Terry Prone: Riefenstahl’s confected reputation is destroyed by her own evidence

Leni Riefenstahl’s father was the first of her problems. He hated that she was a girl rather than the boy he wanted. Plus he was a bullying control freak.

“He could easily lose his temper if he did not get his own way, especially with my mother and me, but people as a rule did not dare to contradict him,” she remembered. 

“He took charge everywhere … he had the final say about anything.”

If a man looked at his teenage daughter in the street, her father would instantly blame her, yelling: “Keep your eyes down; don’t look at men that way.” 

She suffered teenage depression, coped with his paternal envy of her theatrical ambitions (probably stimulated by him having thwarted ambitions to act) — and as soon as she could, at the age of 21, abandoned her family and stayed clear of them from then on. 

She became an athlete, a dancer, and an actor and was very successful in all three areas.

But then she moved behind the camera, into documentary-direction, and her creative genius, her capacity for visual narrative, made her a unique female figure in a generally male-dominated business. 

Her work was and is breathtaking in its vision, scale, and skill.

Her postwar autobiography was an attempt to define how she would be seen in the future. 

A new documentary film directed by Andres Veiel blows a hole in that possibility, portraying her as a propagandist for the Third Reich and — to her death — as believing and hoping that Nazism would be re-established in Germany.

Her self-exculpatory communications shruggingly acknowledged that she might have been a bit naïve in allowing Goebbels to channel huge budgets her way to make Triumph of the Will in 1935.

Anyway, even if she was naïve, she nonetheless maintained the movie wasn’t propaganda but a film “about peace and work”. 

Which doesn’t stand up in the face of a letter to Hitler quoted in the new documentary. 

“The film’s impact as German propaganda is greater than I could have imagined,” she wrote. “And your image, my Fuhrer, is always applauded.”

Like Richard Nixon, Riefenstahl’s commitment to recording everything, whether on film, in still photographs or on audio cassettes, is ultimately what has put paid to the reputation she thought she had established. 

All her life, she had fiercely controlled media examination of it. 

“I’d always fought as if my life was at stake until I’d got my own way,” she once said, and producers/interviewers tell of her putting the kybosh on TV shoots by going into screaming mutiny if the interviewer moved into areas she perceived to be threatening.

The new documentary uses roughly 30 hours of cassette recordings. Some of them are of telephone conversations with members of the public who contacted her to express approval when she’d been on TV. 

Some of the recordings were of former Nazis, offering Riefenstahl moral — or perhaps that should be immoral support. 

Just one example: a caller predicting that the “morality, decency and virtue” of the Nazis would be revived. 

Astonishingly, Riefenstahl, who kept the recordings, replies: “Yes, the German people are predestined for that.”

In another recorded call, she remarks that it was always going to take a couple of generations to rehabilitate Nazism.

Now it is those two generations later, and you see the right rising again.

This, despite claiming in a TV chat show that she had never known of the atrocities of the Third Reich and — bizarrely — that her wounds had not healed. HER wounds?

You have to wonder what thought process led to her saving those incriminating audio cassettes. 

The most likely explanation would appear to be lack of insight, perhaps reinforced by the relative success of her autobiography, wherein she portrayed herself as possessed, during the war years, of an innocence and matching ignorance of the facts around her.

Accusations that she had caused the death of Jews she didn’t want in a scene being filmed by her crew were sufficiently vague — it might have been that the soldier who relayed her instructions conveyed them too crudely — to prevent her being charged with their deaths.

Anything else, she simply glossed over, claiming, for example, that Roma prisoners who appeared as extras in a 1940 movie were all later freed.

This, according to surviving Roma, was absolutely untrue. Her reaction to the contradiction was shocking:

I’m not saying Gypsies need to lie. But really, who’s more likely to commit perjury: me or the Gypsies? 

Even when the recordings do not inculpate her for actual crimes, they demonstrate, on her part, an astonishing lack of awareness of changed context and represent a real and present example of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”.

Arendt’s great phrase referred to the passive order-following of Adolf Eichmann, but the definition also applies to the recordings of conversations between Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer, once Hitler’s architect and armaments minister.

The two had collaborated on spectacular staged events for the Third Reich during the war, reconnecting after Speer had served the lengthy sentence of imprisonment in Spandau jail the Nuremberg Trials delivered.

Although Speer had made a considerable post-war reputation through the memoirs he wrote and smuggled out of Spandau, and although Riefenstahl had worked in Africa in what was interpreted at the time as some kind of reparation for her earlier propaganda work, none of the conversations between them address regret or guilt.

Indeed, guilt is specifically rejected by the filmmaker, who complains in one conversation with Speer: 

“Every time I go on TV they claim I share the blame for the atrocities, the concentration camps.” 

(The two of them also gossip about what they get paid for giving talks or interviews.)

Veiel, the documentary maker, must have been astonished by what he found in the 700 boxes of recordings, photographs, and letters that made up the estate of Leni Riefenstahl.

In advance of sifting through them, and with the evidence of her massive autobiography, he figured she would, of course, have edited out the bad stuff. The astonishing thing is that she hadn’t done that.

Either she had lost judgment in old age or the sheer volume of material defeated her. 

However, she kept tons of data, particularly recordings, that may have appealed to her sense of self, but that allowed another filmmaker to explode a reputation she had spent half her life confecting.

The documentary he made proves her to have been a convinced Nazi right up to her death.