Tuesday, September 9, 2003

Leni Riefenstahl: Dead at Last (Part 3 of 3)

(Part 1 and Part 2 are in previous posts below.)

After the war Riefenstahl remained an unrepentant old Nazi.  The 1994 film Die Macht der Bilder (The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl) allowed the elderly filmmaker to tell her story at great length, with minimal critical challenge.  She portrayed herself as a kindly old grandmotherly type who just had no idea about all those horrible things Hitler was doing.  Why, she was shocked, shocked, when she heard about it.

The master propagandist hadn't lost her touch.  In that film, she carefully tailored her comments to minimize the evils of (verharmlosen) the Third Reich as much as she could without running afoul of the German anti-Nazi laws.

Even at age 100, she was still at it:

Speaking to The Associated Press just before her 100th birthday on Aug. 22, 2002, Riefenstahl dramatically said she has "apologized for ever being born" but
that she should not be criticized for her masterful films.

"I don't know what I should apologize for," she said. "I cannot apologize, for example, for having made the film 'Triumph of the Will' -- it won the top prize. All my films
won prizes."

The woman may never have been a Party member.  But she was an incorrigible Nazi to the end. That's who she was, that's what she stood for. And that's how we should remember her.

- Bruce Miller

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As I understand her life story, she renounced any further involvement with Nazism after being sent to film the invasion of either Czechoslovakia (sp) or Poland, at possible risk to her life.  So there was a line beyond which she would not go.  As far as being involved with Nazism in the 1930s, many people were, including Charles Lindbergh and many prominent Americans, including the bankers and investors who were loaning Hitler's government money even though the publication of Mein Kampf in 1924 made his views and aims widely known and discussed in this country.  Henry Ford was sending Hitler anti-Semitic tracts which possibly encouraged him to  believe that American industrialists who had influence with the government would keep the US out of a European war.  So someone in Germany being involved with government propaganda in the 1930s is to me not that contemptible of an offense.  

If it is, what shall we then say of the current American media allowing the government misrepresentations and outright lies that resulted in the catastrophe called the Iraq war?  Just as serious in my opinion.  

Anonymous said...

Your understanding is not correct.  In the 1994 film I mention in the post, she defends the Nazi regime to the maximum extent possible without violating Germany's anti-Nazi laws.

Hitler held up Riefenstahl as the ideal "Aryan" woman.  She wasn't a casual supporter, she was an active supporter and an important symbol for the Hitler regime.  

People who disapprove of what the Nazi regime was and what it did can say so clearly.  Riefenstahl never did.  If you want to credit her vague, evasive statements as being a repudiation of Hitler, I'm afraid you've been taken in by a woman who was still a master propagandist well into her 90s. - Bruce