Leni Riefenstahl: New film tackles the complicated history of the Nazi filmmaker

Irish Examiner

05-05-2025

Leni Riefenstahl, director of the notorious Nazi propaganda films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, and one of the most controversial women of the twentieth century, died in 2003. She was 101. In the mid 1960s, Horst Kettner became her assistant, and later her lover. He was 40 years younger than Riefenstahl. They remained a couple until her death.
When Kettner died in 2016, their household in Bavaria was dissolved. Two years later, the filmmaker Andres Veiel got access to Riefenstahl's estate, over 700 boxes of previously unseen materials, including letters, diaries, private films, outtakes and drafts of her memoirs. It was the start of a magnificent obsession.
Veiel pored over the haul with a team of archivists, gaining insight into a complex woman who weaved an elaborate web after the Second World War about her true role in the Nazi regime. Veiel, whose films and documentaries have won over 50 awards, also had a personal connection to Riefenstahl's war story.
'My grandfather was a general in the Russian war,' says Veiel. 'There is a question of legends and lies in my own family. I know how easily you can get seduced. How to question [a troubling past] is something I have to deal with myself. To look at Riefenstahl is a good lesson to deal with the question of fake news, of how [myths] are fabricated, what are the longings and necessities for them.
'The moral question is not the only issue for me because we know she lied. I found the more interesting question was to examine what was behind the lies. What were her motives? How did she shift her storytelling in different periods of time? She re-stages in a way her life story. That's why her estate is so useful.'
A scene from Triumph of the Will, made by Leni Riefenstahl at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.
Veiel's film paints a fascinating psychological profile of Riefenstahl. Her parents divorced. Her father was a brute, who wished she'd been born a boy. He beat her violently.
She was left in a closet for hours on end as punishment. Early in her adulthood, she was raped by a tennis star. (In an interview, she claimed Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, twice tried to rape her; elsewhere she maintained they had a romantic relationship, but later rolled back on that assertion.)
'Riefenstahl was very ambitious,' says Veiel. 'She's like a prototype of fascism. In 1906-1907, while only a little girl, she was thrown into the water by her father and close to drowning. It was a pivotal moment. Her conclusion was not, 'I have a terrible, cruel father.' The conclusion was: 'I must become a good swimmer.' This is a very Prussian style of education. Prussia was encircled by bigger, stronger enemies like Austria, France and Russia. Prussian thinking was, 'We are a small country, but we have to fight, to defend. We have to be stronger than all these countries'.'
Riefenstahl was first a dancer, but after suffering a knee injury she shifted her energies into acting and later directing films. Hitler commissioned her to shoot Triumph of the Will, a Nazi Party convention propaganda film, in 1934. It was well received, scooping awards in Venice and a gold medal during the 1938 World Exhibition in Paris. Olympia, her film about the Berlin Olympics in 1936, premièred in April 1938, a gift for Hitler on the day of his birthday.
'Riefenstahl was a brilliant editor,' says Veiel. 'When you think about the famous high-diving sequence in Olympia, they're like avatars. They're not really human beings. They seem to defy gravity. Somehow, they levitate and then they fall, encircling, making these loops.
"She was also a good director – good at choosing the right director of photography, good at taking risks on inexperienced cameramen but knowing they were innovative. She was a very poor writer. Her screenplays were full of clichés.
Leni Riefenstahl taking pictures in Munich during the 1972 Olympic games. (Picture: AFP/AFP via Getty Images)
'But something I try to get across in the film – you can't separate aesthetics from politics. In Olympia, for example, she celebrates beauty and strength, which in her films always meant contempt for others, for the weak and so-called sick people.
"So, when people like Quentin Tarantino and George Lucas celebrate Leni Riefenstahl as the greatest filmmaker ever, I say, 'Sorry, that's naïve. How dare you separate ideology from aesthetics.' '
Perhaps the most interesting section of Veiel's film is the way it tackles Riefenstahl's shape-shifting, how she held onto her self-image as a non-political artist throughout her lifetime, publicly pretending she wasn't a Nazi sympathiser, covering up half-truths and lies. Privately, she had no sense of remorse or regret about her actions. In her private papers, she mourned her 'murdered ideas'. She remained convinced of Nazism's ideals until her death.
The documentary concludes with dramatic evidence of her eye-witness knowledge of the Holocaust, although she was fêted in the most unlikely circles while alive. The Sunday Times newspaper commissioned her to do photography work, including a gig photographing Mick and Bianca Jagger.
In 1976, she was invited as a guest of honour to the Montreal Olympics. Michael Jackson sent her a congratulatory note at the time of her hundredth birthday.
'My film is like a warning against a possible future,' says Veiel. 'That's why it's necessary to watch it. We all have the power to change things. It's not inevitable that things in the world will get worse and worse. It's up to us.
"We have to defend democracy. We need strength to deal with the challenges it faces. We need to understand the reasons, the backgrounds to how fascism takes root. Leni Riefenstahl is a prototype, from which we must learn something.'
Riefenstahl will be released in select Irish cinemas on Friday, May 9. See: www.dogwoof.com
Riefenstahl and Hitler
Leni Riefenstahl first heard Adolf Hitler speak at a rally in Berlin in 1932. His words, his delivery left her in a state of arousal. Her body began to tremble. She got hot sweats. She felt like her whole being had been captured by a magnetic force.
'I'm not a psychoanalyst, although I studied psychology, but when you analyse Riefenstahl's reaction to first hearing Hitler speak at a rally, it's a physical reaction,' says Andres Veiel, director of Riefenstahl. 'She denies any responsibility – 'It just happened. I was overwhelmed. My body reacted to Hitler. It was not my brain. It was the body. What could I do? I could do nothing.'
Leni Riefenstahl at work at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. (Photo by Keystone/)
'Hitler triggered something in her – the idea of an ideal state. The state doesn't command us. We command the state. It's the heroism of somebody who is like God and who gives relief. 'You just have to follow me.' It's a huge promise of salvation. It fits into her character perfectly. It's like some sort of symbiosis.'
Afterwards, Riefenstahl wrote to Hitler, requesting a personal meeting. They met on the North Sea coast in May 1932. Hitler, who loved her film The Blue Light which had come out earlier that year, asked her to make films for his 'movement'. At this stage, he was a few months away from assuming power in Germany. It was the start of a propagandists' marriage made in hell.