Latest news with #Riefenstahl
New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The complicity of Leni Riefenstahl
Leni Riefenstahl welcomes Adolf Hitler to her villa in Berlin, in 1937. Photo by Prod DB © Bayrische Staatsbibliothek – Vinc/Alamy There has been a remarkable documentary about Leni Riefenstahl before. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) was commissioned by Riefenstahl herself and she participated in it fully. In ridiculously good shape at the age of 90, she revisited the key locations of her life – the mountains, where she starred in her early romantic dramas; Nuremberg, where the Nazi rallies were held and she made Triumph of the Will (1935); the stadium in Berlin where she made Olympia (1938) – and gave prolonged, combative interviews. Again and again, she insisted that art had nothing to do with politics: 'I just observed and tried to film it well,' she said. As far as she was concerned, she claimed, Hitler's speeches might just as well have been about trees or fish as politics. The documentary's director, Ray Müller, who took on the task after many had shied away from it, adopted a leisurely approach, indulgently covering her whole career, from her first appearance as a dancer in the early Twenties, to her photographic work in the Sixties and Seventies among the Nuba people of Sudan. This wonderful, horrible life eventually clocked in at a little more than three hours long: Müller, while fulfilling his assignment, had taken care to give Riefenstahl enough rope to hang herself. You cannot mistake what she was really like. The documentary deservedly won an Emmy. Riefenstahl died in 2003, but her partner and collaborator, Horst Kettner, whom she had been with since she was 60 and he 20, lived until 2016. Her archive, including some 700 boxes of tapes, film footage, photos and documents, was then bequeathed to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. The German TV presenter Sandra Maischberger, who had conducted the last major interview with Riefenstahl in 2002 and come away realising she had been deceived, made a deal to have the archive sorted and catalogued in exchange for the rights to use it for this new documentary. As producer, she recruited Andres Veiel, best known for his 2017 film about Joseph Beuys, as director. The intention, clearly, was to convict Riefenstahl of active collaboration with Nazi crimes at last. Riefenstahl, the result, consists entirely of archival material. The approach sounds stultifying, but this is a riveting watch, a masterclass in how to animate such material through inventive treatment. Montage and cross-cutting are always effective in documentaries, but Riefenstahl goes much further. The old media – slides, cassette tapes, crumpled prints of photos and film stock – are transformed. The stills are never still, the camera moving across them, panning in or out. The footage of Riefenstahl, on screen or in television interview, is altered by close-ups, slow motion, silencing: alienation effects that make us observe her, not just listen. The picture quality throughout is astonishing. There is a terrific minimalist score by Freya Arde, pulsing and rattling, which has the effect of keeping us in the present, distancing us from what we are seeing. The subject is not so much Riefenstahl's career itself but her unrepentant management of her reputation until the end of her life. 'For something to be remembered, other things must be forgotten,' we are ominously told at the outset, as if full disclosure is on the way. Yet it has to be said that this archive, doubtless previously edited by Riefenstahl, the control freak's control freak, yields little compelling new evidence for such a posthumous conviction. There's a suggestion that, during her very brief time as a war correspondent in Poland, she ordered some Jews to be removed from the scene, and that this set direction was taken literally and they were shot. But it remains hearsay. She was post-truth before the concept had been invented. She always insisted that she, like many other Germans, knew nothing at all of Hitler's crimes until the very end of the war, but, implausible as that may be, nothing here conclusively proves otherwise. The film ends with a tape of a phone call from a supporter telling her, codedly, that in one or two generations, Germany will return to 'morality, decency and virtue'. 'Yes, the German people are pre-destined for that,' she agrees. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The film-makers clearly intend this film as a warning from history, in the context of the rise of the AfD. It forms an essential coda to the 1993 film. The most telling critique of Riefenstahl's career, however, remains Susan Sontag's 1974 takedown of her work for the New York Review. For it is Riefenstahl's films themselves that best embody and most reveal her brutal faith in the victory of the strong and beautiful. 'Riefenstahl' is in cinemas now [See also: David Attenborough at 99: 'Life will almost certainly find a way'] Related
New European
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Leni Riefenstahl, propagandist with a will to deceive
'None of it is true,' says Maischberger, who, 23 years after their encounter, is the producer of Riefenstahl, a superb and chilling documentary directed by Andres Veiel. 'And I knew she was lying. What I wasn't sure about was, 'is she lying to me or did she lie to herself already so many decades that she's come to believe what she says?'' It was Leni Riefenstahl's 100th birthday, and once again the director was sitting down to be questioned about the years in which she mythologised Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and the Aryan aesthetic in masterfully composed, morally corrupt films like Triumph of the Will (1935). And once again, as she sat opposite the German journalist and talk show host Sandra Maischberger, the same answers rolled out: No, she hadn't known about the darkness, she was never a political person, she was just a naive hired hand lost in a world of art. It is a question at the centre of the new documentary, which follows bravely in the shadow of The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993), a three-hour TV film in which Riefenstahl recounts her myth and is seen raging when director Ray Müller questions aspects of it. After the war, says Maischberger, ' she wrote to a friend: 'I'm not able to do any more art because my ideals have been murdered.' She lost her old life and, and then she had to make up a new one because she had to survive… she couldn't say she shared the Nazi ideology, she had to create a version of her life which would prevent her going to jail. 'And yes (in the early days) she was an opportunist, just following the money and the possibilities for her career, but she was an enthusiastic National Socialist before she met Hitler. She read Mein Kampf early on. She was looking to contact him even before he was chancellor of Germany. She shared his ideas.' What separates the new documentary from Müller's earlier film is full access to the Riefenstahl archive, obtained by Maischberger. Not only is there a wealth of footage, photographs and documents – some telling by their omission – but there are also telephone recordings made over a long period, in what posterity will now show as an act of Nixonian folly. For Maischberger, they are 'the best way to understand who she really is, because she was not acting, she was just who she was. We now know it was a straightforward lie when she said that she was never a political figure, because we discovered that she was in contact with a bunch of old and new Nazis in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, right up until her death. So she was still part of this network of very right wing extremists. So obviously there she was lying to me and not to herself.' Though the film is studded with Riefenstahl's beautiful shots of several of history's ugliest minds, some of the most electric footage comes in interviews; notably one in which the film-maker is paired against a quietly furious woman of the same age who laboured secretly in the German underground resistance while Riefenstahl was hob-nobbing with the Nazi high command. When the woman speaks uncomfortable truths, Riefenstahl reaches over to pat her hand and starts her excuses all over again. 'I thought 'what the hell was that?'' says Maischberger. 'This is a woman of the same age, who we know was persecuted by the Gestapo, and we see Leni Riefenstahl telling this woman: 'You know, I would be happy if I would have had your life because then in the end, I would have known.' This is a very dark moment to watch, because now we know she is lying but also because by the end, she has the audience on her side. The people wanted to believe that she didn't know because it was an excuse for everybody. She offers a big excuse for all of German society of the time.' Ask Maischberger if there is anything to admire about Riefenstahl and she pauses. 'She was proud of being a woman who succeeded in a man's world,' she says. 'She created an aesthetic standard which is still alive today – George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino have talked about her influence and if you watch Dune 2 from last year, it looks very much like the Triumph of the Will, which she shot in the 1930s. That is a big achievement.' But before any aesthetic appreciation must come the fact that Leni Riefenstahl was a willing and eager propagandist for evil and now, as this film reveals, a very adept liar. 'There is a lot to learn from her in terms of how not to behave,' Maischberger says. 'I think it's good to have her around me just to remind me how not to be.' Riefenstahl is released in UK cinemas on May 9. A review by Matthew d'Ancona will appear in his culture newsletter on May 10 ( and in TNE #435
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Riefenstahl review – nauseating yet gripping story of Nazi poster woman
A ndres Veiel's sombre documentary tells the gripping, incrementally nauseating story of Helene 'Leni' Riefenstahl, the brilliant and pioneering German film-maker of the 20th century who isn't getting her name on a Girls on Tops T-shirt any time soon. Riefenstahl was a dancer and actor in prewar movies by Arnold Fanck and GW Pabst, whose performance in 1932 in The Blue Light, her own Aryan romantic fantasy as director-star, entranced the Führer and secured her two historic directing commissions: Triumph of the Will in 1935, a monumentally euphoric and grandiose account of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, and Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Games, with whose undoubtedly stunning images and choreography Riefenstahl effectively invented the modern-day Olympics with its opening and closing ceremonies and media coverage. Despite having no Nazi membership card, an important part of her postwar exoneration, Riefenstahl had the gruesome distinction of being the only important woman in the Nazi movement. The film gives a stomach-turning account of how Riefenstahl was invited by the Nazis to make an on-the-spot documentary in 1939 about the invasion of Poland and how she abandoned that project in the face of a grisly reality that couldn't be stage-managed into some glassy-eyed propaganda hallucination. She opted instead to make Lowlands, a sugary operetta film for which she nevertheless needed dozens of Roma people as extras, including many children, taken from a nearby internment camp. The revelation of this fact undermined her later claims to have known nothing of the camps – as did the chilling allegation that during her abandoned Polish documentary she high-handedly demanded a group of Jews were removed from the background of one scene, which led to their being taken away and shot. Her long life, after being released from house arrest in 1948, was taken up by brooding over her memoirs, giving interviews in which she was querulous and cantankerous about her warm personal relationship with Hitler, and conducting endless libel cases. This documentary shows she revised her memoirs endlessly, unsure if or how to minimise her personal contact with the Nazis, especially the sinister, besotted Joseph Goebbels; her fear of war guilt was at loggerheads with her unrepentant impulse to proclaim her own prestige. Then there was the solemn, preposterous, patronising photography project about the Nuba people of Sudan who could be relied upon not to question her about Hitler. It is arguably a flaw of this film that there is no mention of Riefenstahl's contemporary and sometime acting rival Marlene Dietrich, who got the lead role in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel ahead of Riefenstahl and whose starry career thus took her more irresistibly into a Hollywood orbit and unfolded in parallel with Riefenstahl's, but for the Allies. Fascinatingly though, we see how Riefenstahl gave interviewers her version of the Nuremberg defence for films like Triumph of the Will; that she was carrying out a commission (following orders, as you might say) and, in other circumstances, she might have done the same thing for Roosevelt or Stalin. But she appears never to have made a relativist argument: that she was being pilloried in the way that Sergei Eisenstein might have been if history had been different. Perhaps it simply never occurred to her: she was focused only on her own importance, and important she undoubtedly was. She carried on until her death at 101, alternately grumpy and good-humoured, fearful and defiant, incarnating the secret psychological history of a whole generation of West Germans who didn't see what they should apologise for. Riefenstahl is in UK and Irish cinemas from 9 May and is screening at the German Film Festival across Australia until 28 May.
Telegraph
07-05-2025
- Sport
- Telegraph
Germany could be in Six Nations if it was not for Second World War
'And it's Schmidt, with a floated pass to Müller – and now Schneider is over in the corner! Jubilation for Germany and an early shock for the Twickenham fans.' My imaginary commentary might sound peculiar. But there is a parallel universe where such guttural-sounding names are a regular feature of the Six Nations Championship. When we think of Germany's place in world sport, we generally see them as a football-loving nation with a strong history of motor racing, athletics and tennis. Some of their preoccupations – especially handball – are mysterious to us. So it is surprising to discover that the Germans were serious players on the continental rugby scene of the 1930s. In fact, they were well ahead of Italy, whom they beat 12-3 in their final victory before the Second World War. A few months earlier, in March 1938, Germany had defeated France on the rugby field for the first time, presaging military events two years later. 'The Nazis were generally supportive of rugby,' says Walter Gebhardt, the curator of Germany's rugby museum. 'They promoted it as a fighting sport that developed players with a warrior spirit.' In researching this article, I came across some striking images, including the German rugby team performing the Nazi salute in 1934, and Leni Riefenstahl – Adolf Hitler's favourite filmmaker – making a ceremonial kick-off at a club match. But we should not get too carried away. It is not as if Hitler was debating scrum dynamics with his generals. Indeed, there is no evidence that he had a view on the sport in either direction. He preferred to focus on the propaganda potential of football – already a much bigger sport across Europe – and the Olympic Games. No, the sudden upswing in Germany's rugby fortunes stemmed not from the Nazis' vague and distant endorsement, but from one controversial vote in the committee rooms of London. The vote that approved the ejection of France from the Five Nations Championship in 1931. 'At that time, the home nations felt that the French players were too violent, and their crowds were also prone to dangerous pitch invasions,' explains rugby historian Tony Collins. 'Underlying that was the fact that everyone knew the French secretly paid their players.' So, who were the French going to play now? Well, the Germans had a decent history of rugby. They had formed their first clubs in the 1870s, based around Hannover – a city that regularly hosted English princes – and the prestigious schools of Heidelberg. In 1900, a team from Frankfurt won silver at the Paris Olympics. France's solution was thus to invite a German, Hermann Meister, and an Italian on to the board of the newly founded Fédération Internationale de Rugby. Now Rugby Europe but previously known as FIRA, this body still runs the Rugby Europe Championship for the likes of Georgia and Romania. In the 1930s, it helped arrange fixtures between the continental powers. 'The German rugby community probably only had 800 players at that time,' says Gebhardt, 'but they were being advised by French coaches and educated in French training techniques. Club teams were encouraged to go across the border, with their travel and accommodation paid for, and stay a week to prepare before playing a local side. 'Where they had been playing a couple of matches per season, German players were now regularly coming up against superior teams on the field, and that's how you get better.' Here was the background for the surprise of 1938, when German full-back Georg Isenberg kicked the only penalty in a 3-0 victory over France in Berlin. Had France's investment backfired? Quite the contrary, it had succeeded in creating an opponent worthy of respect. But even as German rugby gathered momentum, so did the slide towards war. Only a year after the triumphs of 1938, many of the players became caught up in deadly confrontations, starting with Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939. By contrast with Germany's leading footballers, who were kept away from the action by their influential manager Sepp Herberger, the rugby men found themselves in the thick of it. No fewer than 16 internationals died in the conflict, nine of them attached to clubs from Germany's original rugby epicentre of Hannover. And then, when peace finally broke out, Germany did not play another rugby international for seven years. France had returned to the Five Nations by now, so they were stuck with mighty Belgium. 'There were all sorts of problems after the war,' says Gebhardt. 'So many players died, and then the Allies didn't allow sports associations to meet in the first few years, so any communication had to be done in secret. 'The shadow of football grew, especially when [West] Germany won the 1954 World Cup. Then there was the partitioning of the country into East and West, and the shortage of goods. To take one example, there were no rugby boots. Even into the 1970s I was having to go to France to find them.' Today, Germany is almost as strong in cricket – a sport in which it has no tradition at all – as it is in rugby, thanks to the number of immigrants from India and Afghanistan. Admittedly, the national rugby team did make a run in the qualification event for the 2019 World Cup, before losing to Canada in a play-off. But their international ranking of 36 marks a considerable dip from the golden days of the 1930s: an era when Isenberg and scrum-half Carl Loos led a team mentored and partly manufactured by the French. 'There's an interesting counterfactual where the rise of Germany isn't interrupted by the war, and they go on to be more successful than Italy in the long run,' says Collins. 'Rugby was never going to be on a par with football there, or indeed anywhere else in Europe, but it could potentially have kept growing into a substantial sport.' This is a curious corner of sporting history, which remains largely unknown outside a small circle of curators and academics. Its very obscurity has given rise to various myths, as Second World War enthusiasts overreach the available evidence. Amateur historian Nigel McCrery has suggested that Hitler deliberately squashed rugby because he saw it as too English. In fact, Hitler admired and imitated the British public-school ethos. Other sources claim that Nazi architect Albert Speer was a rugby player and enthusiast, but he was actually more interested in rowing. Of the characters who really were involved, we should spare a second mention for Meister, the urbane Heidelberg author and publisher who chaired the German Rugby Federation. The Nazis genuinely did not like Meister, who published progressive literature and refused to use their favoured gothic fonts. But his sophistication made him the ideal person to build bridges with the French. Although Meister survived the war, much of his contribution was washed away by the bloodshed, along with Germany's potential as a rising rugby nation. Yet the fact remains: were it not for the Second World War, the Six Nations could easily have ended up with Berlin – instead of Rome – as a regular stop. Four players who fell in the war Prince Alexander Obolensky (1916-40) The great left-arm spinner Hedley Verity is probably the best-known sporting casualty of the Second World War, but Prince Obolensky is in the conversation. Arriving in Britain as a baby after his Russian parents fled the revolution, he became an all-round sporting star at school and Oxford University. In 1936, his two Twickenham tries helped deliver a 13-0 victory over New Zealand – the first time England had ever defeated the All Blacks. Rugby writer TP McLean called his second try 'a stupendous exhibition of the hypotenuse in rugby'. After such a short but glorious life, Obolensky's death had a terrible sense of futility. According to another great sportswriter – Frank Keating – 'he became the first of 111 rugby internationals to lose their lives in the conflict when, taxiing on landing his Hawker Hurricane on the turf airfield at Martlesham Heath, east of Ipswich, the aircraft's wheels snagged a rabbit warren and, having loosened his harness, the pilot was catapulted out of the cockpit, breaking his neck in an instant.' Yet this was not atypical for the Second World War. By contrast with the First World War, where lives were mostly lost at the front, a surprisingly high proportion of casualties took place on home soil. Many were the result of unreliable engineering, with more than 8,000 Britons dying in training or on non-operational flying missions. Christopher 'Kit' Tanner (1908-41) In the exhaustive lists of sporting wartime casualties compiled by amateur historian Nigel McCrery, few can match Tanner when it comes to a heroic final contribution. A winger who won five England caps, Tanner was ordained in 1935 and then served as a chaplain on the light cruiser HMS Fiji. Struck by a German bomb near Crete, the listing Fiji waited for assistance from nearby HMS Kandahar. Meanwhile, Tanner tended to the wounded and even sang music-hall songs to bolster the men's spirits. He then assisted others to climb the scrambling nets that brought them up on to the deck of Kandahar, and was personally credited with saving 30 of the 500 surviving personnel. According to The London Gazette, Tanner 'spent himself in helping men to rafts and floats … in bringing over disabled men and such as could not swim. At length only one man remained to be brought across. Despite his exhaustion Mr Tanner made a last effort to save him and saw him safely on board. But when hauled up himself he died within a few minutes'. Tanner was the only England international to be awarded the Albert Medal during the war. Paul Cooke (1916-40) Scrum-half Cooke was another Oxford man who played alongside Obolensky for the Dark Blues. He won two international caps in 1939, and would surely have added to them but for the war. Instead he travelled to France as a lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. When German advances threatened to cut off the British Expeditionary Force in the lead-up to Dunkirk, the Ox and Bucks was one of the units involved in the Battle of the Ypres-Comines Canal – a three-day stand-off which bought the rest of the Army time to retreat. Cooke is reported to have died while setting up a machine gun in the window of a house. He was one of more than 300 casualties suffered by his regiment. Robert 'Mike' Marshall (1917-45) A phenomenal athlete at No 8, Yorkshire's Marshall made a spectacular England debut at Lansdowne Road in 1938, when one newspaper reported that 'he ran some 50 yards to score the try of the match'. In the war, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and earned the Distinguished Service Cross for ramming and sinking a German E-boat which was attacking a convoy. By all accounts, Marshall – who became a lieutenant commander – embodied the archetypal ideal of an officer-class Englishman. He took part in numerous operations involving motor gunboats, including one campaign that rescued 19 stranded aircrew from the far side of the Channel, and later received a bar for his DSC. Marshall actually made it through to VE Day in 1945, and would have survived the war had he not volunteered for a mission that involved transporting Merchant Navy officers to Gothenburg. (The mission should have gone to a different captain, Jan Mason, except that Mason was away in London receiving his own DSC.) Marshall's vessel encountered a floating mine that had been cut free by a British minesweeper only a few days earlier, and only two of the 28 crew survived. One obituary described Marshall – who left these shores for the last time on May 11, 1945 – as 'the perfect companion who never wasted a word in idle chatter, was never put out, laughed loudest in disaster, was humble to a fault, and staunch until death'.
Channel 4
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Channel 4
How Leni Riefenstahl tried to cover up her role in the Nazi regime
'She understands us'. That's how Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels described the German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003, at the age of 101. It turns out she did. Even though she insisted to the end that her award-winning films were only ever about the art, a new documentary – called 'Riefenstahl' – finds out how she covered up her central role in the Third Reich.
