Leni: the life and work of Leni Riefenstahl, by Steven Bach
(Little, Brown, £25)
The career of Leni Riefenstahl looks like a real-life version of the Faust myth. In return for a brief span of worldly riches and artistic glory, the comely young Fraulein Riefenstahl sold her soul to the devil, in the form of Adolf Hitler. Pampered, protected and funded beyond most film directors’ fantasies, she produced the only creative products of Nazi Germany that have any claims to enduring aesthetic merit, the semi-staged documentary Triumph of the Will and the two Olympia films. Midnight nemesis came to her with the arrival of the Allied armies and the opening of the death camps, of which she claimed total ignorance.
Quite a neat parallel thus far, but it fails in key respects. For one thing, Riefenstahl was slippery enough to escape secular damnation by the postwar courts; after brief imprisonment while awaiting trial, she was exonerated, mainly on the grounds that she had never officially joined the party. (The judges merely noted her want of “moral poise.”) More importantly, it is by no means clear that she had a soul to sell in the first place. One of the major revelations to be found in Steven Bach’s first-rate biography is Riefenstahl’s almost awe-inspiring narcissism. Riefenstahl, it soon emerges, would have been a monster of conceit even had she followed the likes of Murnau, Lang, Wilder, Von Sternberg and company in their flight to Hollywood, and reapplied her skills to the cause of democracy, or just light entertainment. Not that vanity and megalomania are uncommon failings among directors; but Riefenstahl’s record for exploiting anyone who might be useful to her and then discarding them when squeezed dry was exceptional even by the standards of the industry.
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