Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives

by Wieland, Karin

  The transformation of Berlin from a locus of imperial grandeur into a diverse collective was already underway before World War I. New social policies and functional design signaled a break with the nineteenth century. An unembellished coupling of form and function became the hallmark of a power-driven German industrial culture. In some sense, Alfred Riefenstahl regarded himself as an agent of modernist functionality; he looked to the future and was proud of his country’s technological and economic capabilities. He and his wife felt that they were living in the right city at the right time. Berlin’s lack of tradition was her chance to make a fresh start. Alfred applied his sound business sense and craftsmanship skills to improving his lot in life and partaking in the economic upswing. The Riefenstahls embodied the civic spirit of the new Berlin.

  Although Alfred and Bertha signed their daughter up for piano lessons, their motive was less the love of music than a desire to enhance her prospects on the marriage market. Alfred’s interest in art and culture did not extend beyond occasional visits to the theater. In his mind, actresses were women of loose morals. His wife, by contrast, felt that an actress ranked just below a countess, and supported her daughter’s interest in acting. The new art of film acting was an especially fitting profession for dilettantes who believed in their artistic calling. Mother and daughter enjoyed learning all they could about movie stars. Leni began to entertain the idea of acting in a motion picture, and she responded to a small advertisement in the B.Z. am Mittag seeking twenty talented girls for film shoots at the Grimm-Reiter School of Dance on Kurfürstendamm 6. Helene Grimm-Reiter enjoyed a fine reputation as a trainer for stage and screen. Leni knew quite well that her father would never allow her to act in a movie, but her curiosity to find out whether she would be chosen won out over her fear of her father. One girl after another stepped forward, was given a brief glance by Frau Grimm-Reiter, and was told to leave her name and address. Leni was delighted to see Frau Grimm-Reiter put a check mark after her name. When she was about to head out, she peered through a crack in the door of a large room and saw young dancers rehearsing. The room reverberated with piano music and the teacher’s commands. Leni wanted to be one of these girls, working hard to train her body to express grace and strength.

  For the mother and her daughter, a bourgeois life meant showiness, beauty, and a carefree attitude, and they found all three of these characteristics in the cinema, which offered an escape from reality as a bonus. Leni learned to play the piano and draw, but her home life felt confining and gloomy. When she wrote about her youth in Zeuthen, the reader senses her unhappiness. Her father insisted that she become a typist in his company, although she felt the tug of an artist’s calling.

  Her mother agreed to let her sign up at the dance studio, and Leni was chosen for the film. They did not breathe a word of this news to her father. She rejoiced to herself yet did not dare to disobey her father, so had to turn down the film role. Even so, she stepped up her dance training: “No pain or effort was too great for me; I practiced outside of school for many hours a day, misusing every rail or banister for that purpose. On the streets I would do great leaps and prances, and barely noticed the way people stared at me, shaking their heads.”3 There was instruction in rhythmic gymnastics and dance exercises, interval training, fantasy dance, improvisation, diagrammatic representations of dance, and film studies. It was difficult at first, but her body was used to intensive training. Leni’s transformation into a dancer took place behind her father’s back, while the old world was falling apart. Triumph over pain and over her body was all that truly mattered.

  Otto Dix had made Anita Berber the quintessence of the decadent 1920s when he painted her iconic portrait, and now it was Anita Berber, of all people, who was clearing the way for Leni’s first stage performance. Berber, who had also been a student of dance at Grimm-Reiter, was a rising star just after the revolution of 1918. Frau Grimm-Reiter was planning for her prominent pupil to perform, but Berber fell ill and had to cancel. The posters had been printed and the room rented. No one had any idea how to find someone to substitute for her. Then Leni admitted that she had been secretly observing Berber during rehearsals and had reenacted her dances in private. Why not let her stand in for Berber? Alfred was sent off to a hastily arranged card party, and his daughter hurried onstage. She later wrote that her performance was exuberant and the applause neverending. No one appeared to mind Berber’s absence, we are told, and everyone now loved Leni Riefenstahl.4

  The story did not end well. When her father got wind of what she had done, he sent her away to a girls’ boarding school in the Harz Mountains, in the hope that Thale, the “pearl of the Harz,” would cure her of any artistic ambitions. In Berlin, the name Thale still had the ring of high society; Thale was where ladies with nervous conditions were once sent.5 Alfred wanted Leni to marry a rich man and forget about art. After a year in the Harz, she wrote her father a letter swearing off art and expressing her willingness to work at his company. However, she insisted on being allowed to continue taking dance classes—purely for fun. Alfred agreed, and welcomed his daughter to the Berlin office.

  Women who worked as typists in Berlin may have dutifully rushed to work every morning, but many dreamed of becoming film stars when they went to the movies in the evening. They had a good grip on their modest lives; they were young, unmarried, and employed. They wore their hair short, smoked cigarettes dangling from cigarette holders in perfect form, and knew their way around men. Leni was not like this. She was also young, unmarried, and employed, but she worked in her father’s office. Alfred appeared to be quite pleased that the repentant sinner had returned. In these troubled times, he wanted reassurance that his family was gathered around him. His wife kept house, and Leni and Heinz were right there with him at the company. He had prevailed: he had forbidden his son to work in interior design and had disabused his daughter of her nonsensical notions about dance. He was upholding the principles of a patriarch, even though that was no longer the modern thing to do. Now more than ever, he was intent on maintaining his professional pride, and he regarded his family’s participation in the business as an expression of firmly ingrained class consciousness.

  But he was sadly mistaken. Leni was hoodwinking her father. She had no intention of giving up art and her idolization of other performers. Quite the opposite: she aspired to be an idol herself, and she was leading a double life. She spent many hours a day on stenography, bookkeeping, and typing, and devoted three days a week to art. Her cheeks shed their chubbiness and her features were now marked by defiance and denial. She took up sports again and signed up at a tennis club. Her father had agreed to this activity because tennis was regarded as the sport of the wealthy, and he hoped she would meet a rich man there. Every day, father and daughter took the train to the city. She had long ago stopped trying to strike up a conversation with her father because he would shut down on the spot, and he had no interest in her plans for the future anyway. Day after day, they sat across from each other in the compartment in silence. The father read the newspaper, and his daughter parked herself in the corner and dreamed. Alfred sensed her growing discontentment. He was exasperated to realize that she was no longer finding fulfillment in her family, their work together in the office, and life in the country. Leni had discovered the city for herself. Berlin knocked you down or lifted you up; this was where you would sink or swim. An ambitious girl and the hectic pace of the city were a good fit. It was not a moral clash that stood between the father and his daughter; it was the attitude toward life of two different generations. Leni had come to realize from her father that times had changed. She was the new type, and her father “the fossil, the man who had outlived his day, the man from a sinking epoch who refused to believe that the tide of the earth had turned.”6 He embraced new technology, but his lifestyle and family values remained firmly patriarchal.

  Leni had grown up with the pride of modern Wilhelmine Germany, but also with the slogans of the Wandervogel movement, a youth organ
ization that emphasized hiking, camping, and the spirit of adventure. The previous century had offered a well-ordered world. Age and time had had different dimensions. Being young was equated with a lack of dependability and respectability. All gestures that might have suggested the curiosity or exuberance of youth were avoided, and people as young as forty took pleasure in stylizing themselves as venerable old ladies and gentlemen. By contrast, the new generation now claimed that just as the century was young, so were the people in it. Those in the Youth Movement demonstrated their lack of affiliation with the world of their parents. Girls wore their dresses loose instead of tightly laced, and boys preferred open-necked shirts (known as Schillerkragen) to confining starched ones. Both boys and girls opted for sandals. The vitality of the young body was contrasted with bourgeois life paralyzed by convention. Air, light, and sun liberated young people from the historical deadwood of past eras. The Youth Movement strongly emphasized comradeship. Mastery over one’s own body held out the promise of courage, strength, and stamina. Personal experience took the place of reason. To be was to do.7

  Leni did not belong to the Wandervogel movement; she was too young to join. But like the two friends Walter and Ulrich in Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities, she had “just been in time to catch a glimmer of it.” This movement did not draw in the masses; it grew no larger than several thousand. Even so, young people were swayed by it: “Something at that time passed through the thicket of beliefs, as when many trees bend before one wind—a sectarian and reformist spirit, the blissful better self arising and setting forth, a little renascence and reformation such as only the best epochs know; and entering into the world in those days, even in coming round the very first corner one felt the breath of the spirit on one’s cheeks.”8 It was the spirit of vitality, of nature, and of community. All this, along with praise of technology, pleasure in objectivity, a will to succeed, and pride in the virtues of craftsmanship, formed the backdrop to Riefenstahl’s youth. She, too, felt a breath of this spirit on her cheeks. The wordless art of the dance was her first bond with the trends of the era. The pioneers of modern dance celebrated their first successes in Berlin.9 The American Isadora Duncan was the first to appear onstage barefoot and in see-through Grecian tunics in Berlin.10 Her admirers were at a loss for words, never having seen anything of the kind; her critics quipped that she was seeking her soul with her sole. Lovers of classical ballet felt as though they had been duped and turned their backs on her. In their way of thinking, Duncan’s dances were pure dilettantism. German Lebensreformer (back-to-nature advocates) and followers of the Youth Movement, however, saw that she was one of them. This impression was confirmed several times over, by everything from her loose garments to her sandals to her reading of Nietzsche. The Germans found a dance concept of this kind, with its blend of Nietzsche, critique of civilization, feminism, nature worship, and spiritualism, irresistibly appealing. Duncan, who embraced the role of the anti-bourgeois, drew in young women from good families who now wanted to learn dance-based gymnastics instead of ballet. In 1904, she opened a school in a villa in Grunewald to train the dancers of the future. “My body is the temple of my art,” was her motto.

  Riefenstahl cited two names in connection with her career as a dancer: Anita Berber, whose risqué behavior and lust for life had made her a role model for girls from good middle-class families, and Mary Wigman, whose school in Dresden she attended in 1923. Wigman, from Hanover, had been one of the first dance students of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who gave lessons in his méthode rhythmique in Hellerau, known as the “garden city.” His maxim to his dancers was, “Now say it with your body.” People needed to find their way back to a harmony of mind and body, he explained, a harmony that had fallen by the wayside in the course of civilization. Hellerau was a laboratory for modernity. Kafka, Le Corbusier, Poelzig, Diaghilev, and Rilke visited Hellerau on several occasions. Wigman lived there with Ada Bruhn, who would later marry the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and with Erna Hoffmann, who would marry the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn. Every person was artistically gifted, every person could be cured of the harm wrought by civilization, and every person could become someone other than who he or she was. Experimentation trumped tradition. This unbridled dilettantism and belief in the life-altering power of art made prewar Germany a field of experimentation for the new century.

  Wigman found the perfect way to express the prevailing sentiments in the period immediately following the war, when people were fluctuating between euphoria and depression. In both ecstatic theater and expressive dance, the body was made to speak. She dispensed not only with music, but also with classical ballet costumes. The focus was on the self, barefoot. Wigman danced with such energy that the floor shook. She gave her dances abstract names that underscored the metaphysical background of her art. She preached a virtually cultic approach to one’s own body, and she choreographed sacral themes and staged archaic rituals. Wigman made dance an art of the chosen few, an approach that appealed to Riefenstahl. Wigman was a modern artist; while pursuing her calling, she did not neglect the professional aspect. In 1920, she opened her own school in Dresden. In describing her pupils, she commented:

  I also believe that there is quite a bit of justified egoism in all these young women, an egoism that starts by having them seek out themselves before taking on their surroundings and the world at large. Seeking themselves, feeling themselves, experiencing themselves. Dance is an expression of a higher vitality, a declaration of belief in the present without any intellectual digressions. Unimpeded by the past, and as yet to form any notion of the future, the young generation of women lives in the present and expresses this belief in dance.11

  Many people had trouble grasping the notion of an explicitly unsentimental and energetic dance performed by a woman, but young women were enthralled and quite a few wanted to become artists in order to break with authority and tradition once and for all. The question of whether they were actually talented was of secondary importance. Riefenstahl was one of these young women.

  She had stubbornly refused to comply with her father’s vision for her future. She was neither looking for a suitable husband nor was she hoping to wind up as a junior director at her father’s company. Her eventual departure to Dresden was preceded by grueling years marked by relentless quarrels that were followed by reconciliations. Alfred could not bear the thought of men paying to watch his daughter’s body on stage. Indifferent to art, he regarded dance as no more than a display of erotic allure. And there were plenty of stories going around about expensive presents being exchanged for sexual favors in the dressing room. For a master craftsman, having a daughter become an artist signaled a betrayal of his professional honor. He told his daughter that if he were to read her name on an advertising pillar, he would spit in front of it. A study of the upward mobility patterns of daughters of skilled workers in the Weimar Republic concluded: “of the 61 visual artists and artisans, 3 are daughters of master craftsmen or 4.9 hundredths among 96 actresses and women singers, we have only 3 daughters of master craftsmen, that is, 3.1 hundredths of the total number.”12 Leni Riefenstahl was one of them. At some point, her father capitulated to the will of his daughter. Alfred admitted defeat and declared his willingness to finance “top-notch training” for her.

  She received instruction in classical ballet from a once-famous Russian principal dancer and spent time at her dance studio. Leni was actually too old to have success in such a strenuous profession, but she was never put off by obstacles of this kind, either as a young or as an old woman. She wanted to show the whole world what she was made of. “I practiced until I was sometimes ready to black out from exhaustion, but time and again, I was able to overcome my weakness through sheer force of will,” she said.13 Her mornings were reserved for toe dancing, and in the afternoons she practiced expressive dance. A photograph from this period shows her in a tutu with bulging thighs. She is smiling uncertainly into the camera, but it is easy to tell that she is enjoying the dis
play of her body. She had yet to decide between the enchanting artificiality of the ballerina and the dead seriousness of the expressive dancer. Ballet is concentrated lightness; expressive dance is pure energy. The ballerina is pure nineteenth century, and represents the ideal of the woman as a creature who serves only the beautiful. A ballerina dances the steps that the choreographer has arranged for her and masks her effort with a smile. An expressive dancer, by contrast, is the harbinger of the twentieth century, proclaiming the end of sentimental emotion and mawkish beauty. She creates her choreography on her own and obeys only the voice within her. It is not technical brilliance that is in the foreground; only the expression counts. Sigmund Freud was putting the history of the woman down on paper, while at the same time the expressive dancer ventured to put her innermost feelings on display onstage and avow them to everyone in the audience. The form her art took was hers alone. She had parted ways with her male creator and brought herself forth as an artist. It was through her body rather than in words that she pointed the way into the creative unconscious.

  In 1922, Riefenstahl turned twenty. She was yearning for the event that would finally bring her into adulthood. The thought of the “not yet” preyed on her mind. She had not yet lost her virginity, and she had not yet achieved her breakthrough as an artist. Her adolescence had coincided with a grand historical event from which she was now profiting: The lost war had paved her way to her career. In the newly established Weimar Republic, women were put on an equal footing with men. Even as a child, she had not wanted to defer to her father’s authority. She mobilized her body against her father’s all-pervading power. Defiantly and mutely, she subjugated her body to her will. She played sports and grew strong. At home, she shut herself in her room and abandoned herself to her dreams. Expressive dance was the culmination of her desires: Her body gave expression to the messages within her, and she came under the sway of a new order that was no longer her father’s. Riefenstahl’s struggle with her father’s authority corresponded with the end of monarchic rule. The stage was empty. The Kaiser had fled to Holland and kept busy by chopping down trees there; his anachronistic court vanished into thin air. Berlin became the epitome of itself: a city of the traditionless masses.