Before the war, both rhythmic gymnastics and expressive dance had been popular among well-bred young women. In the Weimar Republic, the social composition in the courses changed. The typical clientele for gymnastics now comprised saleswomen and female office workers aspiring to upward mobility. In a manner of speaking, Riefenstahl was one of them; she had exchanged her father’s office for a dance studio. Rhythmic gymnastics held out the prospect of “perfecting the construction of the self” as well as “enhancing personality.” Klamt and her husband were devotees of the Mazdaznan movement, which coupled ideas from the Far East with Western values and melded progressive performance concepts with critiques of civilization.57 Mazdaznan invoked universally valid wisdom and modern scientific findings, amounting to a kind of health- and youth-based religion. This movement was popular among expressive dancers, artists, Bauhaus architects, and adherents of the back-to-nature movement; its followers claimed that Aryans were the chosen rulers, who had degenerated as a result of miscegenation, incorrect breathing, and poor diet. Youth, beauty, vigor, and good health were promised to anyone who lived according to Mazdaznan precepts. Klamt taught Mazdaznan thinking at her school.58
Riefenstahl focused on Klamt’s pedagogical objectives: “Concentration on a goal—stamina—sensitivity—alertness—drive.”59 Riefenstahl never attained artistic freedom in any stage of her career until she had suffered severe physical torments and undergone a process of conversion and recovery. Her pain would bring her to a new artistic calling, which, in turn, would eventually culminate in pain once again. Throughout her life, she compensated for any misfortune in one branch of art by redoubling her efforts in the next branch. At the pinnacle of her career in dance, she was injured during a recital in Prague, “at a theater that could hold three thousand spectators. Anna Pavlova was the only other dancer who had ever performed here, and tonight the house was sold out to the last seat. My evening was a triumph, but perhaps my last. While making one of my artistic leaps my knee cracked, and I felt a pain so sharp that I could barely finish the dance.”60 Riefenstahl had to walk with a cane, and her future as a dancer was in doubt.
The man in her life was still Otto Froitzheim. He seemed to be taking their relationship quite seriously; he had already introduced her to his mother and pressured Riefenstahl to get engaged to him. She did not appreciate his treating her like his possession, but she could not bring herself to break things off. Riefenstahl relished the confirmation of her femininity and sexual attractiveness that came with this affair. Moreover, her lover was an international sports star who enjoyed great popularity in Germany as the top player on the German Davis Cup team.
Shortly after she came of age, Riefenstahl returned to the city and spent much of her time on Fasanenstrasse, just off Kurfürstendamm, at Klamt’s studio. She was able to make the leap from Zeuthen, in Brandenburg, to the heart of the new Berlin, leaving her childhood home in Wedding far behind. As a native Berliner, she understood the significance of choosing just the right neighborhood. People hoping to be seen as modern opted for the New West over the eastern sections, which were mired in tradition. Up-and-coming young artists and the smart and trendy were moving west. Kurfürstendamm featured an array of luxury fashion stores with elegant window displays; there were also American-style bars, the first fast-food restaurants decorated with gleaming chrome, a great many movie theaters and neon signs, and a robust night life.
Riefenstahl steeled her body and her will and lived in conjunction with the new era. She was the very image of the New Woman: single, economically independent, tough, resilient, ambitious, and childless. She surrounded herself with people who supported and nurtured her ambitions, and avoided anyone or anything that might hold her back or keep her away from her art.
She also took boxing lessons with Sabri Mahir. Photographs clearly reveal the extent of her transformation from a somewhat pudgy, insecure girl to a slim, self-confident woman with a remarkably well-toned body in keeping with the ideal of beauty in her era. The vogue of the short straight line, emphasizing a woman’s legs and negating the female form, had been superseded by a renewed emphasis on feminine curves on a slim, sporty body. The modern silhouette could no longer be attained by means of whalebone corsets and girdles; it had to be acquired by engaging in sports. “The modern dress is far too light, too thin, too distinct in its lines to allow for false pretences,” Vogue magazine announced in 1928.61 Whalebone corsets gave way to rippling muscles. The era of “sitting beauties” had passed; beauty was no longer a matter of couture, but a product of hard work. Rhythmic gymnastics and dance were strongly recommended to develop physical elasticity and give a graceful look to a slender body.
This message was no mere fashion dictate. The war had had a sobering influence on the relationship between the sexes. Ruffles were out; smooth lines were in. Seldom in history has the framework that politics and society set for men and women been as sharply demarcated and determinative as for those born between 1890 and 1910. This generation was defined by war and emancipation. For men, the war itself was the defining experience; for women, the sweeping changes—the right to an education and participation in politics through suffrage—came postwar. The war had left young men and women with a deep-seated mistrust of exuberance and passion. Love was objectivized to shield against disappointment. Physically fit young women were an expression of the new Germany. After war and hunger, women wanted to strengthen their bodies and test their limits in sports and in love in order to feel alive. The restrained quality of the young women in their practical clothing was an extension of the sobriety that characterized those years. A matter-of-fact self-confidence befitted the spirit of reportage and documentaries that left nothing to the imagination. The New Woman did not go in for illusions; she neither radiated an air of mystery nor demanded special treatment. The technologies of film and photography made these women into professional portrayers of themselves, who did not merely endure or long for a man’s gaze, but instead self-assuredly required and requited it.
Lotte Jacobi’s photographs taken in the late 1920s show us a different Leni Riefenstahl. Jacobi’s studio was close to Riefenstahl’s apartment. She sought to photograph the young and restless creative set. Her portraits have become icons of the 1920s: Lotte Lenya, the “Pirate Jenny” from The Threepenny Opera, beguiling with short hair and bangs, dark lipstick, a turtleneck sweater, and a cigarette; Egon Erwin Kisch, the “raging reporter,” engrossed in a phone conversation; the siblings Erika and Klaus Mann, haughty and androgynous, in starched shirts and ties, a cigarette dangling from Klaus’s lips, flaunting their twin-like resemblance. Jacobi’s mother, Mia, was a master of advertising strategy and had good instincts for who might become famous. She considered Riefenstahl a prospect for the future. Riefenstahl sat for several photographs, but she would not agree to the exclusive contract she was offered.62
The Riefenstahl that Jacobi reveals is an oddly fragile-looking, mysterious woman. One photograph, which bears the title “Little Sphinx,” portrays the artist in profile, highlighting her delicately curved mouth, pointed nose, and one thick, expressive eyebrow over her dark eye. Her inscrutable gaze suggests a sphinx lying in wait for her victims.63
In the early summer of 1925, a few days after the tennis tournament in which her fiancé emerged victorious, Riefenstahl was waiting at the Nollendorfplatz subway station. Froitzheim had left town again, with her promise to marry him soon. Still, she was anything but a contented fiancée. During the tournament she had been a mere spectator, and in the celebrations that followed, she was reduced to the role of the woman at the victor’s side. It had been painful for her to watch him revel in his success and his profession, while she sat next to him like a poor invalid. Standing by her famous man was not the role Riefenstahl had envisioned for herself, and she used this situation as a reason to split up with him. Froitzheim would not hear of it, and bombarded her with flowers and letters. “One day he stood outside my door,” she later recalled, “asking if he could come in. Nev
er would I have imagined that this man would fight so hard for me. I knew that if I let him enter, I would fall in with him again, but I still found it unspeakably hard not to open the door to him. . . . I bit my hand to stop my sobbing, but I stuck with my resolve. It was the most painful decision I had ever made. After his footsteps faded I wept until the morning.”64 That was the end of her first great love.
The pains in her knee did not let up, and dance recitals were out of the question. Her greatest fear was that her career as an artist would come to an end. She had no intention of returning to work at her father’s office. She made an appointment with a very good doctor and hoped he would be able to help her. All previous consultations had culminated in advice to take it easy and get plenty of rest. But rest was exactly what she did not want. If she did not return to the stage, no photographer would continue to be interested in her.
Tired and demoralized, I stood waiting on the platform, gritting my teeth as my knee began to throb again. My eyes skimmed over the colors of the posters on the opposite wall until all of a sudden they focused on one poster: a male figure clambering over a towering chimney. Underneath, the poster said: “Mountain of Destiny—a Film about the Dolomites, by Dr. Arnold Fanck.” Even though I had just been haunted by thoughts about my future, I stared as if hypnotized at the picture, at those steep walls of rock, at the man swinging from one wall to the next. The train arrived at last and came to a halt between the poster and me. It was the train that I had been waiting for so impatiently. When it left, I could see the poster again. As if awakening from a trance, I watched the train vanish into the tunnel of Kleiststrasse.65
She skipped the doctor’s appointment, which had felt like her last ray of hope just moments earlier, and went to the movies instead. Mountain of Destiny was playing at the theater right across the square.
The very first images fascinated me. Mountains and clouds, alpine slopes and towering rock streamed past me. I was experiencing a world that was alien to me, for I had never seen such mountains. I knew them only from postcards, where they looked lifeless and rigid. But here, on the screen, they seemed alive, mysterious, and fascinating. Never could I have imagined that mountains could be so beautiful. As the film went on I became more and more captivated.66
She left the movie theater filled with a new sense of longing. In her dreams, she saw herself heading across the mountains, and resolved that she would not only get to know the mountains, but would also meet the director of this film. There are two versions of how she accomplished this, one from Riefenstahl herself, and the other from Luis Trenker. In her own account, she traveled to the Dolomites a few weeks after seeing Fanck’s film, together with her brother Heinz, who supported her as she walked. They spent four weeks at the best hotel at the Karersee, where Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Karl May, Winston Churchill, and Agatha Christie also spent their vacations. Riefenstahl was hoping to meet Dr. Fanck there, or one of his actors, but her hopes were dashed. Still, she was enraptured by the alpine world, a world she had never seen, and felt as though she had been transported back to her childhood dreams. As always with Riefenstahl, the encounters that shaped her destiny did not occur until the last minute. Shortly before her departure, she met Trenker, who had played the lead role in Mountain of Destiny. In the hotel lobby, she had discovered a poster announcing that the film would be shown that evening. She later described her experience:
I hobbled back to where the projector was set up and found, standing next to it, a man whom I recognized as the star of the movie. “Are you Herr Trenker?” I asked a bit shyly. His eyes glided over my elegant clothes, then he nodded and said, “That’s me.” My embarrassment vanished. My enthusiasm for the film, the mountains, and the actors just bubbled out of me. “I’m going to be in your next movie,” I said with a tone of certainty, as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. Trenker looked bewildered, then began to laugh: “Can you climb mountains? An elegant lady like you shouldn’t be traipsing around mountains.” “I’ll learn how. I will definitely learn how; I can do it if I make up my mind to.” Again I felt a sharp pain in my knee, which tore me out of my euphoria and brought me back to earth. An ironic smile flitted across Trenker’s face. Gesturing goodbye, he turned away.67
Once she returned to Berlin, she sent him a letter and asked him to forward it to Fanck. No reply was forthcoming.68 In this version of the events, Trenker rebuffed her from the outset. Women—especially women from the city—had no place in his world. Trenker wrote in his autobiography that Fanck had hired him to distribute Mountain of Destiny in Italy. In order to find suitable contacts, he decided to show the movie in the big hotels. He and his piano player made the rounds of the luxury hotels on Trenker’s motorcycle, a copy of the film clamped under his arm, and wound up at Hotel Karersee. After the screening, a nervous man approached and asked if he could introduce Trenker to a lady who was eager to meet him. This man was Harry Sokal, Riefenstahl’s admirer from the beach at the Baltic Sea, who had been underwriting her career to date. Riefenstahl, in turn, claimed that she had made it clear to Sokal even before she fell from the stage in Prague that she had no intention of becoming his lover, even though he continued to pursue her and shower her with gifts (such as fur coats) in the hope that he would be able to buy her affections. After a series of dramatic scenes, he finally promised to settle for her friendship.
Throughout her life, Riefenstahl endeavored to play down or deny the positive influence of Sokal’s money on her career. She set great store by the version of her life story that had her art emerging victorious on its own, despite all odds, and skirted any mention of her large circle of male supporters. Sokal’s account confirms Trenker’s version. According to him, Leni, his former lover, lured him to Karersee to spend a few carefree days with him. They chanced upon the evening movie showing, and as they were coming out, she said, “I’d like to make movies like that too! I would like to get to know that man.” They met Trenker that very same evening, and sat with him throughout the night. “And by dawn it was certain that we wanted to make a film together. A mountain film. With the same team that had made Mountain of Destiny, and was the best mountain film team of the time, and perhaps of all time. Arnold Fanck as the director and author, Sepp Allgeier and Hans Schneeberger at the camera, Trenker in the leading role—and two new additions: Leni Riefenstahl as the leading female role and H. R. Sokal (me) as the financier and producer.”69
The fact that Sokal initially financed 25 percent of the production costs of Riefenstahl’s first movie with Fanck, and that he did not stop these handouts until later, substantiates this account. There were simply too many of Riefenstahl’s admirers involved in this film for his liking, and their jealousy made the shooting more difficult. Sokal did not reveal the extent of his own jealousy. In Trenker’s version, once Sokal had announced to him at Hotel Karersee that a young lady simply had to meet him, Riefenstahl entered from the wings, dressed in white tulle. Sokal introduced the two of them, and Trenker dryly remarked that the name “Leni Riefenstahl” meant nothing to him. The young lady complimented him on the wonderful mountaineering scenes and confessed that she would love to climb one of the Dolomite towers herself, with him at her side. She conveniently ignored his objection that he had things to do in Bolzano and scheduled their meeting for the following morning. Unsettled by this much self-confidence from a woman, Trenker backed out. But she did not let up, and three days later she turned up at his office in Bolzano. “ ‘I simply must be in your next movie!’ ‘Unfortunately, I’m not the director; you’ll have to get in touch with Dr. Fanck. Are you an actress?’ ‘I’m a dancer.’ With these words, she handed me a photograph. With her arms crossed in a devout pose and a gentle part down the middle of her hair, she looked like a Botticelli Madonna.” She asked him for the director’s address, and said as she left, “I’ll see you again for the next film.” Trenker, who figured he ought to warn Fanck, sent him Riefenstahl’s picture and jotted on the back, “Very good-looking. Claims to be a da
ncer. Wants to play the lead role in your next film. You take it from here.” Two weeks later, he got a reply from Fanck, calling him a numbskull who had no idea about women. “This young lady is the greatest dancer, and the most beautiful woman in Europe,” his letter said. “Of course she will play the lead role in my next movie and will soon be the most famous woman in Germany.”70 Hidden between the lines are Trenker’s feelings of rivalry toward this woman. He let no opportunity slip by to portray her as the sophisticated lady and himself as one of the simple mountain folk who were put off by her exalted airs. He failed to mention that he found Riefenstahl quite attractive and started a passionate affair with her that eventually left them as enemies.
Along with Fanck and Trenker, Riefenstahl was regarded as one of the most important exponents of the mountain film (which should not be confused with the sentimental film in a rural setting known as the Heimatfilm). The heyday of the mountain film began in 1924 and extended into 1940; only in Germany did it evolve into a genre of its own.71 Siegfried Kracauer’s pronouncement that the heroism of Fanck’s protagonists was rooted “in a mentality kindred to Nazi spirit” found widespread acceptance.72 Ever since, virtually all discussions of Fanck begin with Riefenstahl and end with Triumph of the Will, although there had not been any moral stigma attached to mountains before the 1920s, nor is there now.73 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mountains took on new interest for adventurers with the introduction of sophisticated Alpine technology and resources.74 These adventurers were referred to as mountain vagabonds, and their heyday had arrived once the Great War came to an end.
Fanck, whom Riefenstahl eventually met at Rumpelmayer’s pastry shop on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, was these adventurers’ role model. She must have been the first young woman to make an appointment with him to gush about his films. “I’m talking and talking, and Dr. Fanck is sitting there without saying a word, listening and stirring his tea. I don’t have the slightest inkling of the impression my ecstatic words are making on him. Only once does he ask me a question: he wants to know how I spend my time. He knows nothing about my dancing; he has yet to hear of me.”75 As she was leaving, she promised to send him dance reviews. This meeting buoyed her spirits for days, although she had to admit to herself that not very much had come of it. “I didn’t ask Dr. Fanck whether I could act for him, and he didn’t bring up the subject either; he just listened and asked who in the world I was [yet] even so, a volcano erupted within me.”76 The shooting pains in her knee brought her back down to reality. She decided to take immediate action in order to be ready when and if Dr. Fanck contacted her. She had been putting off her knee surgery for months, but now she headed straight to the hospital to get her body in shape for the next stage of her career. The operation took place the very next day. “Although I was told that I would be in a cast for ten weeks, and that there was some danger that my knee could remain stiff, at this moment there was only one thing at stake, either-or. I have to get healthy, healthy in order to be able to go up into the mountains.”77 Three days later, Dr. Fanck showed up at her bedside. Instead of bringing roses, he brought a screenplay: “The Holy Mountain—Written for the Dancer Leni Riefenstahl.” Thus began Riefenstahl’s collaboration with a man she would come to loathe, but who was nonetheless her most important teacher.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 9