Always on the lookout for gripping images and stories, Riefenstahl came across a book by Ernest Hemingway, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, that fit the bill. She was spellbound by his Green Hills of Africa and finished reading it in a single night. Hemingway’s book is a lyrical journal of his African safari, with its detailed descriptions of eating, sleeping, drinking, and, above all, hunting. Hemingway loved the wild beauty of Africa and the hunt. For him, killing animals was tantamount to a rebellion against death. Green Hills of Africa was not one of Hemingway’s finest works; it is longwinded and chatty. Its true strength lies in the depiction of a yearning for a primitive world with clear laws in the midst of overwhelming nature. Hemingway describes proud and beautiful men who have no fear and are filled with grace.2 Riefenstahl got caught up in this yearning and believed that she could become whole again in Africa.
She now came into some unexpected money by recouping a loan she had made before the war. With these fourteen thousand marks in hand, she could finance her trip. In April 1956, Riefenstahl traveled to Nairobi on her own initiative.
I had always lived in the world of the mountains, the ice of Greenland, the lakes of Brandenburg, the metropolis of Berlin. Here, I instantly felt the start of something entirely different—a new life. Against the light, I saw black figures in light garments coming toward me, seeming to hover in the quivering sunlight, detached from the earth as in a mirage. Africa had embraced me—forever. It had sucked me into a vision of foreignness and freedom, and affected me like a drug with a narcotic effect that has yet to wear off, even today.3
In the course of her travels through East Africa, she was involved in a car accident that left her badly injured. She spent several weeks at a hospital in Nairobi. This accident boosted her will to survive. Physical suffering gave Riefenstahl the message that she had to conquer something. “It was a dramatic baptism by fire. But in spite of this serious accident, my resolve to find the genuine, pristine Africa strengthened.”4 In Africa, Riefenstahl encountered “the tallest, best-built, handsomest people” she had read about in Hemingway.5 The Masai women threw stones at her when she attempted to establish contact with them. Riefenstahl knew how to woo them from her experience with the Sarntal peasants. Doubly determined to succeed, she returned to the Masai village every single day, sitting down and reading and making her presence known. Her bold and dogged persistence paid off once again: the women and children began approaching her, full of curiosity. Eventually she was able to visit them in their huts and even photograph them. “Thus began my great love for the tribes of Africa.”6
When she returned to Germany, all she could think about was getting back to Africa as quickly as possible. Riefenstahl negotiated with every film company and met with one rejection after another. In the end she appealed to Walter Traut, who had worked with her on the mountain films and felt obliged to come up with something. In July 1956, he founded Stern Film, Inc. to make a movie called Black Cargo, for which Riefenstahl had signed on a dancer, Helge Pawlinin, and a screenwriter, Kurt Heuser, to collaborate on the script. Riefenstahl became Traut’s partner and equal manager in the company. Traut would invest up to two hundred thousand marks of his own money, and Riefenstahl would contribute the screenplay and her preliminary work on the project. She flew to Nairobi with Pawlinin, and they headed for northern Kenya. Riefenstahl began her hunt for exotic, beautiful people and for tall, muscular men to play the roles of slaves. Once she arrived at the island of Lamu, however, she was disappointed to find only slender people, so she set off with an interpreter to seek the physiques she was after. In Sarntal, she had won over the uncommunicative peasants by treating them to wine. In Africa, she offered the chief money, sunglasses, cigarettes, and wristwatches in exchange for his men. The offer was accepted, and she was able to choose freely among the villagers. She looked over the men, and those who made the cut had to come along with her. These actors in the making, separated from their families and their village, were not entirely clear about what was happening to them; many were afraid that Riefenstahl herself was a slave trader and would carry them off with her. A great deal of effort went into filming a few scenes. Riefenstahl had not considered the possibility that these amateur actors might have an outlook on nature that differed from her own. They were terribly afraid of the water and did not want to get onto the barge that had been constructed expressly for the shooting. She was overwhelmed, and began filming haphazardly. Her only goal appears to have been to shoot as much footage as she could. Then she got a telegram from Walter Traut in Munich, letting her know that all the money had been spent. He begged her to come back to Munich. If she brought good shots with her, they would find investors.
Riefenstahl had been able to shoot films only under the luxurious conditions of National Socialism, when neither money nor time mattered. However, there was no longer a party apparatus at her side. Her cameramen were scattered to the winds, and there was no one to provide organization or funding. She also had no real insight into the conditions in Germany by this point. She was incorrigibly bound to an overly elaborate, inefficient, and inordinately expensive working method. Traut paid off the remaining debts, and for Riefenstahl, the subject of Africa was over and done with for the time being.
In 1962, she got back most of the footage that had been confiscated by the Austrian authorities, along with her film equipment and cutting table. She now regained possession of Triumph of the Will, Avalanche, and Zielke’s Steel Animal, and wanted to begin distributing her films as soon as she could. She rented two basements near her apartment and converted them to cutting rooms. Fifteen years after the end of the war, Riefenstahl began building up an archive.7 She was dissatisfied with the distribution of her films and the suits for her rights. Accustomed to ordering others around, she had trouble accepting the fact that no one was listening to her anymore. After plans for an English remake of The Blue Light came to naught and no prominent supporters of hers were left in Germany, she thought about returning to Africa. She gave an appealing fairy-tale account of her second trip to Sudan, in December 1962, which became the prelude to her postwar career as a photographer. She depicted herself as a Junta-like figure sitting in the plane to Nairobi. This time, the place in which she stumbled across the picture that would change her life was not a subway station in Berlin, but a hospital room in Nairobi. She claimed that after her accident, she happened to see an issue of Stern magazine with a photograph by the British photographer George Rodger of two naked, muscular black athletes, one sitting proudly atop the other’s shoulders. Rodger had captured the stark moment of triumph. “This picture changed my life. . . . These unfamiliar Nuba took such complete possession of me that they induced me to do things I would otherwise not have done.”8 From this point on, she invested all her energy in looking for the tribe to which these men belonged. All she had to go on was the caption under the photograph: “The Nuba of Kordofan.” No one knew how to get to them; little had been written about these people, and it appeared uncertain whether they even existed. Riefenstahl set out to find this mysterious tribe, hoping to be the first to uncover this treasure. That is Part One of the fairy tale we might call “How I Discovered the Nuba.” The truth is that she had been looking for the Nuba for quite some time already. She conveniently neglected to mention that in the spring of 1951—three years before the Hemingway book was published and five years before her first trip to Africa—she had contacted Rodger and offered him $1,000 to tell her how to get to the Nuba.
Rodger, one of the three founders of the legendary Magnum Photos, was six years younger than Riefenstahl. He had been at fifty-one front lines of the war, and up until the day he came to Bergen-Belsen, he thought that nothing could shock him anymore. He was the first to take pictures in Bergen-Belsen, and they became famous overnight when they were published in Life magazine. However, Rodger could not forgive himself for having injected an aesthetic component into these horrifying images. He hoped to clear his mind of these awful memories
by taking an extended journey through Africa. Rodger wanted to go to the Nuba; very few scholars or travelers from the West had seen them. In 1951, his pictures appeared in National Geographic, and his book, Le Village des Noubas, was published in France.9 Riefenstahl is sure to have read the National Geographic article, because she contacted Rodger that same year. It must have been an odd coincidence for Rodger that six years after he had taken his photographs in Bergen-Belsen, he was being contacted by Hitler’s favorite director with a request that he do her a favor. Rodger replied to Riefenstahl, “Dear Madam, knowing your background and mine I don’t really have anything to say to you at all.”10 Riefenstahl never mentioned this unequivocal rebuff.
Eleven years later, Riefenstahl traveled to Sudan with a scholarly expedition led by Oskar Luz from the German Nansen Society in Tübingen.11 The scholars would be shooting a series of films about the Nuba tribe. Riefenstahl was the only woman in the group, and its oldest participant. Now Part Two of “How I Discovered the Nuba” began. The regions they passed through became less and less fit for human habitation. “Blocks of stone and ancient trees gave the landscape an almost mythical character. The valley narrowed down, the mountains seemed to converge, and the path grew rockier and rockier. We had been driving through this valley for hours—no water, no people, not even animals anywhere.”12 Suddenly they saw a naked girl sitting on a boulder. “We were surrounded by great silence; the sun was fading and the valley seemed virtually lifeless. Stones and roots blocked our way.” Leni-as-Junta had reached her destination.
One or two thousand people were milling about in an open area surrounded by many trees in the light of the setting sun. Peculiarly painted and oddly adorned, they seemed like creatures from another planet. Hundreds of spear tips danced against the blood-red orb of the sun. In the middle of the crowd, large and small circles had formed, and pairs of wrestlers faced one another inside them. They drew each other in, fought, danced, and were carried from the ring as victors on the shoulders of others, just as I had seen in Rodger’s photograph. I was dazed, and didn’t know what to photograph first.13
Her message was clear: As an artist who was treated unjustly and maliciously by the civilized world, she had come to find people whose hearts were still pure. Once she had seen the picture of the black athletes with their strong bodies, she knew that this paradise still existed. She overcame every obstacle and miraculously found her way to the Nuba.
In fairy tales, portrayals of abuse, sin, and injustice function only as a means toward presenting a naïve moral. Riefenstahl saw her situation in the same terms: penned in, persecuted, and ignored in Germany, she underwent all kinds of adventures and eventually found people who loved her unconditionally and with whom she was finally happy again. When she had to say goodbye to the Nuba after seven weeks, she was stricken with grief.
Riefenstahl did not fly back to Germany, but instead parted from the anthropologists and went back to the Nuba mountains on her own. She not only took photographs but also recorded the local music and language. No matter how strong her emotional ties to the Nuba grew, she was not about to forget the business angle. Just as more than thirty years earlier she had had no qualms about filming the Sarntal peasants in church, she now plunged right into the lives of Nuba men to photograph them during their ceremonial wrestling matches. These photographic quests always centered on wresting the moment of ecstasy from faces and bodies, whether they be Sarntal peasants, Hitler Youth, Olympic athletes, or the Nuba. She later claimed that the photographs she took during this trip were solely for her private use.14 However, a letter she wrote to Theo von Hörmann reveals that her stay with the Nuba had clear commercial aims. “Since November of last year I have been living exclusively in the bush in the most remote parts of Sudan and made several thousand color slides for lecture tours, because I didn’t get any money to make a movie. . . . Now I will be going to the Masai to complete my series of photographs.”15 However, she also wrote about the happiness she felt with the Nuba. “First I was traveling with a group of German scholars, but have been alone for the past few months. Sleeping outdoors, without a tent—or helpers of any kind—so primitively that I didn’t even have a mattress, a head rest, a chair, or a table. All the same, I have felt happier than in Europe because the primitive natives who have not yet had contact with civilization are simply better people—even though they go around without any clothes on.” The photographs from her first extended stay in the Nuba Mountains show a relaxed, cheerful Riefenstahl. She enjoyed wearing becoming safari suits or short, colorful summer dresses. Although she was nearing the age of sixty, she retained the radiance of a young woman, and she would claim for the rest of her life that she had never been as carefree as she was there.
In the 1960s, she traveled to Africa every other year on average, stayed for several months, and came back from each trip with a big haul of thousands of photographs. The descriptions and pictures of her trips to Africa recall bits and pieces of her previous careers. In Africa she worked under ideal conditions. The Nuba did not ask for any pay for the photographs; they sang, danced, and fought for free. She could amass vast quantities of material from which to pick and choose later on, as she had done in filming the party rallies and the Olympic games. Without a script or a producer to answer to, she could film and photograph however she pleased. She was still unabashed when aiming for a good picture. She forced her way between people who were fighting or dancing without a second thought. She even disrupted funerals or death watches with her flash photography. Riefenstahl justified her actions at one of these gatherings as follows: “It wasn’t easy for me to take pictures on this solemn occasion, but I felt I simply had to capture this ritual of a fading mythical culture in pictures.”16 These pictures were her booty. She knew that the more sensational they were, the better they would help her rise to new glory. The Nuba never asked about her background, and she did not have to put up with any annoying questions about her relationship with Hitler or her art. She felt loved and admired without reservation.
Riefenstahl’s new friends and objects were people without a history. The Nuba did not use writing or otherwise chronicle their actions. They lived their lives beyond the grasp of history, with fixed rituals and with nature. Riefenstahl, who was fleeing her own history and had always distrusted words, found her way back to the beginnings of her art while in Africa. When she was with the Nuba, she experienced dance as a force that knit together a community. The dance ceremony, she felt, served to render a sacred quality to the social sphere. She regarded the physical ecstasy, solemnity, and pairing rituals she saw there as signs of reestablishing life within the cult. There are shots of her trying to dance with the Nuba men. Her movements clearly recall her performances as an expressive dancer. But these shots also expose her outsider status in this community. Just as in the mountain and party rally movies, she laid claim to an elevated position here in Africa. Riefenstahl was the only white woman, the only woman who understood the technology, and the only one who regarded herself as an artist.
She had fallen out with her crew members during all her previous journeys, yet she did not want to travel alone, so she went looking for an ideal traveling companion for her next expedition to Sudan. This companion “had to have a stable character and be in good health”; he also needed to be a good driver and mechanic, and know the basics of filmmaking.17 Horst Kettner, an auto mechanic, was recommended to her. She took an instant liking to this somewhat shy, good-looking man. Kettner was twenty-seven years old and had come to Germany from Czechoslovakia just two years earlier. Supposedly he had never heard of Riefenstahl. The old woman and the young man traveled to Africa by ship and Land Rover. However, Riefenstahl’s fourth visit to “her” Nuba resulted in one long disappointment. She had been quite keen to show Kettner a Nuba wrestling match, but she discovered that the rituals had changed. The wrestlers were not naked; they were wearing multicolored trousers, and some even had sunglasses on. “I was horrified, and Horst was disappointed. . . . We
scrapped our plan to film the festival; it would have been a waste of every meter of celluloid.”18
Riefenstahl returned to her fairy-tale diction when recounting the story of how her love of the Nuba of Mesakin came to an end:
Oddly enough, the weather had also changed completely. Every time I had been to the Nuba Mountains in the past, the sky had always been blue, but this time, it was very different. . . . An even more peculiar change was that the clear vista we had always known in the Nuba Mountains was no longer there. The air was hazy, and we no longer experienced the marvelous sunsets. . . . Even the Nuba told us that they had never known such weather.19
The time had come for the old woman, at the young man’s side, to go back to Germany. The Nuba may have let her down, but Kettner did not: “Horst had once again proved himself to an incredible degree. Hard-working, calm, and sensitive, he was an ideal companion. No work was too much or too hard for him, and he found a solution for every technical problem.”20 Her love of the Nuba gave way to her love of Kettner. Choosing Kettner as her new romantic partner showed that Riefenstahl was firmly anchored to her past. Kettner was the age that Ertl, Allgeier, and all the other cameramen had been when she shot the mountain films with Fanck. Fanck always chose technically skilled, athletic young men in their late twenties for work on his films and trained them as cameramen. In this same vein, Riefenstahl trained Kettner to be her cameraman. Their professional and romantic partnership would last until her death.
Riefenstahl was not the kind of woman to give in to old age. She was proud to have a lover at her side who was forty years her junior. Over the course of the following years, she traveled to Africa several times with Kettner. The spell that the Nuba had cast on her seemed to be broken. Each visit brought new disappointment. Her erstwhile affection had tipped into annoyance: “After only a brief visit, our one desire was to leave as soon as possible. The worst part was that our time was so taken up by the Nuba, who were as dear and trusting as ever, that we didn´t have a moment´s rest. They surrounded us like a swarm of bees, and all their affection notwithstanding, it was exhausting.”21
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 44