In 1964, some of her photographs from Africa had been featured in Kristall magazine, but they were largely ignored. Five years later, Stern magazine published a series of her Nuba photos.22 This publication launched Riefenstahl’s fourth career, as a photographer. Much has been written about why the Nuba photographs were so successful throughout the world. Some see this success as the triumph of Riefenstahl’s genius, and others as the continued presence of National Socialist attitudes. There is some truth to both of these assertions. A distinction needs to be drawn between the reasons for the success of these images and Riefenstahl’s reasons for having taken them. As contradictory as it might sound, Riefenstahl’s success stemmed in part from the cultural revolt of 1968. The very social movement that wanted to settle the score with National Socialism helped make Riefenstahl’s long-desired comeback a reality. Up until that time, no attention had been paid to the way the Nuba pictures were presented.
The editor in chief of Stern magazine was Henri Nannen, whom Riefenstahl knew well and who was regarded as one of the most innovative editors in Germany. He wanted to bring a breath of fresh air to the German press, and he was able to do so together with Rolf Gillhausen, whom he hired as Stern’s art director in 1955. Gillhausen placed a Riefenstahl photograph on the cover and designed the series of images that would go along with it. In retrospect it must be said that no one was better suited to this task than Gillhausen. As a photographer, he had seen quite a bit of the world and was especially fond of American editorial design. At Stern, he was in charge not only of the look of the magazine but also of the overall concept and the journalistic content. Gillhausen drew his inspiration from Life magazine in the United States and Paris Match in France. His motto was “Take the best picture and make it big.” Series of photographs extending across two pages, clear composition, and new typography were the hallmarks of his style, which often brought to mind the German magazine Twen, designed by Willy Fleckhaus.23 The typography was plain, the colors tantalizing and glamorous. It was in this style that the Nuba photographs were shown to the German readership. Gillhausen’s design incorporated Riefenstahl’s photographs into the aesthetic of pop culture. All at once, her art was in keeping with the times. This was not the past weighing heavily on the present; it was modern and light.
Riefenstahl’s photographs served to illustrate the catchwords of the era: nudity, critique of civilization, art, free sexuality, and feminism. The Nuba were naked, and they had no need for money or consumerism to achieve happiness. Women were on an equal footing with men, and everyone was an artist. Riefenstahl described the Nuba as musically gifted, soulful hippies who spent their lives cheerfully playing the harp.
In 1973, the illustrated volume The Last of the Nuba was published by List Verlag in Munich. With this book, which was translated into many different languages, Riefenstahl achieved her international breakthrough. She was celebrated as a great artist and researcher. It was as though the Nuba had not even existed before her discovery of them. Her publisher claimed that since the 1930s, not a single white person had undertaken any serious study of the Nuba.
One year before the book was published, Riefenstahl had turned seventy. At the Olympic Games in Munich, she was seen in the bleachers taking photographs with her telephoto lens, capturing the events for the Sunday Times of London. At the same time, her Olympia movies were being shown at the ARRI Cinema in Munich, with long lines forming to get in. When she was asked whether the images from 1936, with all their pathos, still made an impact, she replied: “And how! I’m surprised myself that this movie is still successful after thirty-six years—abroad as well. In England and America, people stand up and applaud after the showing. Some people are even moved to tears. But what’s wrong with that?”24 Film critics and reporters were beating a path to her doorstep; everyone wanted to meet and interview her.
Riefenstahl sought to capitalize on the market potential of this newfound popularity by getting her next Nuba book out as quickly as she could. In the quest for cultures that were as yet unspoiled by civilization, she and Kettner came upon the Nuba tribe of Kau during their Africa expedition in the latter part of 1974. As always, she had a voracious appetite for images. Each new expedition grew more elaborate and technically sophisticated. Now that her first Nuba book had been an extraordinary success, the pressure was on. She knew exactly what kinds of pictures she would have to bring home to delight her readers. To persuade the Nuba to cooperate with her, she carried documentation from the Sudanese government in which they were requested to support the work of Riefenstahl, who was a “friend of the country.” She also handed out flashlights, batteries, candy, and pearls as gifts. She had no time to win over the Nubas’ trust. She had never been bothered by tourists in her previous visits, but this time around they were everywhere. The success of her illustrated volume had had the unintended consequence of bringing out adventurous amateur photographers who hoped to reenact her triumph.
Her firm resolve got her the results she wanted this time as well. She was on the scene with her camera when young men fought with sticks and knives and when girls got tattooed; she even muscled her way into an event known as a “love fest.” Riefenstahl regarded herself as the documentarian of a disappearing world. She went to “unimaginable lengths” to get pictures, “perhaps at the last possible moment, of these fascinating, unique South East Nuba as documents for posterity.”25 Her efforts paid off. Stern, which had acquired the initial rights to the German publication of the photos, published a twenty-page photo section designed by Gillhausen. “Leni Riefenstahl has photographed something no white person has ever seen—THE FESTIVAL OF KNIVES AND LOVE. The Nuba live to fight, to love—and to paint and decorate their bodies.”26 The reader is dazzled by the color contrast in these images: the dull brown of the earth, the gleaming black of the bodies, the brilliant blue of the sky, and the bright red of blood. Her second illustrated volume, People of Kau, surpassed all expectations. It sold to great acclaim around the globe. For the first time ever, she attended the Frankfurt Book Fair and introduced her book there. Riefenstahl had come through with the pictures people had expected of her. The photographs of strong men engaged in bloody battles with knives and love dances of long-legged girls seem a fitting follow-up to the draft of the screenplay she had written for her Penthesilea project. The passionate fights, ecstatic dance, and sexual love born of battle she had sought in the Libyan Desert were found in the Sudanese savanna.
The pictures Riefenstahl brought from Africa were criticized for their exhibitionism, their distorted image of the Nuba, and the dubious methods she had used to attain them.27 Still and all, they mesmerized readers. Riefenstahl used her new platforms of radio, television, and print media to talk up her version of the unpolitical artist. Many Germans who had lived through the National Socialist era were gratified by Riefenstahl’s comeback. If Hitler’s favorite movie director could now be mentioned in the same breath as Francis Ford Coppola and Mick Jagger, the Third Reich must not have been all bad. For young Germans who knew National Socialism only from history class, Riefenstahl was an alluring figure. She had passed the age of seventy, yet she was an energetic, good-looking woman. With her dyed blonde hair, light makeup, high spirits, and colorful clothing, she came across as a cosmopolitan woman. She was rarely photographed without a camera in hand, and she was childless. Riefenstahl seemed to be the embodiment of the modern woman who confidently defined herself by her profession and her gender. Her defenders argued that if she had been a staunch National Socialist, she would surely not have spent months living with a primitive black tribe. This image of a modern, unconventional, professional woman appealed to American feminists. Her movies were shown at feminist film festivals, and she was hailed as a maverick whose achievements had brought her triumph in a patriarchal world.28 Riefenstahl, as one of the first female directors of the twentieth century, and probably the most successful one, was far too good a catch for feminists to pass up on merely political grounds.
Susan Sontag
was the only critic to throw cold water on this blaze of enthusiasm. In her essay on “Fascinating Fascism,” published in February 1975, she did not deny Riefenstahl’s artistic achievements but simply stated that the Nuba photographs were a direct outgrowth of the aesthetic of her films from the Nazi era: “Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl’s portrait of them evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical.”29 No one had expected this kind of attack, least of all Riefenstahl herself. The damage was done. No one who has read Sontag’s text can look at Riefenstahl’s Nuba photographs without thinking of Triumph of the Will.
CAMP
It had all been quite simple. Marlene Dietrich felt that her new career seemed to be taking off by itself, as she wrote in a positively giddy letter to her daughter in August 1953. She had been in Las Vegas, and “Tulla” (Tallulah Bankhead), who was performing at the trendy Sands Hotel, brought her onstage. Dietrich told her daughter, “I went out to see if I could get them to whistle.”1 She took the plunge without any rehearsals, or even nervousness, and performed as a nightclub singer. It worked; she still had it in her. So she signed a contract offered by the neighboring Sahara Hotel, which was not quite as chic as the Sands, but it was bigger. Besides, she would be earning ninety thousand dollars for three weeks—ten thousand more than what Bankhead was getting at the Sands. She proudly reported that no one had ever earned this much for performing in Vegas.2
Dietrich was well aware that her presentation would require careful planning. In movies she had not had direct contact with her audiences, but now she would. There would be no close-ups or retakes. Everything would take place in real time. Every inch of her had to be dazzling. Jean Louis, a costume designer at Columbia Pictures whose big coup had been the black satin dress that Rita Hayworth wore in Gilda, designed Dietrich’s outfit. For her stage debut, he made a “see-through” style of dress, which draped her body in beaded lengths of diaphonous fabric that had been dyed the color of her skin and molded to a specially designed close-fitting foundation. Ten seamstresses spent three months of intense and tedious labor sewing each individual bead into place on the delicate fabric. The dress was tailor-made right on her body. She stood in the studio for up to ten hours a day while the seamstresses worked away at her six-thousand-dollar dress. Being the perfectionist that she was, she noticed any pearl that was not in its precise place.
It was worth all the effort that had gone into making this dress. The audience gasped when Dietrich proudly and confidently took the stage. After the first show, she invited the press into her dressing room for a glass of champagne. Media professional that she was, she let it be known that she was naked under the dress. When asked why she was wearing a dress like that, she replied: “This is Las Vegas. If you can’t wear it here, you can’t wear it anywhere.”3 She would not go onstage like this unless she was offered a similar fee, and she let it be known that she would not be staying long-term. The many yellowed newspaper clippings that describe her first performance focus on two things: her fee and her dress. Any mention of her singing was disparaging. Her performance was not regarded as an artistic success, let alone as the beginning of a new career. For Dietrich herself, the key issue was to be free of financial worries for a while and not to have to shoot one of those sappy movies. But not all was well with her in Las Vegas. Shortly before Christmas, she called up her friend Leo Lerman in New York and complained that a ninety-thousand-dollar job was also damned lonely. The soldier’s daughter had gone off to battle alone. This was not so easy, especially because she was always being asked how old she was. Nearly every article called her “glamorous Granny” or “the movies’ senior glamour queen.” On her birthday, she was badgered by journalists to reveal her true age. Of course she kept to herself that she was already fifty-two and claimed that she had just turned forty-eight, even though for a woman over thirty, four years made no difference; either way, she was too old. Whenever she was asked what her next movie role would be—as she often was—she came up with some excuse. Charlie Feldman had the unpleasant duty of informing her that roles she had been promised had been cut out of the films or that the only roles on the table were for someone to play older women, which she categorically refused to do.
In this situation, Major Donald Neville-Willing, the manager of the London nightclub Café de Paris, offered Dietrich a set of performances. Her friend Noël Coward sent her a telegram urging her to accept the offer: DARLING CERTAINLY THINK YOU SHOULD APPEAR CAFEDEPARIS STOP ROOM AND AMBIENCE PERFECT FOR YOU STOP YOU SHOULD GET ONE THOUSAND POUNDS A WEEK STOP MONTH OF JULY VERY GOOD AUGUST TOO LATE IN SEASON ALL LOVE NOEL.4 In late March, she agreed to six performances a week for four weeks beginning on June 21, entertaining her audience for forty-five minutes after midnight. For the duration of her stay in London, she would be put up in a suite at The Dorchester. The airfare for Dietrich and her personal assistant would be covered. She insisted on booking seats in the last row, with a seat left empty beside her.
Every table at the Café de Paris was sold out for all four weeks. Each evening she was introduced by a different prominent guest. Coward was first, followed by Laurence Olivier, Robert Fleming, Richard Attenborough, and Alec Guiness. There was such a stampede in front of the café that the police had to contain the crowds. Inside, the illustrious guests enjoying pâté de foie gras and champagne while awaiting her performance included Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Douglas Fairbanks, Lord and Lady Norwich, and Jack Buchanan. Dietrich had not revealed what she would be wearing. To the audience’s great delight, she came onstage in the famous translucent gown. As one critic wrote, you thought you were seeing everything underneath until you realized that you were actually seeing nothing. She knew her routine inside out. She sang a dozen of her most famous songs, including “The Boys in the Back Room,” “Falling in Love Again,” and “The Laziest Gal in Town.” Dietrich sang in both English and German, knowing full well that she was the only one who could get away with introducing German songs. In contrast to her audiences in Las Vegas, these people had experienced the war firsthand. The German language was not music to the ears of the people in this city, which had been attacked by the German Luftwaffe, but Dietrich welcomed the challenge of showing that being a German and being a Nazi were not one and the same thing. She therefore made a point of including “Lili Marleen,” the favorite song of the World War II soldiers, which earned her this caustic comment: “Rommel could have had no complaint about the enthusiasm with which she sang it.”5 Her interludes were short and pithy, and she retained a polite distance from her audiences. She did not do encores, no matter how thunderous the applause, even though she was said to have enjoyed playing recordings of the applause she received to friends and visitors—only the applause.
There was only one person in London she wanted to see: Kenneth Tynan. The young theater critic was the star of the London arts scene. Tynan was witty, knowledgeable, eloquent, highly gifted, melancholy, and flamboyant. He always stood out in a crowd, yet he was smartly dressed. After the performance, he generally went backstage, and she reached her hand out of the dressing room and pulled him in while snubbing her other fans. He watched her bathe and get her clothes on, then he took her out to dinner. It was from Tynan that the British learned that Dietrich listened to Beethoven’s late string quartets and the early Stravinsky in her suite in the Dorchester until the early morning hours. Tynan and Dietrich related to each other as equals. She enjoyed his cultivated eccentricity, loved his witty malicious gossip, and admired his intellectual aggressiveness. He was fascinated by her androgynous nature and famously remarked: “She has sex but no particular gender.”6 His parties and high spirits were legendary, and his essays universally admired. Tynan numbered Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Lillian Hellman among his friends—and, now, Marlene Dietrich. In his eyes, she was the personification of the kind of glamour that was anchored in the
past.7 Tynan, who was an exhibitionist by design, knew the kind of energy it took to unfurl this glamour evening after evening. Dietrich was twenty-five years his senior; her history was intertwined with the heyday of Hollywood and went back to the fabled Berlin of Isherwood, Auden, and Spender. With Tynan, she could relax into her actual age. He was interested in her life experience, her professionalism, and her dalliances. Tynan and Dietrich got along famously, and in the summer of 1954, they became friends for life.
While one set of performances was still running, she had to be thinking about the next one. Starting in mid-October, she would be back in Las Vegas. In the intervening time, she had to play the successful, urbane artist, and that role required a suitable wardrobe. She often flew to Paris for the weekend and spent her days there with fittings at Balmain or Dior, meetings with Françoise Sagan, and cooking for her friend Jean Marais. She would spend rainy hours at Fouquet’s, her thoughts on Jean Gabin. Rumor had it that she would watch his new movies on the sly and bemoan the love she had lost. Gabin had banished her from his life. All the same, she remained loyal to France. On August 21 at six in the evening, Dietrich strode down the Champs-Élysées side by side with former front-line soldiers and members of the resistance to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation. She had on a dark blue, high-necked raincoat, her honorary war medals, her American Legion forage cap, and white gloves; the expression on her face was proud and serious. This was the role of her life: standing up for a good cause in a uniform and flats. She would think about Remarque, who always called the Arc de Triomphe a locus of their love. Four years earlier, she had sent him a telegram on his birthday and told him she wished he were with her in New York, “this forsaken town.” He wrote to her every once in a while, telling her about his drawers filled with pictures of Marlene and how nice it was to hear from her, the “floor-scrubbing Nike,” in the middle of the night across the continents. She could not hide her jealousy of Boni’s new girlfriend, the lovely Paulette Goddard, who was close to ten years younger than she. In contrast to Dietrich, Goddard had no financial problems. At the side of the wealthy Remarque, she could afford to live a life of luxury without needing to work. Dietrich conveniently forgot that she had been offered that place first. She missed the company of Hemingway, with whom she could indulge in malicious gossip about Remarque. Hemingway was living in Cuba with his wife Mary, whom he called “Papa’s pocket Venus,” and Dietrich and her friends adopted the epithet. At night he listened to Dietrich’s recordings at his hacienda, and during the day he went fishing and swimming while longing for the camaraderie of the war. Hemingway understood and shared Dietrich’s tormenting loneliness. He wrote to her in 1955: “You sound in worse shape than me. We’ll have to pull ourselves to pieces and throw in the counter-attack. Any good kraut can mount a counter-attack from memory.”8 Although he was quite successful—his new book was selling “like the Bible or Mein Kampf in Germany”—and had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature the previous year, he could not find his footing in the postwar world.9 Time and again, he invited Dietrich, “my great and bravest and wonderful Kraut,” to Cuba, but just as she had never gone to Porto Ronco, she would never take Hemingway up on his invitation to visit his country home in Cuba.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 45