There were certainly protests in Telluride. She found them distressing, but not enlightening. She had no particular desire to deal with the accusations directed at her, and because she dreaded having to face demonstrators, she turned down a subsequent invitation to the “Women in Film” series at the Chicago Art Festival.5 She was rewarded for this “disappointment” when she and Horst Kettner were strolling along Fifth Avenue and she saw the entire window display of a bookstore directly across the street from Tiffany’s decorated with her Nuba book. Her publisher, Harper & Row, confirmed the great commercial success of her book. Exhilarating conversations with Mick and Bianca Jagger and Faye Dunaway at a fancy French restaurant in New York rounded out her trip. With great satisfaction, Riefenstahl smugly noted the interest being shown to her art in the United States, where people had dared to snub her in 1938. It seemed as though Susan Sontag’s critical intervention had only heightened Riefenstahl’s significance. Thanks to Jagger, Telluride, Sontag, and the Nubas, she had one foot in the door. Riefenstahl would not rest until she was firmly inside.
One year before her seventy-fifth birthday, she was a guest on a German talk show.6 Riefenstahl looked astonishingly young and had lost none of her sexual attractiveness. Her hair was dyed blonde, her nails were polished, and she still had a remarkable figure. She provided a slick self-portrait, claiming that as a young woman, she had gone “against the entire industry” so she could fulfill her dream and make a movie, which was unheard of for a woman at that time. Moreover, this film had become a “worldwide success.” She herself had been a “worldwide star” before 1933, with regular performances in Paris and London, and telegrams from Hollywood. She did not understand why people wanted to talk to her about Hitler, because she had shot only one film for the National Socialists: Triumph of the Will. No one on the talk show seems to have known that she had also made Victory of Faith and Day of Freedom: Our Wehrmacht. Riefenstahl stuck to this tactic in dealing with her past; as long as the opposite had not been proven, she stuck by her version of the truth.7
Her final grueling journeys to Africa had made her aware that there was nothing more for her to accomplish there.8 The People of Kau could certainly build on the success of her earlier books, but she knew that this would be her final photographic foray. Riefenstahl had already discovered a new stamping ground. In 1973, she had taken a diving course near Mombasa. In order to pass the test, she had claimed to be twenty years younger, and was thus able to add a new superlative: Riefenstahl was now the oldest certified diver in the world. On her hundredth birthday, she proudly reported that she had completed more than two thousand dives. She was not going on these dives as a hobby or for relaxation; instead, she soon began to take photographs under water. In her mid-seventies, she was planning her next career move, and she eagerly immersed herself in the latest technology. She was as pleased as Punch with her new camera, which she had ordered in New York. As an underwater photographer, she not only had to be able to dive quite well, but also to master each technique perfectly. Every second counted. Riefenstahl was proving to the world that neither her age nor the perils of the sea would hold her back from capturing beautiful images. Because she sensed that her art would not be exhibited in any museums during her lifetime, she set about creating her own archive by building another house: not a Bavarian-style villa, but a majestic prefabricated building with a great deal of glass and wood, hidden behind trees. She moved from Schwabing in Munich to Pöcking at Lake Starnberg, which tended to attract wealthy people who sought peace and quiet. The heart of the house, the air-conditioned archive, was in the cellar. Enormous steel cabinets stored neatly sorted photographs of Junta, Goebbels, Nuba, SA men, pole vaulters, and sea creatures. In the basement of the wood-paneled house, she collected and archived films, photographs, certificates, prizes, trial documents, and the letters from her admirers. Riefenstahl would live in this house at Lake Starnberg with Horst Kettner until her death.
“I have been writing my memoirs here for two years—it is hard, almost desolate work,” Riefenstahl wrote to Bernhard Minetti in January 1985, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, with cordial wishes and recollections of the good old days when they worked on Lowlands.9 The five years she spent writing the memoirs were punctuated with diving trips to the Bahamas, the Caribbean, Indonesia, the Maldives, and Papua New Guinea. Just as she had in her previous careers, Riefenstahl was quite adept at combining business with pleasure. At the age of eighty, she had become a frequent flyer who was at home in the most beautiful diving sites in the world. Photographs show her with a weather-beaten face and her scuba tank and technical equipment at dream beaches. Only illnesses and accidents could slow her down. There was not a bone in her body that she had not already broken, but she saw that as more of an incentive than an impediment. Riefenstahl freely confessed that she availed herself of medical intervention to preserve her vitality. She took regular trips to Lenggries for live cell therapy treatments. Professor Block, who oversaw her treatments, had been a student of Dr. Niehans from Switzerland. In the clinic, she was shielded from the world and could concentrate on her recuperation without interruption. After every round of treatments, she felt well rested and able to sleep again. She did not provide any information as to what memories, images, or worries had been robbing her of sleep.
The anguish involved in writing her memoirs stemmed from her recognition that her readers’ interest would be focused not on her, but on Adolf Hitler. She worked her way around this balancing act by providing many insights into her close relationship with him, but at the same time making it clear that she had been somebody both before and after Hitler. Despite the awkward prose, skewed images, and grammatical gaffes in the memoir, the book sold well. A “worldwide exclusive” advance publication in Bunte magazine drew in readers and boosted sales.
In the run-up to the book’s publication, a suit that Riefenstahl brought against the filmmaker Nina Gladitz drew even more attention to it. Gladitz had claimed in her film Time of Silence and Darkness that nearly all of the Gypsies who had appeared in Riefenstahl’s Lowlands had been killed in Auschwitz. She brought forth and named witnesses for this claim. In addition, she explained that Maxglan was not, as Riefenstahl had maintained, a “public welfare and relief camp,” but a concentration camp. Riefenstahl saw these accusations as an attack on her integrity, and in 1983 obtained an injunction against showing Gladitz’s film on German television. Gladitz filed an appeal against this injunction, and after years of litigation, the court decided that Gladitz no longer had the right to claim that Riefenstahl had known about the looming deportation of the Sinti to Auschwitz. Riefenstahl played the emotionally charged diva in court. Anyone who had experienced the angry outbursts of this eighty-five-year-old woman could well imagine that she had already twice attacked other people and bitten their necks.10 She insisted adamantly and vehemently on her version of the story, no matter how the witness statements read, and maintained that she had had nothing to do with Auschwitz, concentration camps, and death. Her purview had been art, beauty, and the Führer. Riefenstahl made no claim to have been a member of the resistance, and she had no desire to descend into anonymity. And she did not seek refuge with the neo-Nazis. She had never deigned to interact with the ordinary party members; her bond had been with Hitler. She portrayed herself as both an active framer of her life and a victim of her fate. She had rejected the career her father had envisioned for her and put all her energy into becoming an artist. She remained childless and rarely formed a lasting attachment to a man. The most important thing in her life was art, which also brought her to Hitler. Hitler was not a temporal power in her eyes; he was a miraculous, inexplicable phenomenon. The artist-ruler Hitler created a world for which Riefenstahl, as his court artist, provided the visual representation. Hitler stood above her. He was the creator of what she filmed. This did not change until his death and the downfall of his Reich. Riefenstahl lost her privileges, but she gained the exclusive power over her art. She no longer had to shar
e her fame with him. The glory was all hers.
Riefenstahl was the only artist favored by the Nazis who did not suffer a loss of her fame (albeit of a tainted variety) in the postwar period. She never denied Hitler’s charisma. She was keenly aware that her association with him shaped her postwar career. The reverberations of National Socialism worked to her benefit.
Academic studies of film have delved into the notional level and investigated the nature of National Socialism’s powerful imagery. They looked at the specific capability for truth in the aesthetic realm and the identification of phantasms that point the way to the unconscious. Riefenstahl’s art was predestined for these questions, yet she herself refused to provide the answers to them.
The artist dove down and sought her ideal world of beauty at the bottom of the sea. In 1978, she published her first underwater volume, Coral Gardens, which was followed by Wonders under Water in 1990. As always, her artistic work involved a high degree of physical exertion. The unending blackness began just a few yards under the surface of the water. Those who wanted to bring colorful pictures to the light of day could not be afraid of the horrors of the depths, the cold, and the pitch-black night. Riefenstahl went even farther and sought out proximity to sharks, the murderers of the sea. In her view, fear spurred growth.
Like the Nuba people, the peasants in the Sarntal valley in South Tyrol, or the SA men in her photographic and cinematic past, the fish, corals, and marine creatures could be had for free, and she could take as many photographs as she liked. The sheer abundance allowed for a fine selection. Riefenstahl felt hers was a noble cause, because the world underwater was also being threatened by civilization. She would have to move quickly so as to capture this endangered beauty for posterity.
In 1990, when Luis Trenker died at the age of ninety-seven, Riefenstahl was surely aware that her own days were numbered. Now that her memoirs had been written, the next gap to fill was a film about her life. For years she had rebuffed any attempts to make a film of this kind, but shortly before her ninetieth birthday, she took a different view. The search for a director turned out to be complicated; nobody wanted the assignment. It was known that people would have to dance to her tune, but a film that reflected only her view would be more vexing than intriguing. Moreover, no director of note wanted to be associated with her. But the documentary filmmaker Ray Müller was willing to take the gamble. They agreed to make a ninety-minute film; in the end, though, it swelled to three hours in order to accommodate portrayals of all her careers. Riefenstahl speaks at great length and gets to play herself in a constantly changing set of costumes. Her recollections are reeled off as though from a tape recorder, and whenever Müller dares to contradict her, she loses her train of thought and chides him. At these moments, the viewer senses that Riefenstahl has scripted her life like a movie role. Of course she toyed with the idea of calling off the project on the second day of filming and felt as though she was in a denazification trial. But her lust for renown won out, and she kept on with it. The greatest experiment in the documentary film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (the original title of which, Die Macht der Bilder [The Power of Images]: Leni Riefenstahl, is far less giddy) is the leading lady herself.
Even though she would soon be reaching the age of one hundred, she could not imagine life as a retiree. When she was not traveling, she was sitting in her cutting room in Pöcking, which was equipped with state-of-the-art technology, and working on photographs of the Nuba or fish. For the first time, there were exhibitions about her in Japan, Finland, Italy, Spain, and Germany. She carefully monitored how her work was received and tried to prevent her films from being shown if she did not approve of the context; only the exhibition organizers whose approach was compatible with her ideas were rewarded with exhibits. Each of her exhibitions was sure to be accompanied by critical articles, but these did nothing to harm sales. Her pictures of the Olympic Games of 1936, of the Nuba people, and of the corals were in brisk demand. Riefenstahl was not interested in artistic inquiry or in experiments; she was “on the quest for the unusual and marvelous, and for the mysteries of life.”11 But this kind of art had now grown uninteresting and inconsequential. The attraction of her pictures derived from their context. The symbolic effect of her name was greater than the aesthetic effect of her images. The tactical skill that her friend Albert Speer had shown in dealing with his past eluded her. Riefenstahl was a jumble of contradictions and emotions. She did not deny the fascination that Hitler had exerted on her, but she showed some degree of dismay about having been so deluded by him. She viewed herself as a victim of Hitler; it was his fault that she was no longer an international star.
As she grew older, the Germans seemed to grow less and less eager to ignore her. Riefenstahl was now part of the political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany. Susan Sontag’s essay as well as the high regard in which she was held in America made her a worthy object of interest in the intellectual and academic realm. She was the darling of German cultural reporting each time she reached a milestone birthday; every five years brought a spate of clever articles about the incredibly vigorous old lady from Lake Starnberg. She enjoyed serving as evidence of the covert continuity of National Socialism. She did not disappoint her enemies, who could count on her intransigence. She did not pander to them, and insisted on her version of the past.12
Riefenstahl was one of the last living connections to Hitler. She loved him, as so many other Germans had, even without having been a party member. For many Germans, she stood for a sad and loving memory of the Führer. She was the subject of countless interviews, illustrated books, and biographies. In the tabloid gossip columns she was pictured with her friends, including American lion tamers, Leo Kirch, Uschi Glas, and Reinhold Messner. When Time magazine celebrated its seventy-fifth birthday in 1998, she and Claudia Schiffer were the only German guests of honor.13 Riefenstahl was flattered by the invitation to join Henry Kissinger, Tom Cruise, and Sophia Loren at the event in New York, and she happily accepted.
In 2000, Kettner went with her to Sudan for the last time. Her desire to see old friends again served as a pretext. Müller would be shooting a film about this journey; Riefenstahl wanted to play the big star one more time. She risked her life for her final appearance in front of the camera. Despite explicit warnings about the politically unstable and unsafe situation in Sudan, there was no holding her back. Wearing a fashionable safari outfit, a big pair of sunglasses, and smeared lipstick, she set off for a country that had been plagued by civil war for the past seventeen years. With temperatures soaring to more than one hundred degrees, she hurtled through the desert in an old jeep, her iron will almost visibly triumphing over her physical frailty. Riefenstahl wanted to savor the memory of the time she had spent with the people of Nuba thirty years earlier. People rejoicing at the sight of her made her forget the strain of the journey. Even though her friends were now old and no longer naked, they still worshipped her. While she was settling into her role, reality caught up with her. The civil war thwarted the grand entrance she had planned. Just as she was getting ready to show the Nuba the old photographs she had brought along, a shot rang out. She was quickly—and forcibly—brought to a helicopter. This helicopter was supposed to bring her and her companions to safety, but it crashed and flipped over. She wound up in the hospital in Khartoum with two broken ribs, a damaged lung, and multiple contusions, and was flown to Munich. In her view, the worst part was not the pain, but the fact that the cameraman (who was himself severely injured) did not film her when she was brought out of the helicopter. Magnificent pictures had been irretrievably lost in the process. Riefenstahl wanted to reenact the scene in Germany in order to incorporate it into the film later on. Most likely she would even have been willing to repeat the crash for the sake of these images. But who would want to see a hundred-year-old woman survive a helicopter crash? Her egocentricity knew no bounds, and she circulated photographs that showed her lying utterly exhausted in a hospital bed in El Obeid w
ith blood-smeared scratches on her face. The most memorable aspect of this film is that Riefenstahl had not changed—she would do literally anything for a good picture.
Cold showers, work, and morphine got her to the age of one hundred. She was cared for by her family, which consisted of Kettner and her secretary. Both remained loyal to her and kept her away from anything unpleasant. She lived according to a highly disciplined schedule and had no patience for anything she deemed nonessential. Her house was antiseptically clean, and her strict love of order was legendary. Her penmanship was thin and sharp, and her hair was still dyed blonde. Tobacco and alcohol were taboo. Her weight had not changed in eighty years, and her ramrod posture still revealed the dancer in her. She never appeared in public without makeup. Spinal surgery, pneumonia, and plane crashes did not rob her of her vitality. At the age of ninety-seven, she was still being photographed in swimsuits, and she cut a fine figure. She came to interviews in top form and enjoyed showing off her legs, as Helmut Newton knew when he photographed her for Vanity Fair in 2000. He had seen all her films as a schoolboy in Berlin and admired her artistry. Even so, he did not shy away from calling her an old Nazi. She, in turn, was flattered that the infamous Jewish photographer of glamorous women was interested in her, and the two of them hit it off. For the photo shoot, he asked her to change into a skirt because he knew of her proud claim that she had better legs than Marlene Dietrich. “Well, the pants came off in a jiffy and she was in the shortest skirt. As they say, ‘The legs are the last to go.’ ”14 Vanity and egocentrism had kept Riefenstahl young.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 52