LENI: The Life & Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach

Little, Brown £25

What the Leni Riefenstahl story inspires is not adulation or anger or contempt, although she aroused plenty of all three, but exasperation at her refusal to acknowledge what she had done. She was 43 when her adored Führer shot himself amid the ruins of the Third Reich, and she lived on until 2002, when she was 101. In all that time she never ceased to protest her innocence. The Nazis, she insisted, had forced her to make films, but they were pure art, not propaganda. She did not have the “slightest idea” about Hitler’s racist policies, and had no contact with any party official except Goebbels, who was “cold and forbidding” towards her. As an artist, she could not be expected to know what was happening in the world at large. These lies are so breathtaking that you wonder how anyone can have believed her. The answer seems to be that several of those who might have testified against her were implicated in her guilt, or dead, while in the chaos at the war’s end vital pieces of evidence disappeared, and have come to light only relatively recently.

Steven Bach’s biography might be called exemplary, except that that word is too cold for the excitement he generates as he dexterously slots together the ugly jigsaw that was Riefenstahl’s career. His book is no witch-hunt. He concedes that she had a tough start in life, which helps to explain her ruthlessness. A plumber’s daughter, born in one of Berlin’s grimmer industrial suburbs, she survived during Germany’s post-first-world-war hyper-inflation by selling picture postcards in tourist cafes. She trained as a dancer, but a knee injury intervened. Undaunted, she learnt to ski and climb and took part in several “alpine” films. These were Nietzschean melodramas, set amid snow and ice, which celebrated heroic idealism and prefigured Nazi master-race aesthetics. The reactions of Jewish critics disappointed her. Jews, she protested, had no right to criticise “our mentality” and had no right to criticise “our work”. As long as there were Jewish film critics, she despaired of having a success. “But watch out. When Hitler takes the rudder everything will change.”

When she read Mein Kampf she was bowled over. It was a “beautiful” book, and its fascist message was utterly convincing. “You'll see, they are right”, she told friends, “I’ll work for them.” At a 1932 Nazi-party rally in Berlin, she got her first sight of the Führer. It was “like being struck by lightning”, an “almost apocalyptic vision”. She wrote to him and was granted a private audience at which, she said, he attempted a romantic embrace. He visited her in her flat, and took her to Goebbels’s house as his guest. She let it be thought she was Hitler’s mistress, because then nobody dared refuse her anything she wanted for her films. Victory of Faith, her film celebrating the 1933 Nuremberg rally, was made in collaboration with Albert Speer, later Hitler’s minister for armaments, and contained a speech by the arch anti-semite Julius Streicher. At the premiere, Hitler presented her with a diva-sized bouquet, and she swooned. His thank-you gift was a grey Mercedes convertible.

Her two later films glorifying Hitler, Triumph of the Will (1934) and Day of Freedom (1935), were, like Victory of Faith, financed entirely by the Nazi party. Nobody dared question the vast sums that Riefenstahl lavished on herself and her projects, since they had the Führer’s personal approval. They typified his sumptuous generosity towards artists he approved of, as outlined in Frederic Spotts’s revelatory book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (2002) — an absentee from Bach’s formidable bibliography. Day of Freedom had the specific propaganda purpose of celebrating Hitler’s rearmament of Germany in repudiation of the Versailles treaty. By contrast, it has been argued, her film of the 1936 Olympics was independently made and free of propaganda. Bach shows that neither claim is true. The film was party-funded, and when Riefenstahl’s extravagance raised charges of embezzlement, she went weeping to the Führer and emerged triumphant. When an official at the games complained that her film crew was impeding an event, she threatened to drag him by the ears to Hitler’s box. The film’s propaganda purpose was to camouflage Germany’s aggressive foreign policy and project a peaceful, health-loving image. To the same end, gypsies and vagrants were rounded up from Berlin’s streets before the games began and relocated on sewage-disposal sites, and “Jews Keep Out” notices were temporarily taken down. The prominence the film gives to Jesse Owens and other black athletes, often cited in its exoneration, was in keeping with Goebbels’s instructions. He calculated, rightly, that it would have a “favourable effect” abroad.

Kristallnacht, two years later, had a less favourable effect. Synagogues throughout Germany were torched, and 30,000 Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps. Riefenstahl, in America at the time hoping for a Hollywood breakthrough, dismissed the press furore as a “slander” on her homeland and on “the greatest man who ever lived”. “If only this damned Jewish question would get out of the headlines,” she snapped, the Americans would soon forget it. In September 1939, her special film unit, financed by the Reich, was on hand to record the conquest of Poland, and in the Polish town of Konskie, she witnessed the killing by German troops of 30 Jewish civilians, who had been forced to dig a mass grave in the town square and had tried to escape. She denied being present, but snapshots taken by a German soldier show that she was there. A year later, when she wanted gypsy extras for a film she was making, she had the gypsy internees in a transit camp paraded before her by the SS guards and chose 23, of whom 15 were children, the youngest 13 months old. They worked unpaid, as forced labour under armed guard, and in strict isolation from the rest of the cast, and were returned to the camp when filming ended. Riefenstahl declared that she saw “nearly all of them” after the war, and nothing happened to “a single one of them”. In fact, it has been proved that nearly all of them perished in Auschwitz.

After the war, her art-photo work among the Nuba people in Sudan was meant to show she was no racist. But, Bach finds, she remained her old exploitative self. She drove her Land Rover over Nuba burial sites, spied on secret rites with a telephoto lens, and displayed near-naked black warriors as curiosities for the West. “Obscene and racist” was the verdict of a scholarly expert on the Nuba, whose help she sought.

Her work for the Nazis did not mean, of course, that she was a monster. It was just that her talents allowed her to do more harm than most of her compatriots. As Bach succinctly puts it, she used the century’s most powerful art form to glorify a murderous dictator. But her worship of Hitler was shared by millions of Germans, otherwise he would have had no power. Her fault was simply that she believed art more important than people, particularly if those people were Jews or gypsies. That belief is still powerful today. It is frequently said that art enshrines our “highest” ideals, or, even more foolishly, that art is “what makes us human”. Those who harbour such illusions would do well to read Bach’s powerful and enlightening book.

Available at the Books First price of £22.50 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy