‘Riefenstahl’: The Making and Unmaking of a Master Propagandist

A review of ‘Riefenstahl’, by Andres Veiel; Vincent Productions, 2024.

There are many telling scenes in Riefenstahl, but one sticks out. Its subject, the director of Triumph of the Will and Olympia, insists she had no clue what the régime she served so dutifully was up to. As an artist, she claims, she did not concern herself with politics. Indeed, she seems to say, she was above it all. Art is a creative business, concerned with truth and beauty. Politics, on the other hand, is blunt, practical.

Would that her interlocutor had done his job. He might have pointed out that Hitler was a painter, Goebbels was a novelist, Eckhart was a playwright. He might have noted that the man who came up with Fascism, Gabriele d’Annunzio, was a poet. Nazism was an artistic enterprise. Its creators and champions took Germanic folklore, Norse mythology, mad racial theories, and good old-school Jew-hating and mixed it all into a cocktail fortified with rallies, anthems, uniforms, and more. Not for nothing did Walter Benjamin call fascism ‘the aestheticisation of politics’.

So you can perhaps see why Riefenstahl fitted in so well. Yet from the end of the war till her death 20-odd years ago at the age of 101, she claimed that despite making two of the most infamous propaganda films ever made, working closely with Hitler, and bringing worldwide attention (and, for a time, acclaim) to the Nazis, she knew nothing of the Holocaust. She was ‘just’ a filmmaker, she said; she only saw the bright side of life in Nazi Germany. In case you didn’t already find that hard to believe, Andres Veiel’s film will persuade you. Through private letters, recorded phone calls, off-the-record conversations, television appearances, court transcripts, and much else he gives Riefenstahl quite a bit of rope. Predictably, she hangs herself with it.

She was ‘just’ a filmmaker, she said; she only saw the bright side of life in Nazi Germany.

In her account, her story started when her father threw her into the river, having made her a lifejacket made of reeds. Shock: the lifejacket did not work and Riefenstahl nearly died. She recalls reflecting that death by drowning wasn’t the worst way to go. Soon she became a good all-round athlete and something of a tomboy. And in 1932, she made The Blue Mountain, a smoke-filled, dreamlike Alpine hymn to the will in which she scales a rock face. (She also wrote and directed the thing.) Veiel depicts this as a kind of mythic origin story, in which Riefenstahl, the rising artist, searches for purity and form in a stark Germanic landscape. For this is no gauzy prelude: we see signs of the totalising creative gaze that would find fame and purpose in political propaganda. Her film, like the ideology she would deny she understood, is all surface. Do not get me wrong: appearances matter. But they must point to something real. And The Blue Mountain, though beautiful, is empty.

Then, the apotheosis. In 1934, with his dictatorship firmly in place, Hitler commissioned Riefenstahl to capture that year’s Nuremberg Rally. The result was Triumpf des Willens (Triumph of the Will), in which Riefenstahl used groundbreaking techniques and methods that are still taught in film schools. Moving cameras, overhead angles, long tracking shots through masses of people—none of these had been seen before. Veiel does not deny Riefenstahl‘s enormous talent, nor her technical brilliance; but seeks to get across to us that these were put in service of something cold and dark and brutal. The creators of fashion and perfume adverts owe a debt to Riefenstahl, who used her camera not to document, but to deify. She was not some naif, merely starstruck by Hitler (though he was, she said, ‘magnetic’). She knew what she was doing and liked the access it gave her.

She was now rubbing elbows with the most powerful people in the Nazi state. Commissioned in 1938 to make Olympia, a celebration of the Berlin Olympics, she received the biggest-ever budget doled out for a feature film. The film is lush and fetishistic. If you ever doubted that there was something deeply sexually broken about fascism, watch this. It is a parade of muscle and sweat: a festival of erotic worship. The ideology is implicit. Aryan idealism drips from every frame. But it is Jesse Owens, who in the 100-metre spring left his white rivals (and the ideal of Aryan superiority) in the dust , who steals the show and captures Riefenstahl’s eyes. Riefenstahl says she did not even realise how fixated she was on Owens until she saw the footage. We learn that Riefenstahl’s demands drove the star of Olympia’s prologue sequence to have a breakdown. He was later sterilised.

If you ever doubted that there was something deeply sexually broken about fascism, watch this. It is a parade of muscle and sweat: a festival of erotic worship.

Riefenstahl’s post-war rebrand is almost comic; and what is puzzling is that plenty of people in Germany, presumably keen to justify their own actions to themselves, were quite happy to believe her, or at least defend her: Riefenstahl liked to read out her correspondence, and kept files ranking the kinds of correspondence (most of it positive) that she received. She would have been quite a bit more convincing if she had not been quite so prickly, so touchy, so defensive when questioned on her knowledge of what the Nazis were up to. We see her many legal battles, her vanity-interviews with glossy magazines, and her inability to resist boasting of her close relationship with the most powerful Nazis in government.

There is surely some truth to the notion that if you listen to someone for long enough then he will tell you who he is. Or, as the case may be, who she is; and Riefenstahl, in fact, cannot resist telling you who—we might say what—she is. This is the central irony. On the one hand, Riefenstahl insists with tedious indigence that she is and was apolitical; on the other, she defends and downplays both her own Nazi legacy and, I would add, affirms the régime’s aestheticisation of life. ‘I knew nothing’, she claims; and yet she once insisted that Jews, labouring in the background of a shot, should be removed, which led to their murder. She used gypsy children taken from a nearby internment camp as extras in a film. They were killed, too.

I have always found it slightly quaint that people think that life imprisonment is worse than death on the grounds that people have to ‘live with what they’ve done’. It seems to me that most people, particularly the worst among us, are really very good at deluding themselves. That Riefenstahl lived till she was over 100 suggests to me that she wasn’t all that bothered by the role she had played in giving lustre to the Nazis or being chummy with Adolf Hitler, and never in fact do we hear her express even a trace of consideration for, say, the millions who died pointlessly at his hands to satisfy his mad fantasies of greatness. Riefenstahl (and others) will say that she did not create or develop or outwardly support the ideology; but signs and symbols elicit and enhance belief in ideology, and she made the Tausendjähriges Reich look eternal.

That Riefenstahl lived till she was over 100 suggests to me that she wasn’t all that bothered by the role she had played in giving lustre to the Nazis or being chummy with Adolf Hitler.

Beauty is a form of violence in Riefenstahl. Her love of symmetry, strength and what she saw as physical perfection fed neatly into the Nazi philosophy of aesthetics. She would shoot from low angles to make her subjects seem heroic, use slow motion to show muscles rippling beneath flesh. She wanted to transform beautiful human beings into deities. But there is no weakness or softness in her lens. Asked if she would have devoted so much attention to, say, someone with a physical disability, she is quite content to say she wouldn’t: indeed she seems to take it as read that there can be nothing beautiful about such a person.

Aesthetics deals with the sensory experience and subjective judgment of what is beautiful or ugly; ethics, on the other hand, deals with morality, on right and wrong. But Veiel goes some way to collapsing or at least questioning the distinction. Wittgenstein argued that the most important aspects of human life, including ethics, are revealed through the lens of aesthetics, particularly through art and creative expression. So when Riefenstahl documents African tribes later in her life, in a style that is fetishishing and exploitative, she is letting on a good deal more than she thinks. Her portrayal is full of exoticism and erotic charge, and hence reveals a perspective that is patronising, perhaps colonial. She sees the beauty of those she films, but here, it is in a way that makes them less than human—rather than, as in the case of the athletes of Olympia, or the soldiers of the Nuremberg Rally, more than human.

There are flaws with Riefenstahl the film, as well as Riefenstahl the person. It is somewhat monotonous and goes on far too long. It is, if you like, a slow-burner, and one that at times can feel emotionally flat. One might argue that this is deliberate, that its subject is a woman who used image to smother truth and cloud appropriate emotion, but I think this would be too generous. Regardless of all of this, it is quietly devastating, and one is left with the feeling that this woman was not a ‘mere’ propagandist, an artist accidentally involved in firming up one of history’s darkest régimes. She was, rather, a particularly precise expression of it: superior, emotionally immature, thoroughly self-involved, obsessed with control, and unable to indulge even the possibility that she might be wrong. This is someone who got off way too lightly.