“Why? Because she was a fan of Mein Kampf. She was part of the [Nazi] ideology and to separate aesthetics from politics is, for me, totally naive. It is even dangerous,” says the German director speaking on a video call from his office in Berlin.
His film does not put the boot in to its subject. Rather it allows Riefenstahl to speak for herself via a mosaic of filmed archive, still images, correspondence and recorded phone calls from the trove of documents, footage and sound recordings. Some of the recordings were of telephone conversations with Nazis with whom she remained on fond terms after the war. These included Albert Speer after he was released from prison 20 years after his conviction at the Nuremberg Trials. Hitler’s favourite film-maker chatting to Hitler’s favourite architect.
Leni Riefenstahl[Missing Credit]
Veiel describes the Riefenstahl that emerges in his cinematic portrait as “a prototype of fascism”. It explores her childhood during which her violent father moulded in his daughter a “typically” Prussian/German contempt for weakness in others, a view which was later applied to foreigners and Jews. And although after the war Riefenstahl went to great efforts to depict herself as a victim of what she claimed were unfounded allegations that she was complicit in Nazi crimes, Veiel reveals the lie of Riefenstahl’s own revisionist version of herself.
One event concerned the massacre of 22 Jews in Końskie, Poland in 1939. Riefenstahl was present as a war correspondent embedded with the German army during its invasion of the country. Although she had once said that she had witnessed the massacre, she later maintained she had only heard the shots, a version that probably suited her second de-Nazification hearing, which was held in 1952.
The proceedings were designed to establish complicity with the Nazis. She was cleared in both trials. However, Veiel unearthed a letter written by a German army adjutant to Riefenstahl’s husband, a German army officer, who was in Końskie with his wife. It described how Riefenstahl was filming the funeral of four German soldiers who had died in action the night before. As Veiel describes it, Riefenstahl’s story was a simple one of “German courageous soldiers burying their comrades”.
Jews had been beaten and forced to dig the soldiers’ graves, removing the soil with their bare hands. For Riefenstahl, they were ruining the nobility of the image. She asked for the Jews to be removed. They were taken away and shot. “The letter shows she wasn’t a witness but the catalyst of the massacre,” says Veiel.
The infamous director with Adolf Hitler[Missing Credit]
His film is released in the UK not only just after the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe but at a time when Veiel fears the lessons of Second World War are being unlearnt, particularly in the German director’s own country.
“I’m really concerned. I live just outside Berlin. The AfD (Alternative for Germany party) got something like 43 per cent [in the recent election] so you can [look at the people around you] and say every second person voted for a far-right extremist party.”
There is, according to the director, “a longing and a yearning for simple solutions” that has echoes of the Germany in which Leni Riefenstahl was formed. “That’s why I call her a prototype for fascism,” he says.
However, his documentary also reveals a post-war Germany that is less shamed by its Nazi past than is often assumed. When Riefenstahl’s version of life is challenged during a 1970s TV chat show, the audience is seen to side with her view that she was a powerless bystander. Letters poured in supporting her. Never mind that when Goebbels protested that Riefenstahl was being given too much money to make her films “she went to Hitler, cried and got what she wanted”, Veiel says.
The director shows his film to young people in German schools and they are making the connection between Nazi Germany and the dangers posed today, he says.
But what of those, like the German schoolboys who recently made neo-Nazi gestures while on a trip to Auschwitz? Is he getting through to them, too? “I go to these areas where the majority vote for AfD and, of course I get death threats. ‘Riefenstahl was a great artist,’” he says quoting some of the messages he has received. “‘You are spitting on her and Germany; when we come to power, a dog will not touch even your bones.’ Things like that. But that’s OK. I hit the nerve of those people.”
For those making these threats, the aesthetic that defines Riefenstahl’s Nazi films – from the battalions marching through Nuremberg’s streets and then in Speer’s Zeppelinfeld Stadium, to the adoring images shot with the camera looking up at Hitler himself – is being replicated by today’s totalitarian regimes.
The director with Adolf Hitler[Missing Credit]
“When we were editing the film in 2022, the Ukrainian War started several weeks later. We had the parades in Moscow, and it was like a renaissance of Triumph of the Will: the angle shot of Putin; the marching soldiers, the staging of strength, healthiness of the superiority. And the opening of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing was the renaissance of Olympia.”
Many of Riefenstahl’s admirers saw in the director an exemplary example of blonde, body-beautiful fascism.
The technical competence of her work is not in doubt.
Has Veiel come to any conclusions about what prevents a well-made film from gaining the status of high art?
“Riefenstahl was just celebrating Nazi ideology. Art should not be in service to an ideology. And that’s what she made.”
But was not Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin also made as propaganda for communism? And isn’t that film considered great art?
“The difference is Potemkin had heroism,” Veiel says. “It’s more individual. It’s not organised masses. You have characters. That’s why it is timeless. Triumph of the Will is so stupidly staged. It has nothing to do with the abilities of Eisenstein.”
Tarantino take note.
Riefenstahl is in cinemas now
Director Andres Veiel and stills from his new film Riefenstahl[Missing Credit]