Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl (; 22 August 1902 – 8 September 2003) was a German filmmaker, photographer, and actress. She is considered one of the most controversial personalities in film history. Regarded by many critics as an "innovative filmmaker and creative aesthete", she is also criticized for her works in the service of propaganda during the Nazi era.
A talented swimmer and an artist, Riefenstahl became interested in dancing during her childhood, taking lessons and performing across all Europe. After seeing a promotional poster for the 1924 film Mountain of Destiny, she was inspired to move into acting and between 1925 and 1929 starred in five successful motion pictures. Riefenstahl became one of the few women in Germany to direct a film during the Weimar era when, in 1932, she decided to try directing with her own film, The Blue Light.
In the 1930s, she directed the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), resulting in worldwide attention and acclaim. The films are widely considered two of the most effective and technically innovative propaganda films ever made. Her involvement in Triumph of the Will, however, significantly damaged her career and reputation after World War II. Adolf Hitler closely collaborated with Riefenstahl during the production of at least three important Nazi films, and they formed a friendly relationship.
After the war, Riefenstahl was arrested and found to be a Nazi "fellow traveller" but was not charged with war crimes.Obituary Leni Riefenstahl The Guardian Throughout her later life, she denied having known about the Holocaust, and was criticized as the "voice of the 'how could we have known?' defence". Riefenstahl's post-war work includes the release of the film Tiefland in 1954, her work as a photographer, her autobiography in 1987, underwater photographs and two photo books on the Nuba peoples of southern Sudan.
Early life Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin on 22 August 1902. Her father, Alfred Theodor Paul Riefenstahl, owned a successful heating and ventilation company and wanted his daughter to follow him into the business world. Since Riefenstahl was the only child for several years, Alfred wanted her to carry on the family name and secure the family fortune. However, her mother, Bertha Ida (Scherlach), who had been a part-time seamstress before her marriage, had faith in Riefenstahl and believed that her daughter's future was in show business. Riefenstahl had a younger brother, Heinz, who was killed at the age of 39 on the Eastern Front in Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union.
Riefenstahl fell in love with the arts in her childhood. She began to paint and write poetry at the age of four. She was also athletic, and at the age of twelve joined a gymnastics and swimming club called Nixe. Her mother was confident her daughter would grow up to be successful in the field of art and therefore gave her full support, unlike Riefenstahl's father, who was not interested in his daughter's artistic inclinations. In 1918, when she was 16, Riefenstahl attended a presentation of Snow White which interested her deeply; it led her to want to be a dancer. Her father instead wanted to provide his daughter with an education that could lead to a more dignified occupation. His wife, however, continued to support her daughter's passion. Without her husband's knowledge, she enrolled Riefenstahl in dance and ballet classes at the Grimm-Reiter Dance School in Berlin, where she quickly became a star pupil.
Dancing and acting careers
Riefenstahl attended dancing academies and became well known for her self-styled interpretive dancing skills, traveling across Europe with Max Reinhardt in a show funded by Jewish producer Harry Sokal. Riefenstahl often made almost for each performance. She began to suffer a series of foot injuries, which led to knee surgery that threatened her dancing career. It was while going to a doctor's appointment that she first saw a poster for the 1924 film Mountain of Destiny. She became inspired to go into movie making, and began visiting the cinema to see films and also attended film shows.
On one of her adventures, Riefenstahl met Luis Trenker, an actor who had appeared in Mountain of Destiny. At a meeting arranged by her friend Gunther Rahn, she met Arnold Fanck, the director of Mountain of Destiny and a pioneer of the mountain film genre. Fanck was working on a film in Berlin. After Riefenstahl told him how much she admired his work, she also convinced him of her acting skill. She persuaded him to feature her in one of his films. Riefenstahl later received a package from Fanck containing the script of the 1926 film The Holy Mountain. She made a series of films for Fanck, where she learned from him acting and film editing techniques. One of Fanck's films that brought Riefenstahl into the limelight was The White Hell of Pitz Palu of 1929, co-directed by G. W. Pabst. She had to undergo many physical challenges that would probably be deemed unethical in today's standards. Some of the torments included: being engulfed in small avalanches, jumping into mountain lakes and icy streams, climbing rocky pinnacles while barefoot, letting herself be pulled up a rock face being pelted by snow and ice, balancing on a ladder above a deep glacial crevasse, and enduring obscene jokes from her exclusively male colleagues. Her fame spread to countries outside Germany.
Riefenstahl produced and directed her own work called Das Blaue Licht ("The Blue Light") in 1932, co-written by Carl Mayer and Béla Balázs. This film won the silver medal at the Venice Film Festival, but was not universally well-received, for which Riefenstahl blamed the critics, many of whom were Jewish. Upon its 1938 re-release, the names of Balázs and Sokal, both Jewish, were removed from the credits; some reports say this was at Riefenstahl's behest. In the film, Riefenstahl played an innocent peasant girl who is hated by the villagers because they think she is diabolical and cast out. She is protected by a glowing mountain grotto. According to herself, Riefenstahl received invitations to travel to Hollywood to create films, but she refused them in favor of remaining in Germany with a boyfriend. Hitler was a fan of the film, and thought Riefenstahl epitomized the perfect German female. He saw talent in Riefenstahl and arranged a meeting.
In 1933, Riefenstahl appeared in the U.S.-German co-productions of the Arnold Fanck-directed, German-language SOS Eisberg and the Tay Garnett-directed, English-language S.O.S. Iceberg. The films were filmed simultaneously in English and German and produced and distributed by Universal Studios. Her role as an actress in S.O.S. Iceberg was her only English language role in film.
Directing career
Propaganda films Riefenstahl heard Nazi Party (NSDAP) leader Adolf Hitler speak at a rally in 1932 and was mesmerized by his talent as a public speaker. Describing the experience in her memoir, Riefenstahl wrote, "I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth."
Hitler was immediately captivated by Riefenstahl's work. She is described as fitting in with Hitler's ideal of Aryan womanhood, a feature he had noted when he saw her starring performance in Das Blaue Licht. In May 1933, Hitler asked Riefenstahl to make a film about Horst Wessel, but she declined. Riefenstahl was offered the opportunity to direct Der Sieg des Glaubens, an hour-long propaganda film about the fifth Nuremberg Rally in 1933. The opportunity that was offered was a huge surprise to Riefenstahl. Hitler had ordered Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry to give the film commission to Riefenstahl, but the Ministry had never informed her. Riefenstahl agreed to direct the movie even though she was only given a few days before the rally to prepare. She and Hitler got on well, forming a friendly relationship. The propaganda film was funded entirely by the NSDAP.
During the filming of Der Sieg des Glaubens, Hitler had stood side by side with the leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), Ernst Röhm, a man with whom he clearly had a close working relationship. Röhm was murdered on Hitler's orders a short time later, during the purge of the SA referred to as the Night of the Long Knives. It has gone on record that, immediately following the killings, Hitler ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed, although Riefenstahl disputed that this ever happened.
Impressed with Riefenstahl's work, Hitler asked her to film Triumph des Willens ("Triumph of the Will"), a new propaganda film about the 1934 party rally in Nuremberg. More than one million Germans participated in the rally. The film is sometimes considered the greatest propaganda film ever made. Initially, according to Riefenstahl, she resisted and did not want to create further Nazi Party films, instead wanting to direct a feature film based on Eugen d'Albert's Tiefland ("Lowlands"), an opera that was extremely popular in Berlin in the 1920s. Riefenstahl received private funding for the production of Tiefland, but the filming in Spain was derailed and the project was cancelled. (When Tiefland was eventually shot, between 1940 and 1944, it was done in black and white, and was the third most expensive film produced in Nazi Germany. During the filming of Tiefland, Riefenstahl utilized Romani from internment camps for extras, who were severely mistreated on set, and when the filming completed they were sent to the death camp Auschwitz.) Hitler was able to convince her to film Triumph des Willens on the condition that she would not be required to make further films for the party, according to Riefenstahl. The motion picture was generally recognized as an epic, innovative work of propaganda filmmaking. The film took Riefenstahl's career to a new level and gave her further international recognition.
In interviews for the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Riefenstahl adamantly denied any deliberate attempt to create Nazi propaganda and said she was disgusted that Triumph des Willens was used in such a way.
In a private letter to Hitler, quoted in a 2024 documentary, Riefenstahl seems enthusiastic about the propaganda effects of Triumph des Willens: "the film's impact as German propaganda is greater than I could have imagined and your image, my Führer, is always applauded."
Despite allegedly vowing not to make any more films about the Nazi Party, Riefenstahl made the 28-minute Tag der Freiheit: Unsere Wehrmacht ("Day of Freedom: Our Armed Forces") about the German Army in 1935. Like Der Sieg des Glaubens and Triumph des Willens, this was filmed at the annual Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg. Riefenstahl said this film was a sub-set of Der Sieg des Glaubens, added to mollify the German Army which felt it was not represented well in Triumph des Willens.