Carole Angier
The Art of Propaganda
Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
Steven Bach (Little, Brown 386pp Ł25)
There are brilliant books about monsters - Ian Kershaw on Hitler, for example, or Simon Sebag Montefiore on Stalin. Leni demonstrates (if you've ever doubted it) that Leni Riefenstahl was a monster. Of course she wasn't a patch on Hitler, and Steven Bach isn't a patch on Ian Kershaw. So is it worth reading this biography?
Yes, with reservations. Bach does not grapple enough with the difficult questions that are the only good reasons to read or write it. He's no psychologist, having nothing to say about the role of Riefenstahl's background - poor working-class - in her lust for power, and only one thing to say about the role of her parents - that she learned to manipulate men from dealing with her despotic father. His book is readable, but rarely powerful; and he has strange lapses, in which he forgets his own proof that almost every word she ever uttered was a lie, and seems to take on trust some implausible claim (eg that she once 'confronted [Hitler] with her distress at his racial policies').
Nonetheless, Leni is in several ways an admirable achievement. Bach is good at memorable summaries of the background. In the 1920s - he tells us - inflation rose to the point where Leni's current lover paid for her dancing debut with one American dollar, and the Munich paper that reviewed it cost 1.5 billion marks. And in the 1930s Hitler consolidated his power at the same crazy rate. Less than a week after he became Chancellor in January 1933, rival parties lost the rights of expression and assembly; four weeks after, civil rights were savaged, including habeas corpus; six weeks after, Dachau opened, and by the end of the year there were fifty camps for political prisoners in Germany. No wonder Germans were reeling.
This does not mean, of course, that their eager acceptance of the Führer's grandiose flattery, cult of hero-worship and racist paranoia was excusable; and the closer people were to the centre of this corrupt power, the less excusable they were. Leni Riefenstahl was among the closest from the beginning. She exploited this for all she was worth at the time, and lied about it for all she was worth ever after; and never repented, regretting her connection to the Third Reich only for the harm it did her to her dying day.
It will be very hard to deny this ever again, after Leni, and that is its first service. But - and this is the really admirable thing - Bach neither attacks nor defends his impossible subject. He remains cool, calm and collected. He makes his judgement of her plain - rightly, I think; it would be an evasion of responsibility not to. But that too he does coolly and calmly.
This is more of an achievement than it sounds. After many years with their subjects, biographers will have strong feelings about them, which will drive their narratives. But the right balance must be found. Too much defence is the classic fault. Too much attack is almost worse (like Roger Lewis with Anthony Burgess, for instance, or J D F Jones with Laurens van der Post): if subjects are so loathsome, why waste our precious time on them? It is fatal to protest too much, either way; the reader will dismiss the book as a whitewash in the one case and a hatchet job in the other. Leni is neither. That is clever, and convincing.
What it convinces us of is that Leni Riefenstahl was a monster of egotism and self-absorption, and above all of ruthless ambition. As a girl she encouraged suitors in order to reject them; as a woman she chose an endless string of supine admirers, spending the last 36 of her 102 years with a lover 42 years her junior. As a colleague she was poison, insisting on her own will in everything; eagerly cutting her Jewish collaborators out of the credits and profits; exploiting and even taking credit for other people's work - her patrons', her cameramen's, scholars', other photographers'. She was uncultured, and no thinker; her strengths were physical courage and beauty ('pretty as a swastika', Walter Winchell said), and obsessive hard work. Fascism made her strengths into a cult, and despised the things in which she was weak; naturally, therefore, she was a Fascist. Fascism to her was a kind of self-worship, which was her favourite pastime anyway.
However despicable her private life (she spent years trying to disinherit her niece and nephew too), it is her public life that counts. And here, in his quiet way, Bach really puts the boot in. Leni adored Mein Kampf, and Hitler himself; and in turn Hitler personally backed her from the bottomless coffers of the state, not only for the films which so brilliantly promoted himself and his cause, but for her own wartime movie, Tiefland, which by Bach's account is frankly awful. She was close not only to Hitler himself but to Goebbels, Speer and Streicher, in whose tender care she left the claims of 'the Jew Béla Balázs' when she airbrushed him out of her history. All of this she denied ever after, never knowing anyone or anything, always being somewhere else at the time. Officially she got away with it, being categorised as the next-to-lowest level of collaborator by a denazification tribunal after the war. But Bach nails every lie, from the smallest - such as that her father was not a member of the Party - to the largest, eg that she did not knowingly use gypsies as unpaid labour in Tiefland; that Maxglan, the concentration camp they came from, was a 'welfare and care camp'; and that 'almost all of them' survived the war. In 1987 a German court rejected these claims, but she repeated the last one to the end - outrageously, since most of the Maxglan gypsies died. Riefenstahl's own justification for all this was 'art über alles', a justification echoed by her supporters. Whether art justifies everything is a huge question, but luckily one we do not need to confront. For another question comes first: were Leni Riefenstahl's films art at all?
PaThere is no doubt that some works that exalt authority over freedom, hatred over tolerance and the strong over the weak can be good or even great art - the writings of Nietzsche, for example, of Hamsun and Céline. But that is not because of their formal achievement alone. It is because they also examine the ideals they express; because they include at least some self-criticism and reflection. The problem with Leni Riefenstahl's films - and with her photographs too, most famously of the Nuba people of Sudan - is that they contain no such reflection. They exalt beauty and strength, and a simplified notion of nobility, and that is all. They are, therefore, not art, but propaganda - superb propaganda, technically innovative propaganda, but propaganda all the same. They misrepresent the reality of Nazi power, and Nuba life, showing only a glittering, manipulated surface, not the complex and (in the case of the Nazis) horrifyingly costly truth. Art is about more than beauty, as Susan Sontag said. Leni Riefenstahl 'had a flair for the stunning image and the histrionic episode', Bach writes, but none for any human feeling or truth. He quotes Thomas Mann: 'art is moral in that it awakens', while 'Leni's art lulled and deceived'. Leni Riefenstahl was not an artist, but a gifted propagandist for an evil cause. That is Bach's conclusion. His will probably be the definitive biography. I certainly hope so.