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"Festive" was the atmosphere at the premiere of her work, said the director decades after the society event in a television camera.
Certainly she spoke the pure truth: April 20, 1938 was finally “Führer” s birthday, the cinema in the Reich capital was filled with the grandees of the Nazi regime, plus a few diplomats from abroad - and the visual power of the two-part film “Olympia” the audience cannot escape to this day.
But this is where the problems with Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl (1902–2003) begin.
Can someone who creates great art be a monster?
That is the question that is asked again and again in connection with her.
The interview quoted, which took place decades after the fall of the Third Reich, promises information.
Scene from "Olympia", 2nd part: "Festival of Beauty"
Source: picture-alliance / akg-images
First of all, Riefenstahl does not say a critical word about the Nazis present in 1938 in the corresponding sequence.
But no one expects that who has dealt a little with her biography.
Nobody got to the point better than the writer Alfred Polgar - he noted that when the director was called after the war as a witness in the trial against her colleague Veit Harlan, she “smiled as if something sweet was melting in her mouth” when there was always talk of Adolf Hitler.
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Accordingly, the TV recording has its most terrifying moment when Riefenstahl talks about how she was doing during the performance; her eyes screwed up, her mouth drawn to the line, she complains, until the final applause, after all the trouble with the strip, she didn't feel comfortable at all. So she left self-pity from the gala, no one had asked what the performance might trigger in poor Leni - the words of an egomaniac, a woman who has lost all standards, in what situation she found herself.
In general, Riefenstahl does not mention the political circumstances with a single syllable in the passages of the TV conversation, let alone the fact that an inhumane system was able to carry out a gigantic propaganda coup. She only discusses technical issues. Among other things, there is talk that there was too much material to look through, the director pours over herself with the most lumpy self-praise for how she succeeded in depicting the “iron will” of the marathon runners on the last kilometers through the interplay of music and images .
The irony of all these words is that they reflect large parts of how Nazism was dealt with in the early Federal Republic.
Many West Germans quickly switched to self-regret mode: As part of an apolitical people, one was seduced by a gang of criminals, the appropriate story goes, and that made one Hitler's first victim, especially when family members lost their lives have to.
Can someone who creates great art be a monster?
- Leni Riefenstahl
Source: picture alliance / dpa
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It is thanks to the historian Martin Broszat that the debate about the relationship between the Germans and the brown rulers was expanded to include the concept of resistance.
And even if many of those born after him are too hasty to convince themselves that resistance is the least they would have shown the rulers in the years 1933 to 1945, this judgment cannot be averted: Leni Riefenstahl not only failed to show any resistance, she tried it Turning around after the disaster as if that wasn't a problem.
The question that remains is which of the two is more important.
Do you want to hear history too? "Assassin" is the first season of the WELT History Podcast.
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