Travelling from
Germany to the Paris International Exposition, in the summer of 1937,
Leni Riefenstahl went under an assumed name. She had no desire to
confront reporters. In Paris, she won the fair’s gold medal for a film
she had directed, a documentary-style celebration of the Nazi Party
congress three years earlier. Yet she was also forced to defend herself,
in interviews, not against her Nazi ties but against the swirling
rumors that she had fallen into disgrace with the leaders of the Reich.
Was it true that Goebbels had repudiated her? Were some upper-echelon
Nazis unhappy that a woman wielded so much power? On her way back to
Berlin, exhausted, she stopped off in Berchtesgaden, where she was
escorted to Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat, so that she could describe
her trip to the one man whose support for her was absolute.
Hitler
had bypassed all the sanctioned Party hacks to hire Riefenstahl to
direct her first official Nazi film, in 1933, and he had provided the
title for the second, “Triumph of the Will,” so recently triumphant in
Paris. He was deeply interested in movies, and screened them often in
his home. Riefenstahl, ushered into an entrance hall, found herself
watching a film in progress; she recognized Marlene Dietrich’s face
before the Führer appeared and took her off for coffee on the terrace.
Hitler’s choice of a Dietrich film might have seemed curious, since his
ministers had long campaigned to destroy her reputation. Although she
was the greatest movie star that Germany had ever produced, Dietrich
refused to work in Germany. And it was no longer possible to pretend
that her choices were not political. A few months before Riefenstahl’s
visit, Dietrich announced that she had applied for American citizenship,
posing for reporters outside the federal building in Los Angeles with
one leg propped on the running board of her chauffeured Cadillac, and
saying things like “America has been good to me.” The Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer
informed its readers that Dietrich’s years among “the film Jews of
Hollywood” had rendered her “wholly un-German”—which did not keep Hitler
from very much wanting her back.
Two
beautiful and ambitious Berliners, born just eight months apart—Marie
Magdalene Dietrich, on December 27, 1901; Bertha Helene Amalie
Riefenstahl, on August 22, 1902—both bound to shape the fantasies and
touch the histories of their time. Two girls growing up amid the fear
and chaos of the Great War, two artists committed to impossible ideals
of physical beauty, two women who became embodiments not only of the
opposing sides of the next war but, for many, of opposing forces in the
human soul. They scarcely knew each other, although during the late
twenties they were such close neighbors that Riefenstahl claimed she
could see into Dietrich’s apartment windows.
It
is unlikely that Dietrich would have looked back. There are a few
photographs showing the two of them at the Berlin Press Ball in early
1930: Dietrich, on the brink of the huge success of “The Blue Angel,”
smiles and clowns with ease, a jaunty cigarette holder clamped between
her lips, the broad planes of her face soaking up the camera’s light and
affection; Riefenstahl, then a well-known film actress, too, stands by
shy and awkward, self-consciously eclipsed. Decades later, Riefenstahl
recorded several anecdotes about Dietrich in her memoirs. Dietrich, in a
sketchier memoir of her own, had nothing to say about Riefenstahl.
Dietrich’s daughter, however, wrote of hearing a conversation in the
mid-thirties about Jewish actors who had been thrown out of Germany.
“Soon they won’t have any talent left for their big ‘cultural Reich,’ ”
Dietrich said, “except, of course, that terrible Riefenstahl and Emil
Jannings. They will stay, and those two ‘well-poisoners’—the Nazis deserve!”
The
two women never saw each other again after 1930, when Dietrich left
Germany, nor did they write or speak or maintain more than a few
acquaintances in common. Karin Wieland’s dual biography “Dietrich &
Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives” (Liveright),
translated from the German by Shelley Frisch, gets around these
problems largely by ignoring them. The book’s alternating sections keep
their subjects separate, except on a few inevitable occasions—say, when
Riefenstahl received a phone call informing her that Dietrich had won
the role that Riefenstahl coveted in “The Blue Angel,” and was so upset
that she sent her dinner guest home without his promised goulash. This
isn’t the first time the story has been told; it originates in Steven
Bach’s 1992 biography of Dietrich. Bach, who interviewed Riefenstahl’s
dinner guest, a film-magazine editor, observes that Riefenstahl
generally did not audition but, rather, dined.
One
could gain more detail about both women by reading two full-scale
biographies: Bach has also written an excellent book on Riefenstahl, as
has Jürgen Trimborn. Wieland is shrewd, though, about her subjects and
has done serious work in German archives, producing documents—a
reassuring letter from Riefenstahl to Albert Speer, in 1944, predicting a
“great turning point in this war”; an unpublished memoir by
Riefenstahl’s inconveniently Jewish early lover-financier; several
Dietrich letters—that give her book credibility, texture, and unending
interest. This is the story of two glamorous women whose achievements in
another time might have been no more substantial than the images on a
screen but who assumed real-life roles with the highest historical
stakes. However inscrutable human conduct, it is difficult not to search
these lives for insight into some of the modern era’s most difficult
questions, about illusion and mass intoxication, art and truth, courage
and capitulation.
Could
their very different childhoods tell us something about the choices
they ultimately made? Consider what it meant to be the product of a
Prussian military family, a girl whose father died before she was old
enough to remember him beyond the vague impressions she listed later on
as “tall, imposing stature, leather smell, shining boots, a riding whip,
horses”—a father whose absence prompted her need for a “masculine
model,” as she saw it, and whose mother raised her like “a kindly
general,” providing every sort of lesson (violin, piano, English) on a
widow’s meagre earnings. It would be easy to see here someone who came
to welcome Hitler’s leather-costumed militarism, yet this is an outline
of Dietrich’s childhood and the forces that she felt had made her who
she was. Riefenstahl grew up in a working-class family on the rise; her
mother was a seamstress, her father was a plumber who built up a
successful business and was the dominating figure of her early life.
Dietrich had an older sister, Riefenstahl a younger brother, both of
whom were the “obedient” children in the family and pleased their
parents by following conventional paths. Neither the bourgeois widow nor
the ambitious plumber could accept the notion that a well-brought-up
German girl would ever appear on the stage.
It
seemed a particularly far-fetched dream in wartime. The war had begun
just as the girls were entering adolescence—as Marie Magdalene decided
she would be called by the more stage-worthy Marlene. In her diary, she
wrote about attending a “real cinema” but also about the death of her
uncle Otto at the front: “Shot in the neck on the fourth of December.
Everybody’s crying.” Her mother remarried, and her stepfather, too, was
killed at the front; by sixteen, she was mourning her “golden youth.”
Later, Dietrich recalled the meals made entirely of turnips, the cold of
those years without fuel, and the continuing sacrifice of men she knew
that brought her “face-to-face with the war.”
No
such events or feelings seem to have touched Riefenstahl, who was not
from a military family and suffered no personal losses. She lived in a
“cloud of unknowing,” or so she claimed in her memoirs, which were set
on projecting the image of an artist too immersed in her work to notice
her surroundings. “My mind was turned in on a tiny exclusive world,” she
wrote, referring to the long hours of dance lessons that she had begun
to take without her father’s knowledge. Her determination was
formidable. But, at her own best evaluation, she was a woman who never
came face to face with anything, because the only face she saw was her
own.
By the early twenties, both
young women were on the stage, having overcome parental objections by
sidestepping the floozy connotations of such a career. Dietrich took
lessons at the illustrious Max Reinhardt School, and performed in tiny
roles in Reinhardt’s classic repertoire. Riefenstahl took to the
elevated styles of modern dance then popular in Berlin, cultivating the
aura of a barefoot priestess, even when costumed in a silver lamé
leotard under transparent (but ethereally floating) chiffon. She also
found a backer: the young Romanian-born Jewish banker Harry Sokal, who
wanted to marry her but agreed instead to rent large theatres for her
solo concerts, hire musicians, and take out ads. She made her
professional début in 1923 and was well received, but in less than a
year a knee injury brought her career to a halt. She was on her way to a
doctor, utterly depressed, when she saw a poster for a film titled
“Mountain of Destiny,” featuring a man poised between steep walls of
mountain rock. She skipped her appointment and went to see the movie. It
proved to be one of the two great epiphanies of her life.
“Mountain
films” were a genre exclusive to Germany. Flourishing in the twenties
and thirties, they began as sports documentaries and turned into
quasi-mystical adventures played out on icy peaks by supremely heroic
skiers or mountain climbers. The pioneer director of these films was
Arnold Fanck, a geologist who’d taught himself to use a movie camera, a
technical innovator with no studio connections. Riefenstahl was
enthralled by “Mountain of Destiny,” and was determined to be part of
Fanck’s next venture, even though the only mountains she’d ever seen
were on postcards. Fanck responded to her overture by quickly writing a
screenplay just for her; it may have helped that Harry Sokal had agreed
to pay a quarter of the film’s costs.
“The
Holy Mountain” opened with a closeup of Riefenstahl’s face and
continued with a sequence of her dancing on a shelf of rock above the
sea: she was a joyous nymph, a child of nature, and a brand-new movie
star. The film, which centered on the rivalry between two mountaineering
friends for the dancer’s favor, was Fanck’s biggest success so far.
Riefenstahl later revealed that Hitler had admired her “dance on the
sea,” but even at the time of the film’s release, in 1926, it was
interpreted politically, by critics on both the disapproving left
(“Obtrusive propaganda for noble-blond, high-altitude humanity”) and the
welcoming right (“This way, German film, to the holy mountain of your
rebirth and that of the German people!”).
Riefenstahl
went on to make several more mountain films with Fanck. She became
adept at skiing and climbing, and did all her own stunts, often in
freezing weather. She was hauled up on ropes through a real avalanche;
she crossed a treacherous chasm on a wobbly ladder laid end to end. She
was an early action heroine. But she wanted something more—to make a
film with an esteemed director, with a real studio, indoors. In
August, 1929, the renowned Josef von Sternberg took a few months off
from Hollywood to make a movie in Berlin, and word went out that he
needed a young female star. Riefenstahl did some assiduous dining with
Sternberg; later on, to save face, she claimed that it was she who had
told him all about Marlene Dietrich.
“The
Blue Angel” was meant to be a vehicle for the German silent-film star
Emil Jannings, who had also had a big success in Hollywood—he had just
won the first Academy Award for Best Actor—but, with limited English,
was returning to Berlin to make his first official talkie. Produced by
the biggest German studio, Ufa, with Paramount’s coöperation, the film
was to be shot in both a German and an English version. Sternberg first
saw Dietrich that September, in a musical, and was struck by her “cold
disdain” for the buffoonery around her. Neither Jannings nor the
producer wanted her: at twenty-seven, she had long since traded the
classics for a string of stage and film roles as a glamour girl, and she
seemed already somewhat past her prime: early comparisons to Garbo had
become criticism of her “slavish imitation” of Hollywood’s reigning
star.
Sternberg’s
film, based on the novel “Professor Unrat,” by Heinrich Mann, was the
story of an old and priggish teacher who falls for a small-time cabaret
singer. The professor was the central role, the girl merely the agent of
his destruction. But Sternberg had changed the title to the name of the
cabaret—and, by intimation, to the girl—in the hope of turning the
emphasis around. When Dietrich stepped onstage, he knew the idea would
work.
At ease with her sexual
powers, wryly funny, unflinchingly amoral, Lola Lola, the cabaret singer
of “The Blue Angel,” was also a new sort of woman on the screen.
Dietrich wasn’t yet the goddess she would become: she’s rough around the
edges, a bit thick in the waist, less polished and more natural than
she ever was again. But in her white satin top hat and her exposed
garters, flashing her legs while singing “Falling in Love Again”—“What’s
a girl to do? I can’t help it”—she was the essence of Weimar sexual
sophistication, the imperturbable center of the night world that
Sternberg built around her. Seedy but vital, that world was filled with
magical detail: a chorus of chubby overage showgirls, a live bear led
calmly through Lola Lola’s dressing room, a mysteriously sad and silent
clown overlooking all. Nothing could be further from Riefenstahl’s
mountain films. Even Sternberg’s city alleyways are painted scenery;
only the psychology of the main characters seems entirely real. The Nazi
Party condemned “The Blue Angel,” if to little effect. But Dietrich was
gone by then, in any case. She read the first German reviews
(“Fascinating as no woman has ever been before in film”) on shipboard,
on her way to Hollywood, where Sternberg waited to complete her
transformation.
“I
am Marlene,” he said later, and she agreed. She inscribed a photograph
that she gave him, a year after her arrival, “To my creator, from his
creation.” He was in love with her, but even more in love with the image
of her that he projected on the screen. She was not in love with him;
after an initial romance, he made love to her only through the camera, a
fact that may have contributed to the allure that his lens discovered
in her. Both were married, but it didn’t matter. Sternberg’s wife, in a
rage over his obsession, sued for divorce. Dietrich had left her husband
and small daughter in Berlin; she later collected the daughter, and
although she never divorced her husband—he remained a friend, an
adviser, and a dependent for decades—he did not interfere with her
numberless affairs.
Sternberg
was small and dark and Jewish; the “von” in his name was a Hollywood
affectation. He had grown up dirt poor and hungry in Vienna (except for a
few years when he was dirt poor and hungry in New York). His salvation
was his proximity to Vienna’s Prater, the great amusement park, where he
immersed himself in “pirouetting fleas, sword swallowers, tumbling
midgets and men on stilts,” to abbreviate the long and fond list in his
memoirs. The working inhabitants of “The Blue Angel,” bear and all,
naturally leap to mind. But Sternberg created a realm of adamant
illusion in all the six films he went on to make with Dietrich, until
his love began to feel more like entrapment and to look more like
revenge.
She became slimmer,
blonder, sleeker, her cheekbones carved by shadow, a golden nimbus
haloing her hair. The melancholic weariness of her opening scene in
“Morocco” (1930), their first Hollywood film, betrays an overly close
study of Garbo, but once she dons a tux, kisses a woman, and seduces
Gary Cooper, all in the next scene, she’s nobody but Dietrich (unless
she’s Sternberg). Nowhere this side of female impersonation has such
evident pleasure been taken in the artifice of womanhood: playing an
errant spy in their next film, “Dishonored,” set in the Vienna of the
First World War, she refreshes her lipstick and straightens a stocking
while awaiting a firing squad. Veils, lace, feathers, and furs make her
almost as elaborate a construct as the teeming Chinese railroad station
that was created for the opening of “Shanghai Express”—their best film
together. Both “Morocco” and “Shanghai Express” were hits in Germany,
and a Nazi ban on the spies and traitors of “Dishonored,” in January,
1932, was again without effect, since the Party was still a year from
power. But, in a new turn, the film’s Berlin première was disrupted by a
band of belligerents, whom an informant of Dietrich’s perhaps too
casually dismissed as “rowdies.”
A
month later, Riefenstahl experienced her second epiphany, in a stadium
packed with cheering rowdies at a Hitler rally in Berlin. She seems to
have been as inspired to become part of Hitler’s enterprise as she had
been with Fanck and his mountain films, and the possibilities for
advancement now were much greater. She had recently directed a film of
her own, “The Blue Light,” which brought into the open the mysticism of
the mountain genre: Riefenstahl played an otherworldly girl, spiritually
tied to the beauty of a crystal-lined cave on a mountaintop, who dies
when greedy villagers hack out the crystal. Riefenstahl had surely not
intended the political intimations later discerned in the film. But,
according to Harry Sokal, who left Germany in 1933, the negative reviews
by several Berlin critics, some or all of whom were Jews, prompted an
outpouring of anti-Semitism from the outraged director, who at about
this time, with notable obtuseness, urged Sokal to read “Mein Kampf.”
Riefenstahl
met Hitler shortly after the Berlin rally, when an admiring letter she
sent brought a surprisingly quick response. She was soon appearing in
the Goebbelses’ opera box, or dancing at a soirée at their home,
charming everyone at the sort of social events that she was able to
disavow until Goebbels’s diaries were discovered, in 1992. (June 12,
1933: “She is the only one of all the stars who understands us.”) There
were widespread rumors of an affair with Hitler, evidently false. But
Hitler believed so firmly in her artistry that he contracted her to film
the Party rally in the summer of 1933. “Victory of Faith” was well
received as propaganda, but it was a rush job, carried out with modest
means. Riefenstahl assured him that she could do better. When he
entrusted her with the much bigger rally to be held the following year,
he demanded only that she render it “artistically meaningful.”
“Triumph
of the Will” met the demands of the man who commissioned and financed
it. Sixteen cameramen with sixteen assistants, nine aerial
photographers, a sound crew, a lighting crew, drivers, guards: some
hundred and seventy men reported to a director who had become the most
important woman and the most important artist in the Reich. Plans for
the six-day rally, which brought more than half a million people into
the medieval city of Nuremberg, were made side by side with plans for
the film. Albert Speer, the “chief decorator” of the event, was
responsible for the visual drama: the obliterating seas of flags, the
towering eagle behind the speakers’ platform, the “cathedral of light”
made up of anti-aircraft searchlights beaming upward in Valhallan
splendor. And all of it not only captured by Riefenstahl’s cameras but
magnified and mythologized, so that the film itself has become a part of
the history it documents.
It
begins amid the clouds, from whence the Führer descends in his plane to
spread joy among his people and to oversee a furiously rehearsed Nazi
machine. Cranking up the sort of ingenuity she’d learned from Fanck, who
mounted cameras on downhill skiers, Riefenstahl set her cameras gliding
along tracks, soaring high in a specially built elevator, whizzing
along with a crew on roller skates: every scene is in motion. Speeches
by Party leaders were reduced to a few pithy lines (Julius Streicher: “A
nation that does not protect its racial purity will perish!”) and
reshot when necessary on a studio set. Hitler, in countless closeups, is
viewed worshipfully from below, his face against the sky, his every
word provoking an electric response. This is the leader, still
consolidating power, whom the German people came to know. As much as any
Hollywood director, Riefenstahl turned a human being into a god and
urged a nation to fall hopelessly in love.
She
completed one more major film before the start of the war, “Olympia,” a
two-part record of the 1936 summer Olympics, in Berlin, which was used
as a showcase for the ostensibly peaceful new regime. Even more
ambitious as filmmaking, involving further innovations—powerful
telephoto lenses, underwater cameras—“Olympia” was no more a
straightforward record of events than “Triumph of the Will.” Practice
sessions were spliced in, winners replicated their feats, film segments
of the diving sequence were reversed to suggest the exhilaration of
flight: this was a tribute to human strength, striving, and beauty. The
surprisingly close attention that Riefenstahl’s cameras paid to Jesse
Owens, the African-American star of the games, was meant to assuage the
world’s fears about German policies, as were the many images of a
smiling, chatting, unprecedentedly “human” Hitler. And yet Riefenstahl’s
shots of Owens have an undeniable warmth. It’s an insoluble paradox
that she demonstrates real devotion to the achievements of both men.
The
enormous expenses of “Olympia” got Riefenstahl into funding fights with
Goebbels, leading to the rumors in the Paris papers that only slightly
marred her reception at the Exposition there in 1937. But “Olympia” was
her greatest success yet. It had its première as the climax of Hitler’s
birthday festivities, in April, 1938; Goebbels awarded her the German
Film Prize. Intended for an international audience, the film was shown
to prolonged applause through much of Europe before Riefenstahl set off
for Hollywood to obtain American distribution. She reached New York in
early November, just days before Kristallnacht, which she claimed was a
slanderous falsehood perpetrated by the American press. Arriving in
Hollywood some two weeks later, she found that no major figure except
Walt Disney was willing to see her.
Dietrich
was not in Hollywood at the time. Her last three films with Sternberg
had been commercial disasters, as exotic fantasy gave way to hysterical
extravaganza. She still believed she needed him as a director, but he
had grown sick—to judge by the films, very sick—of being needed only in
that way. There’s little love in the camera’s eye for anything but the
Byzanto-crazy sets and costumes of “The Scarlet Empress” (Dietrich as
Catherine the Great), and there’s a definite cruelty in its regard for
her in their final film, “The Devil Is a Woman”: harshly made up—her
semicircular eyebrows suggest permanent shock—and wearing a fringed
lampshade on her head, she’s a parody of the woman she used to be.
Paramount soon let her contract expire. During the late thirties, she
travelled in Europe, failed to persuade her mother and sister to leave
Germany, and made a few films that were less interesting than her list
of lovers, which included Erich Maria Remarque and the French actor Jean
Gabin. It was Gabin’s decision to join the Free French in North Africa
that made Dietrich realize she could not “let the war pass me by.” At
the end of 1943, she joined the U.S.O. and took on the greatest role of
her life.
It’s
hard to say whether her true uniform was the Eisenhower jacket, which
she made appear the height of chic, or the sequinned gowns she wore
onstage in front of the troops, singing and sometimes playing a musical
saw—a ridiculous instrument that she used to tremendous effect, hoisting
her skirt and placing it between her legs to sound a tune. She started
out in Algiers and travelled the length of Italy, following the boys,
often giving two shows a day in primitive conditions: Naples, Anzio,
Rome, eventually Belgium, and finally into Germany. She put in more time
at the front than any other performer. She sang on the radio, too,
broadcasting not only to Allied troops but behind German military lines:
her specialty was “Lili Marlene,” a soldier’s love song so sad that
Goebbels banned it as demoralizing. (Dietrich’s friend Ernest Hemingway
wrote that “if she had nothing more than her voice she could break your
heart with it.”) Shortly after V-E Day, she travelled to the camp at
Belsen, where she’d heard that her sister had been found, only to
discover that she was not a prisoner but had been helping her husband
run a movie theatre for Nazi personnel, living comfortably amid the
horror. The Americans hushed up the story to spare their tireless
warrior the headlines. Dietrich took care of her sister, quietly, for
many years, but never spoke of her again.
People
lie, and so do images. Early in the war, after witnessing a pogrom by
German soldiers, Riefenstahl backed out of a film she’d begun making
about Hitler’s victories at the Polish front. If her conscience troubled
her further, though, she hid it well: the same month, she was on the
dais at the victory celebration for the taking of Warsaw. She made no
more official Nazi films, but the inverted mountain movie that she
worked on during the war, titled “Lowlands,” was lavishly financed by
the Reich. Starting in 1948, she was put on trial four times; in the
end, she was judged to be nothing worse than a “fellow-traveller.” As
for Dietrich, no one else would have been asked to play the
Nazi-collaborating cabaret singer in “A Foreign Affair” (1948), a
Hollywood film set in bombed-out Berlin. The Vienna-reared director,
Billy Wilder—a Jew whose mother was murdered by the Nazis—confounded
every expectation by favoring Dietrich’s morally ambiguous temptress
over Jean Arthur’s shrilly all-American ingénue. Dietrich, glittering
and gorgeous, sang her darkly cynical numbers (“Want to buy some
illusions, slightly used?”) accompanied at the piano by the composer
Friedrich Hollaender, who had written the songs for “The Blue Angel,”
eighteen years earlier, shortly before he, too, fled to Hollywood. In
these two films, Dietrich embodies the bold beginning and the tragic end
of the same German story.
Dietrich’s
real-life heroism allowed her to play women who had shown none of her
moral courage and invest them with human dimension. In 1948, when the
publication of the fraudulent diaries of Eva Braun “revealed” salacious
stories about Riefenstahl, newspapers gleefully predicted “Marlene to
play Leni” in the movie version. She might have lent even this role some
sympathy. She is said to have based the exquisitely cultured and
willfully unknowing Nazi she played in “Judgment at Nuremberg,” in 1961,
on her mother.
Riefenstahl’s
redemption, beyond the military courts, was a subject of fierce argument
for the rest of her very long life—she died in 2003, a decade after
Dietrich, at the age of a hundred and one. She never saw the need to
offer an apology, and her memoirs, which appeared in Germany in 1987,
were filled with self-justifying fabrications. But the fact that the two
major films Riefenstahl made for the Nazis remain so powerful has meant
that the real argument is about art. We do not expect artists to be
heroes, but we have come to accept that the art of totalitarian regimes
is, by a kind of moral corollary, bound to be bathetic kitsch. It is
deeply unsteadying to ponder the possibility that Riefenstahl might have
been both a considerable artist and a considerable Nazi. Critics have
long pressed for resolution, one way or the other.
As
early as 1955, a group of American film directors—many of whom had
refused to see Riefenstahl when she came to Hollywood in 1938—named
“Olympia” one of the ten best films ever made, alongside “Battleship
Potemkin” and “Citizen Kane.” Just a decade after the war, one could
presumably tell the artist from the art. In 1965, Susan Sontag wrote
that both “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will” transcended “the
categories of propaganda or even reportage,” but she changed her mind
when, nine years later, her position no longer seemed a daring stand for
formal values but a dangerous commonplace, with the two films becoming
festival favorites and the director approaching the status of a pop
star.
In
1973, Riefenstahl launched a new career as a photographer, with a
lauded book of color images of the Nuba, a majestic tribe in remote
central Sudan. The subject, as far from her past as possible, supported
the increasingly widespread contention that the only constant in her
work was a devotion to physical beauty, without regard to race. Sontag,
in an essay that seems to have made Riefenstahl angrier than anything
Hitler had done, countered that the only constant in Riefenstahl’s work
was its inherent Fascism, evident precisely in this devotion to physical
beauty, among other things, and in its exclusion of human complexity.
It’s a strong argument about intention: a refusal to separate the artist
from the art. The photographs, however, remain indistinguishable in any
moral or political sense from those taken of the Nuba by George Rodger,
the English war photographer whose work inspired Riefenstahl, and whose
perspective was anything but Fascist: Rodger, accompanying the British
Army in 1945, had been among the first to photograph the corpses at
Belsen.
The
dedication to beauty had its dangers for Dietrich, too. She spent much
of the last two decades of her professional life on the concert stage
and on the move, from Paris to Las Vegas, stirring memories and breaking
hearts—she sang “Lili Marlene” again in Germany, and in Israel—and
punishing her body beyond endurance to maintain the glamour of years
past. From the late seventies, when the glamour seemed beyond recall,
she sequestered herself in her Paris apartment. Her “Judgment at
Nuremberg” co-star, Maximilian Schell, made a documentary film about her
when she was eighty-one, without being allowed to photograph her. Billy
Wilder promised that he’d blindfold himself if only she’d let him visit
her, but she declined.
One might
have expected Riefenstahl to be the isolated one, but freedom from shame
proved a great advantage. She shared her later years with a devoted
camera assistant four decades her junior. She took up scuba diving in
her seventies, and continued straight through her nineties, posing in
her bathing gear and publishing books of underwater photographs,
practically daring anyone to talk about Fascist images of fish. Yet the
old questions continued to vex her. “So what am I guilty of?” she asked
an interviewer in the final moments of a three-hour documentary about
her life, released in 1993. “I didn’t drop any atomic bombs. I didn’t
denounce anyone. So where does my guilt lie?”
Near
the end of “Judgment at Nuremberg,” Dietrich, the widow of a convicted
Nazi general, waits expectantly for the verdict in the American military
trial of four German judges. Like her husband, these men were not
blatant monsters but influential figures who went along with the
monstrous plans. The movie, directed by Stanley Kramer, is a document of
its time: the late fifties, when people were just beginning to come to
terms with the Holocaust. One of the trial scenes contained actual
footage from the liberation of the camps, the first such images that
many people had seen. Dietrich’s role—written with her in mind—is the
aggrieved persona of German innocence. “Do you think we knew of those
things?” she asks the American judge, offended in her dignity. “We did
not know. We did not know.” The verdict, nevertheless, is
guilty. In the aftermath, the judge calls her to say goodbye, and
Dietrich has one of her finest moments, with no lines to say at all:
there is just her magnificent face, half in shadow, suddenly aged and
blanched of life, as she sits silently and lets the telephone ring. ♦
