Two decades after her death, the German director Leni Riefenstahl occupies an uneasy place in film history. She directed two influential movies that are still studied for their aesthetic ambitions despite being propaganda for the Third Reich: “Triumph of the Will,” a visually striking film about the Nazi party’s 1934 rally in Nuremberg, and “Olympia,” about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
After World War II, she was declared a Nazi follower, after four denazification proceedings. Later, Riefenstahl tried to recast herself as an apolitical artist. New access to the estate of the director, who died in 2003 at 101, has prompted a debate in Germany about how to manage her political legacy — and about whether her postwar rehabilitation was based on false premises.
Last week, “Riefenstahl,” a documentary by the filmmaker Andres Veiel that uses recordings and letters from the estate to argue she had willfully concealed her support for Nazism, was released in German cinemas. And at a symposium in Berlin last month, researchers presented the results of a yearslong project investigating the impact of Riefenstahl’s photography of the Nuba people in Sudan.
In a video interview, Veiel said that renewed scrutiny of Riefenstahl was justified by findings in her estate, which was donated in 2018 to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin and comprises 700 boxes filled with film rolls, photographs and audio recordings, among other items.
The material “contradicts the basic perspective, her legend, that she had sold to the outside world,” he said. “Even in her old age, she believed in Nazi ideology.”
In a phone recording included in the film, Riefenstahl seems to agree with an anonymous caller that Germany should “return” to the “morality” of earlier times — an apparent reference to the Nazi era. “The Germans have the predisposition for that,” Riefenstahl answers.
The film also includes a letter from a soldier that appears to contradict Riefenstahl’s claim that she remained unaware of Nazi atrocities against Jews during the war. According to the note, Riefenstahl inadvertently caused the killing of 22 Jews in 1939 when she asked soldiers to remove them from the background of a scene she was filming in Poland after Germany’s invasion.
Although Riefenstahl initially said after the war that she had witnessed the massacre in Poland, she later denied seeing it. “She had a very big repertoire of ways of imposing her version of the story,” Veiel said. The film includes clips of her throwing tantrums or becoming emotional during interviews, which Veiel describes as a manipulation tactic. “The greater the guilt, the greater the need to repress it,” he said.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August and has been well received by critics in Germany. (Kino Lorber snapped up American rights, with plans to release it in the United States next September.) The newspaper Die Zeit praised Veiel’s “flair for the unassuming” and the public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk called it “a meticulous and fascinating piece of archival work.”
But in an interview, Karin Wieland, the author of “Dietrich & Riefenstahl,” a widely praised book about the filmmaker, argued that the film oversimplified Riefenstahl’s relationship to Nazism. “She always said she loved Hitler,” Wieland said, but added that Riefenstahl’s passion did not extend to Nazism, pointing to her lack of membership in the Nazi Party. (Other scholars have argued that Riefenstahl’s lack of membership was of little significance, given her proximity to Hitler’s inner circle.) Despite the film’s formal strengths, Wieland said it was “intellectually lazy” and did not delve thoroughly enough into Riefenstahl’s identity as a woman and artist in a male-dominated society.
Riefenstahl’s reductive photography of the Nuba in Sudan is also being re-examined. Her books, “The Last of the Nuba” and “The People of Kau,” featured stylized photographs of its subjects, often in the nude. In her landmark 1975 essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag described the photos as “the fascist version of the old idea of the Noble Savage.”
After obtaining the estate, researchers affiliated with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation started a project with Nuba representatives to gain their insights into the work. “This is a historically burdened estate,” Paola Ivanov, a curator of the African collection at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and a head of the project, said in an interview. “We need to make it possible to engage with it in new ways.”
As part of the project, the researchers organized a temporary exhibition of Riefenstahl’s photographs in Uganda in 2023, the first such showing in Africa. In some cases, academics were able to locate the photo subjects and ask them to sign release forms. In October, the Nuba were also given digital copies and scholarly rights to the photographs.
The Nuba have been long the subject of violence and oppression, and the project has been complicated by the outbreak of the civil war in Sudan last year, which has killed up to 150,000 people and displaced many Nuba from their homes.
In a video interview, Shamsoun Khamis Kafi Tiyah, the chairman of the Pan-Nuba Council, a group dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage the Nuba, said he had not been aware of Riefenstahl’s connection to Hitler before being contacted about the project. Regardless, he said the council hoped to establish a cultural center in Sudan exhibiting her images, which he saw as important documentation of his culture. “We can learn a lot from these photos,” he said.
He added that some Nuba groups wanted compensation from Germany in the form of aid, given that Riefenstahl had made money off their likeness without their permission. (In a statement, a spokeswoman for Claudia Roth, the minister of state for culture and the media, wrote that the ministry has not received any formal requests.)
Ivanov, the curator, said that she hoped access to Riefenstahl’s estate would prompt further research, including into Riefenstahl’s exploitive treatment of Sinti and Roma people, and broader reflection among the German public about how to engage with the troubling aspects of her work.
Despite her complexities, Wieland, the author, cautioned that anyone who has spent time researching Riefenstahl “knows they shouldn’t have any illusions about her.” The filmmaker, she said, “has qualities that make her unbearable.”
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