Survival, but Not Triumph

Little wonder that Leni Riefenstahl finds solace nowadays in the silent world of deep-sea diving, where neither public reproach nor pangs of conscience intrude.

On terra firma, the last living confidant of Adolf Hitler cannot escape accusations that her genius cinematography helped whip Germans into a nationalistic frenzy in the years before World War II.

Only deep under the sea, from the Maldives to the South Pacific, can the soon-to-be centenarian pursue her photographic art unhindered by persistent claims that she knew--or should have known--she was propagating evil.

But even with the benefit of hindsight on the Holocaust, Riefenstahl says she regrets her association with Hitler only because it stunted her filmmaking career and besmirched her reputation.

Although her propaganda masterpiece, “Triumph of the Will,” propelled Hitler to godlike stature in Germany, she has continued to insist throughout her extraordinarily long lifetime that her role in the Third Reich’s deadly rampage was purely artistic.

“Altogether I only worked with him for six days, as that is how long the party congress lasted,” Riefenstahl says of the 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg that was the subject of her notorious documentary film and the scene of Hitler’s first ominous fanning of the flames of racial hatred.

“It’s often said of me that I was a friend of the Nazis, but that cannot be justly maintained. I was neither a member of any political party nor ever expressly sympathetic,” Riefenstahl said in an interview at her two-story wooden home that is more museum than mere shelter in this quiet Bavarian village. “I was completely neutral.”

Born to a successful Berlin businessman who indulged her desire to study art, Riefenstahl soared to early success in each of the careers she pursued, from modern dance to silent movies to directing by the time she was 30. But the war years were her undoing, from the collaboration with Hitler to the years of detention and interrogation by the victorious Allies.

Married only once, and briefly at that, she had no children and long ago outlived the last of her relatives. While she sees professional associates involved in publishing her books and photographs as friends, she mostly escapes fellow Germans’ cold shoulder by delving into editing work to pass days now filled with pain or dulled by medication.

Destined to take whatever secrets she harbors to her grave, the erstwhile beauty who turns 100 on Aug. 22 sees her life as unbowed perseverance through jealousy and injustice.

“I haven’t had an easy life, but that is natural for someone who was very admired and famous and then falls into a crisis,” Riefenstahl said. “All this happened to me because I lived in a time that also gave the world Hitler.”

Those who accuse her of collusion with the original axis of evil have misjudged her, she insisted, but they will never defeat her.

“I’m a very positive person. I dispose of negative things as soon as possible, putting them behind me so I can focus on the positive,” she said, exuding the mind-over-matter confidence she has embraced for decades. “The positive gives you strength, whereas the negative makes you sad, and I have absolutely no desire to feel sadness.”

She admits to occasional bouts of depression as age and infirmity make inroads into her entrenched sense of well-being. “But I always overcome them. They always go away,” she said, resentful nevertheless of the medication she must take for persistent back and hip pain.

Remarkably fit and lucid for her years, tastefully dressed and with artfully applied makeup, Riefenstahl still clings to the reflected limelight from her days with Hitler even though she disowns him. She proudly shows visitors this month’s issue of Vogue magazine, in which an 18-page spread includes images of her working with the dictator, and the 1938 cover of Time magazine, on which she is featured as “Hitler’s Leni Riefenstahl.”

In dozens of yellow loose-leaf binders, she has cataloged every major review, article and editorial to give her mention since her 1923 debut as a ballet dancer, including acclaim for “Triumph of the Will,” one of cinema’s first attempts to project military might through mass marches and impassioned addresses.

Although Riefenstahl had acquired broad acclaim before World War II with “Triumph” and the artistically brilliant documentary on the 1936 Olympics, “Olympia,” Hollywood filmmakers who dominated the postwar movie industry shunned her.

“I always admitted that, yes, in the beginning I was fascinated by Hitler,” she asserted in her 1987 autobiography, “A Memoir.” “I never denied that. But I had no idea what Hitler was doing.”

“Triumph” portrayed Germany as an inspired and invincible nation and Hitler as a messianic figure leading adoring citizens to their rightful place as a world power. It is considered to this day an unparalleled propaganda masterpiece.

Riefenstahl attracted even broader accolades with “Olympia.” Her innovative camera work and artistic presentation of the human body at the peak of performance during the Summer Games in Berlin established her as a trailblazer in sports photography techniques now taken for granted, such as slow motion, zooming and mobile filming. Riefenstahl deployed 60 cameramen on roller skates, rail-mounted platforms, riverboats and hot-air balloons, in towers and pits and atop flagpoles to present the athletes from unprecedented angles.

The images of physical perfection, often presented with only cloud-dappled sky as background, were reminiscent of Greek statuary--a deliberate and artistic embrace of the Games’ origin.

Some of the more stunning images from “Olympia” were made into photographs and sold by the ostracized artist to keep herself financially afloat during the lean years after Germany’s wartime defeat.

Freed from Allied detention or house arrest seven years after the war ended, Riefenstahl managed to direct one last film begun in wartime before she was driven from the industry. A skilled career chameleon, she then spent years photographing the Nuba tribes of Sudan, living in self-imposed exile among people with no interest in her past.

Riefenstahl waved off as “rumors and lies” the many contradicting accounts of her life and association with Hitler’s inner circle. She has no time to read disturbing reports, she said, including a just-released biography by historian Juergen Trimborn, who presents compelling new evidence that the filmmaker knew more about early Nazi atrocities than she has acknowledged.

While filming German troops in occupied Poland in 1939, she witnessed a massacre of Polish Jews, Trimborn contends in “Riefenstahl: A German Career.” He also provides documentation of accusations she has long denied that she used prisoners from concentration camps as extras for her film “Lowland,” about a gypsy dancer, played by herself, who is seduced by an evil but powerful aristocrat--a story that some postwar critics contended was an allegorical rejection of Hitler.

Another account of Riefenstahl’s life that will hardly be to her liking looms in a biopic being made by actress-director Jodie Foster, who has been in contact with her subject but has failed to secure her cooperation. Riefenstahl wants the right to censor scenes that contrast with her memoirs, in which she says she has revealed all there is to say about her history--including denial of an oft-rumored love affair with Hitler.

“My memoirs should be filmed, but that’s not what the Americans want. They want to make a film according to their own notions. They want to present their own imaginings rather than the truth,” she said, adding that she lacks the strength for legal or media protests to fight any “untruths.”

Although the consummate survivor claims to regret having met Hitler, she is far from shy about peddling pictures of them together.

Two years ago, she came out with a glossy coffee-table book chronicling her “Five Lives.” It spans her early years as a dancer, then as an actress in a series of mountain adventure films, her directorial zenith in the 1930s, then her turn to still photography among the Nuba tribes of Sudan and eventually to scuba diving.

As with all of her autobiographical presentations, “Five Lives” offers images of her work with Hitler with neither commentary nor expressed chagrin. In a visual version of name-dropping, it also includes shots of Riefenstahl with famous faces through the century: Marlene Dietrich, Gina Lollobrigida, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Siegfried & Roy.

Born Bertha Helene Amalia Riefenstahl, Leni, as she has been known throughout her lifetime, was the firstborn of a businessman and a former seamstress. Her brother and only sibling, Heinz, died on the eastern front of the war ignited by Hitler.

Riefenstahl studied classical ballet and modern dance in the early 1920s but was forced to abandon that career--her favorite, she now says--after a knee injury. She turned next to acting under the direction of Arnold Fanck in six man-humbled-by-nature films before directing one of her own, “The Blue Light,” in 1932. She won the gold medal at that year’s Venice film festival, as well as the notice of Hitler.

Riefenstahl insists that she never wanted to make “Triumph” but that she couldn’t refuse Hitler. Like most Germans of the time, she acknowledged, she was impressed by his mesmerizing powers over the masses. Still in her early 30s when she made the two documentaries that would forever taint her, Riefenstahl has also acknowledged that she was swept into the Nazi entourage by ambition.

She traveled to Hollywood in 1938 to promote “Olympia” but was snubbed by movie moguls who saw her as a Third Reich envoy. Only Walt Disney received her, and her film never found U.S. distribution.

In 1944, Riefenstahl married a German army major, Peter Jacob, then took refuge at a villa in Kitzbuehl, Austria, to escape Allied bombing. After the Nazi defeat, she was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the U.S. 7th Army, returning to Kitzbuehl only to be detained again when that Alpine resort came under French occupation.

It wasn’t until 1952, five years after her divorce from Jacob, that she was released without formal charges. Her refusal to admit culpability in elevating Hitler has always denied her entree into politically correct circles.

Still, Riefenstahl insists that respectability has come back to her with time. She staged an exhibition of her photographs at a chic Berlin gallery two years ago, drawing only scattered protests. She doesn’t point out the furor that erupted among Holocaust survivor groups in 1997, when the Cinecon club of private film buffs spirited her into Los Angeles to accept an award for lifetime achievement.

And she sees the backlog of interview requests mounting ahead of her centennial as further evidence of her overdue rehabilitation. Her daily mail, she said, is voluminous and 100% in her favor.

People, mostly journalists, visit, but her typical day begins with an hourlong walk alone through the forests around Starnberger Lake followed by 12 hours in the ground-floor studio that takes up much of her home.

To mark her milestone birthday, Riefenstahl has produced her first film in nearly half a century. “Underwater Impressions,” though less than an hour long, presents footage from some of the more than 2,000 dives she’s made around the world since taking up the sport at 72.

Talk of a festive premiere accompanied this year’s announcement of the film’s emergence. But Riefenstahl now says the work may be unsuitable for the big screen because it was made as a video and could lose its vibrant colors if converted. She has yet to secure a distributor for the video, despite having announced months ago that it would be available by her birthday.

It’s not that cinemas or producers still shun her works or fear anti-Nazi protests, she said.

“We have lots of requests, from Berlin, Munich, from all over the world,” she said, adding that it would probably be too physically demanding for her to face the attendant flurry of interviews and receptions.

Likewise, she said she will probably skip the ceremonies at an exhibition of her Nuba photographs at Los Angeles’ Fahey/Klein Gallery in September.

“All the autographs and questions--it would just be too exhausting,” she said. “The only thing worth that long a trip is diving. That is something that I can look forward to and dream about for months after.”

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Williams was recently on assignment in Poecking.