The German Way: Life in Austria, Germany, Switzerland

German-Hollywood Connection > LENI RIEFENSTAHL > PART 2 > FILMS

Hitler’s Favorite Director

“They kept asking me over and over again whether
I was having a romance with Hitler. ‘Are you Hitler’s
girlfriend?’ I laughed and answered the same way each
time: ‘No, those are false rumors. I only made documentaries for him...”

  — Leni Riefenstahl, about her 1938 US tour, in A Memoir
 

She was Hitler’s favorite director. She was beautiful and talented. She was a woman in a man’s field. Three strikes and you’re out.

Riefenstahl scuba diving
Leni Riefenstahl on an underwater photo expedition in the 1980s.
Photo courtesy Robert von Dassanowsky

Leni Riefenstahl (REEF-en-shtal) was never able to shed the historical contamination that attached to her during the last half of her 101 years. Despite (some say because of) her demonstrated talent as actor, dancer, director, cinematographer, and still photographer, Riefenstahl could not shake off her Third Reich associations. Although her films have had enormous impact on world cinema and even television sports coverage, the woman herself found it difficult to gain public respect. Her attempt to revive her directorial career in the 1950s proved futile. The often-imitated, seldom-honored artist remained a controversial and unrepentant pariah up until her death on 8 September 2003. Ironically, her own well-crafted black-and-white motion-picture images of Hitler, Nazi pageantry, and the Jesse Owens Olympics helped keep both her genius and her past alive. In the words of Ray Müller, director of the documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, “Her talent was her tragedy.”

Riefenstahl and Himmler
Leni Riefenstahl with Heinrich Himmler (left) at the Luitpold Arena in Nuremberg during the filming of Triumph des Willens in 1934. PHOTO: Bundesarchiv

Riefenstahl’s story begins in the Wedding district of Berlin, near the start of the twentieth century. Her father, Alfred Riefenstahl, was a prosperous businessman dealing in heating and ventilation. Her mother, Bertha Sherlach, had been a part-time seamstress before she married. Their first child, Helene (Leni) Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl, was born on August 22, 1902 in the family’s apartment on Prinz-Eugen-Straße in Berlin. Leni’s younger brother, Heinz, was born three and a half years later. He would later die in Hitler’s war at age 38 on the Russian front.

“Mountain of Destiny”
Young Leni grew up in Berlin and lived at home until she was 21. Against the wishes of her father, she studied dance and was soon performing in Munich, Berlin, and Prague. But according to her memoirs, the course of her life was changed dramatically one day as she was waiting for a subway train at the Nollendorfplatz station in Berlin.

In a daze, thinking about the whirlwind of her dance appearances over the last six months, Riefenstahl could feel the pain in her injured knee that was threatening to end her dancing career in its early stages. She was on her way to yet another doctor, trying to find one who could finally put her back on her dancing feet. Her gaze happened to fall upon an advertising poster on the wall opposite the platform. Suddenly the image of a man climbing a jagged mountain came into focus. The colorful poster was promoting a movie with prophetic name Berg des Schicksals (“Mountain of Destiny”). Its letters further spelled out the words: “Ein Film aus den Dolomiten von Dr. Arnold Fanck” (“A film from the Dolomites by Dr. Arnold Fanck”). The picture was currently playing at a nearby cinema.

Frau im Mond
A Portrait of Leni-Riefenstahl by Audrey Salkeld. Buy this book
Riefenstahl stood in a trance, staring ahead blankly as her train came into the station and departed without her. Instead of going to the doctor, she left the station and soon found herself in a completely different world watching vivid, lifelike images of majestic mountains. Dr. Fanck’s Berg des Schicksals held her so much in its spell that the young woman returned for repeat viewings every night for a week. It was the beginning of her own mountain film destiny and a new career as both film actress and director.

Amazingly, Riefenstahl got her first acting role in the film, Der heilige Berg (“written for the dancer Leni Riefenstahl”), directed by Dr. Arnold Fanck, only 18 months after that fateful day at the Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station. Within weeks of seeing Fanck’s Mountain of Destiny she had happened to meet the director himself in Berlin. Following a successful operation on her knee, Riefenstahl met with Fanck at his home in Freiburg near the Black Forest. Soon she would be appearing in movies directed by Fanck and co-starring Luis Trenker. Her dream was coming true, but the day would come when she regretted having ever met either of these two men.

After appearing in several films, Riefenstahl turned to directing—remarkable for a field so dominated by men, then as now. An admirer by the name of Adolf Hitler asked her to film a documentary of his Nazi party’s rally in Nuremberg, and the rest is indeed history.

Following her success with Triumph des Willens, in 1936 Riefenstahl was put in charge of filming the Berlin Olympics, a project that was no minor undertaking. For Olympia she had to manage a total crew of 60 cinematographers, who used three different types of black-and-white film stock—Agfa (architectural shots), Kodak (portraits), and Perutz (fields, grass)—to shoot over 1.3 million feet of film (400,000 meters, over 248 miles). In the process, Riefenstahl invented or enhanced many of the sports photography techniques we now take for granted: slow motion, underwater diving shots, extremely high (from cranes/towers) and low shooting angles (from pits), panoramic aerial shots, and tracking systems for following fast action. The editing alone took her a year and a half to complete. The result is considered a classic cinematic masterpiece. The four-hour long (two-part) epic Olympia premiered at Berlin’s UFA Palast am Zoo cinema on Hitler’s birthday, April 20, 1938.

Next > Riefenstahl visits the United States...

NEXT > Riefenstahl - Part 2

MORE > Riefenstahl Filmography

MORE > German-Hollywood Connections

Riefenstahl in Print

Riefenstahl on DVD

Riefenstahl On the Web

Related German Way Pages

MORE > German-Hollywood Connections
Find a famous person poster!
Search:

Original Web content ©1997-2012 Hyde Flippo | Graphic design by Erik Flippo www.erikflippo.com
Hyde Flippo is solely responsible for the content of this site and, other than permission granted to publish copyrighted material, McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Publishing has no direct involvement, financial or otherwise, with this site. When in Germany, Do As the Germans ©2002 McGraw-Hill; The German Way ©1999 McGraw-Hill/Passport Books. All rights reserved | Site Map | Privacy Policy | Advertise with us!