Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives

by Wieland, Karin

  While Riefenstahl was having one nervous breakdown after another in Spain as a result of countless delays in filming, Ruttmann traveled through Germany with Sepp Allgeier. The Film-Kurier introduced Ruttman as the scriptwriter for the party rally film who worked with Riefenstahl on the artistic presentation. He filmed German landscapes, workers, peasants, SA men, and labor service men, as well as the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, the Landsberg Prison in Bavaria, and a memorial to Albert Leo Schlageter, a hero to the Nazis who had been executed in 1923. Ruttman envisioned movement and “productive people” as the foreground of the movie—not Hitler.

  When Riefenstahl had a look at his footage in Berlin, she was shocked. “What I saw on the screen was, to put it mildly, unusable. It was a jumble of shots of newspapers fluttering along the street, their front pages tracing the rise of the Nazi Party. How could Ruttmann present work like this! I was absolutely miserable.”44 She decided to dispense with him and the footage he had shot. Now she supposedly had no choice but to bite the bullet and make the movie herself.45 Ruttmann switched over to the Ufa commercial division, and Riefenstahl would go down in history as the creator of the second party congress film, as she had intended all along.46

  Enterprising as ever, she wrote a book about the making of the film. Behind the Scenes of the Reich Party Rally Film was published in December 1935 by Eher-Verlag in Munich, the central publishing company of the NSDAP. After 1945, she claimed that Ernst Jäger had written it and that she had not even read it in advance of the filming, which does not sound credible coming from a woman with her control mania and business acumen.47 She names Sepp Allgeier as the head cameraman; Walter Ruttmann is not mentioned at all.

  Before the shooting began, she was a bundle of nerves. “Discussed party congress film with L. Riefenstahl,” Goebbels noted disapprovingly in his diary on August 28, 1934. “This will not amount to much. She is too tense.” However, her tension must have subsided by the time she arrived in Nuremberg. Riefenstahl relaxed in the circle of her crew, which included many people she had worked with before. Guzzi and Otto Lantschner and Walter Prager were signed on as her assistant directors, and Sepp Allgeier, Walter Frentz, Franz Weihmayr, and Walter Riml as her cameramen. Hans Schneeberger’s wife, Gisela, would be in charge of the publicity stills. One week before the party congress opened, Riefenstahl and her key crew members traveled to Nuremberg. She wanted to personally oversee the preparations for this film, which would “convey a stylized reality in documentary form for centuries to come.”48 Extensive arrangements were required. She spent several days roaming through the city in her long white coat with her aides, examining, approving, or rejecting camera positions. She knew the strengths and weaknesses of her men; she divided up and assigned the tasks. “One is good at pictorial images, another at exhilarating motion. One can capture inner life on film, another sees only the outer forms. Many different capacities have to be allotted appropriately.”49 Allgeier, the lead cameraman, was quick on his feet, a wizard of lighting, an athletic ski jumper, and tough as nails.50 Allgeier and his colleagues clung to monuments, gables, façades of houses, church steeples, or fire escapes to shoot this film. Lifts were installed on statues and flagpoles, and in one building, a twenty-meter-long track was installed on the second floor so that a dolly could travel back and forth with a camera capturing the marching troops on film.

  The crew stayed at a villa on Schlageterplatz.

  Within 24 hours, this house, which had previously been vacant, was newly furnished throughout, and then Leni Riefenstahl could move in with her large staff. The mezzanine had a big reception room and several offices, and upstairs, on the second floor, there was a big conference room, which was also used as a breakfast room. The other rooms served as quarters for Leni Riefenstahl’s entire technical team, including cameramen, assistant cameramen, sound engineers, lighting technicians, and so forth, for a total of about 120 men. All of them had to sleep here for the duration of the party rally so that they would be on call at all times.51

  Makeshift darkrooms were set up in the cellar. Riefenstahl had a telephone switchboard, office and work rooms, and a conference hall. Eight to ten men slept in each room. Riefenstahl was familiar with this kind of camp life from her work on mountains.

  The members of the film crew dressed as SA men so that they would fit into the picture. Perfectly camouflaged, they could operate within in the crowd. Riefenstahl herself wanted to remain recognizable. Wearing a trench coat–style elegant white coat with a white peaked cap, she could be made out even in all the hubbub. In the published photographs of the filming process, she assumed multiple roles. In one, she had a motherly chat with a Hitler Youth member; in another, she lay on the pavement with her cameramen to try out different camera angles. In yet another photograph, she is sitting among her cameramen, looking regal in a ladylike white outfit complete with white hat and white gloves. She is not wearing a party badge, but she is clearly in a key position.

  Even today, Riefenstahl’s films foster the illusion that these party congresses were highly disciplined events riding on a wave of enthusiasm. This was decidedly not the case.52 In 1934, half a million people were expected in Nuremberg. The political leaders, who numbered 180,000, were the largest group. The rest comprised 88,000 SA men, 12,000 SS men, 60,000 Hitler Youth, 50,000 Labor Service men, 120,000 party members, and 9,000 SS functionaries and special police.53 Nuremberg’s 400,000 residents had to cope with the onslaught of hundreds of thousands of people, which also included spectators who often came in for just a day. In order to portray the Volksgemeinschaft and cover the immense costs of all the fanfare, there needed to be a large turnout of paying participants and spectators. The men who marched in Triumph of the Will had paid a rally fee, and those cheering them on from the sidelines had bought admission tickets.54 The status reports of the Nuremberg vice squad indicate what sorts of entertainment the participants sought out after the rally. One hundred SS men were assigned to keeping their fellow party members from heading to brothels. Their efforts were likely in vain. The number of prostitutes was rising every year, a great deal of alcohol was consumed, and drunken political leaders staggering down the street were now part of the urban landscape. Albert Speer reported that even the party elites who were privileged to sleep under the same roof as their Führer in the Hotel Deutscher Hof carried on like this. The gauleiter went on drunken rampages. As Speer saw it, “only in alcohol could these fellows resurrect their old revolutionary élan.”55 Hitler did not need to worry about Riefenstahl and Speer, however. His architect went to every Wagner opera, and his director devoted her efforts to portraying him and his party rally exactly as he wished.

  There were daily briefings in the villa. Every evening at about nine o’clock, Riefenstahl climbed onto a chair, called the group to order with a bottle of beer, and shouted: “The gentlemen whose names I now announce have to be ready to leave at 6:30.”56 Each cameraman was assigned the use of a car. White and red slips of paper on the car windows indicated to the security forces that these vehicles had clearance to enter the grounds. The management directed the vehicles to the cameramen’s locations. These sessions often ran until two in the morning. Breakfast was served in the dark at 5 a.m. Military order prevailed in the villa. On a huge chalkboard, the boss noted down the final instructions for her crew. During the day, the cameramen were on their own. No retakes were possible; the shots needed to be perfect the first time around. The hunt for images was carried out on the streets and from an airplane.

  “On September 5, 1934, 20 years after the outbreak of the World War, 16 years after Germany’s Suffering, 19 months after the beginning of the German Rebirth, Adolf Hitler again flew to Nuremberg to review the assembly of his faithful followers.” This opening crawl is all that remains of Ruttmann’s prologue. The film begins above the clouds with an airplane approaching the city of Nuremberg. The shadow of the fuselage glides over the medieval walls of the city. The viewer cannot see who is in the airplane, but it can only be Hitler. T
his opening scene is remarkable because the images formed by the clouds evoke not only an enormous realm of fantasy as defined by the history of Western imagery, but also recent German history. The World War I combat pilots ranked among the unforgotten heroes of the Germans. All alone in the skies, their sole mission was to kill the enemy. As they fired, they were like gods bringing death to the people below.

  Hitler’s arrival is eagerly awaited. Riefenstahl shows us crowds going wild at the sight of him, in much the same way as she had in Victory of Faith. Even before a single word is uttered, we hear the roar of Heils. In Riefenstahl’s films, the crowds remain mute apart from formulaic acclamations. Standing in an open Mercedes, Hitler celebrates his entry into the medieval city. The fixed black formation of the SS men shields him from any intrusiveness from the crowd. The camera casts what seems like a loving eye on every detail lingering almost tenderly on boots, belts, black uniforms, and helmets. Hitler is tacitly present throughout the film, as sequences shot from multiple perspectives and with a movable camera convey the impression that everyone in Nuremberg is constantly on the lookout for a glimpse of the Führer.

  On the rally’s opening day, Riefenstahl shows the men awakening in their tents. A merry chaos ensues. Young men splash water at one another, wash their backs, line up to get their food, and roughhouse. These scenes of exuberant masculinity make it perfectly clear that Hitler and Riefenstahl needed the collective energies of hundreds of thousands to create the image they were after. Rudolf Hess opened the party congress, directing his special greetings to the foreign diplomats, who had turned out in large numbers, and to the men of the Reichswehr. Riefenstahl edited the subsequent speeches by the leading party members to ensure that each one appeared briefly on the screen. To limit the amount of time spent on speeches, she included footage of each speaker with a statement she regarded as typical for him. Even her artistry could do nothing to improve the puffy, vacuous, disagreeable, sweaty, and unsightly faces of these men. During the labor service roll call on the rally grounds, she highlighted a series of clear, proud, fanatical faces that were welcomed by their various regions with the question, “Comrade, where do you come from?” Riefenstahl’s men had installed wooden tracks on the field on which they now rode back and forth to get direct shots of people’s heads. Hitler greeted the men in the labor service who were taking part in a party rally for the first time. To William Shirer, they seemed like a “highly trained, semi-military group of fanatical Nazi youths.”57 Their roll call was followed by a commemoration of the casualties in World War I, during which Riefenstahl displayed Hitler’s face against the sky.

  The atmosphere at the evening SA gathering is almost eerie, with open fires burning, swastika banners fluttering, and smoke rising. The men are heard singing. The new SA chief of staff, Viktor Lutze, disrupts this elaborately staged setting when he begins to speak in his shrill voice. The crowd starts shouting: “We want to see our chief of staff!” In these scenes, Riefenstahl was making a direct reference to recent history. This evening assembly is the only part of the film that is not listed in the official program. Going into this much detail was the director’s decision. She presented Lutze, Röhm’s successor, as a popular, well-respected chief of staff. Long shots of fireworks symbolize the explosion of the SA men’s feelings, followed by images of interlocked male bodies seeking physical closeness to their chief of staff.

  The next day, Baldur von Schirach reports to his Führer that sixty thousand Hitler Youth have arrived. He calls on them to endure sacrifices and steel themselves. While he speaks, the camera scans the rows of the listeners. These cross-cutting sequences were one of Riefenstahl’s key stylistic devices to show Hitler in constant interaction with his audience. “The Hitler Youths are generally filmed at a different time in a different place—but the editing sequence suggests that they are hanging on to the ‘Führer’ ’s every word. The technique of contriving fictitious encounters on the editing table is both simple and effective.”58 Riefenstahl shows us handsome, sincere-looking faces of young men that her cameramen culled with telephoto lenses.

  Aside from the black bronze eagle on the speakers’ platform, three large swastika flags hoisted on steel poles over a hundred feet high are the only decoration at the tribute to the dead in the Luitpoldarena. Hitler strides down the center aisle through the line of the 120,000 men, followed by Himmler and Lutze. They are the only ones in motion; the masses are frozen in place. In these scenes, the lift mounted on the flagpole is visible. Nobody besides Riefenstahl and the men she appointed have access to this aerial view. Hitler enters the atrium of the memorial, pauses in front of the wreath and the “blood flag” from the failed 1923 putsch, and honors the casualties of the Nazi movement and the war.59 Mussolini had figured out how to use the casualties of world war as his political capital. The “aristocracy of the trenches,” the dead and the living, were united in comradeship. The fascists would ensure that their comrades had not died in vain. Mussolini had hit a nerve with this ploy more than a decade earlier, and now Hitler was copying it, with Riefenstahl supplying the requisite images. The death ritual at the party rally was not backward-looking, however, but rather future-oriented. Hitler would demand proof of loyalty to the death from the men lined up there.

  Then all the marching began. A never-ending stream of male bodies poured through the narrow streets of Nuremberg like molten lava. SA, SS, the Stahlhelm paramilitary organization, and the labor service men filed past Hitler. One of his secretaries found out how he managed to keep his arm outstretched for hours at a time: “At teatime one day, he said . . . that daily exercises with an expander enabled him to accomplish this, but that a strong will was needed as well. He added that he tried to look at every man who marched past in the eye to give him the feeling that he was singling him out.”60 Riefenstahl’s shots reflect this attentiveness. Hitler saw the individuals only as a part of a series, but for each of these men, this parade signified a very personal recognition as a National Socialist.

  In Triumph of the Will, the words of their Führer seem to be inscribed on the men’s bodies. The masses are either feverishly active or rooted to the spot, reminiscent of the characters in Riefenstahl’s mountain films, with some intrepid climbers scaling the cliffs and others winding up as frozen bodies in the ice. Hitler captured the masses with his gaze and his words, Riefenstahl with her cinematic direction and montage. After 1945 Riefenstahl categorized Triumph of the Will as a documentary, but prior to that time, she called it an “artistically constructed film” in order to distinguish it from mere newsreels.

  She and her crew needed two weeks to sift through the footage at her film laboratory, Geyer, in the Neukölln section of Berlin. One workroom was adorned with a larger-than-life portrait of Hitler, and the vestibule displayed pictures of NSDAP leaders. She had the latest technology at her fingertips. According to Steven Bach, no director in Germany—and perhaps anywhere in the world—had ever enjoyed these kinds of working conditions.61 However, she kept falling into a state of exhaustion and being assailed by doubts.

  For Riefenstahl, art and utter devotion, both mental and physical, went hand in hand. In 1934, she strove to be better than in 1933. If this film won over the top brass, a place at the top would be hers. On October 17, 1934, Goebbels noted in his diary, “Leni Riefenstahl talks about the party rally film. It will be good.” In the fall, she visited Hitler at his mountainside retreat in Obersalzberg to fill him in on the progress of her work. In December he came in person to visit the cutting room, which indicated to the Germans that she was still in his good graces.

  Quite a bit had changed since the 1933 party rally. On October 14, 1933, Hitler had proclaimed that Germany would be pulling out of the League of Nations, which was tantamount to pulling out of the league of civilized countries. Abroad, the word “war” came up more and more frequently in connection with Germany. The photographs Erich Salomon took of the conferences of European politicians in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Geneva, London, and Paris
show well-dressed men sitting together in beautifully appointed salons and deliberating the state of the world. There is no hint of the fanatical pathos that the National Socialists brought into politics. The Germans, by contrast, considered it a sign of national strength for their chancellor to show up in his bizarre swastika uniform.

  Triumph of the Will was conceived of as a lasting document, and it certainly became one. Riefenstahl’s images continue to have a powerful impact to this day. Excerpts and stills from Triumph of the Will are shown again and again to illustrate the relationship between Hitler and the Germans. No distinction is drawn between intention and impact: the film conveys the National Socialist experience. Riefenstahl documented Hitler’s wish as reality. Her film displayed the body of the masses. These masses then see themselves onscreen as a powerful historical force. In this sense, the films of Riefenstahl are an important part of a self-referential system that is still evident today. In Triumph of the Will, a single individual—Adolf Hitler—stands apart from all the others. He alone enjoyed the privilege of not mingling in the social sphere. Riefenstahl molded these images of the great loner into the enduring images of Hitler.

  On November 22, 1934, she showed the first segments of her film. Goebbels wrote in his diary, “Afternoon with Leni Riefenstahl; splendid shots of the party rally film. Leni is quite adept. Imagine if she were a man!” And five months later, he remarked, “Afternoon Nuremberg film. A magnificent show. Somewhat long-winded only in the last part. But otherwise a stirring display. Leni’s masterpiece.” Two days later, she met with Goebbels again and talked about the film. Her appearance must have alarmed him, because he noted, “She simply has to take a vacation.”