She retreated to the mountains with a man and a romantic film project. Harald Reinl, an exceptional skier with a law degree, became her coauthor and artistic assistant. Even during the war, she could afford to rent a mountain cabin near Kitzbühel to write the script for Lowlands. She cast Bernhard Minetti, Maria Koppenhöfer, Frida Richard, and Aribert Wäscher, and decided to direct the film and play its lead role as well. She wanted the world to applaud her acting skills at long last.
The weather was icy cold at the beginning of 1940. Berliners were suffering from a shortage of coal, while the number of copies of Mein Kampf was approaching six million. (Germans were also reading Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Trygve Gulbranssen’s Beyond Sing the Woods.) In the spring, the German Wehrmacht invaded Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Cold, calculating young generals ran a gigantic war machinery that handed Hitler one victory after another. On the morning of June 14, 1940, Paris fell to the Nazis, and German troops captured the city. The days and nights may have been mild, but the streets were empty. About twenty thousand uniformed Nazis were said to be in Paris. Riefenstahl, who was preparing to shoot her film, congratulated Hitler on his victory.
With indescribable joy, deeply moved, and filled with profound gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, Germany’s and your greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You are achieving deeds beyond the realm of the human imagination, deeds that are without parallel in the history of mankind; how can we thank you? Offering congratulations falls far too short in showing you the feelings that are stirring within me.
Yours, Leni Riefenstahl.25
Later, she would explain that she sent the telegram to express her joy about what appeared to be the imminent end of the war—but that is not how her message comes across.
In August, the filming of Lowlands was slated to start in Spain. Franco had won the civil war with the help of the Germans, and Riefenstahl could feel assured of the support of the Spanish authorities. However, Italy’s entry into the war thwarted her plans. Mussolini sent troops to the south of France and thus made shooting a film in Spain out of the question. Because money was no object, she promptly arranged to have her “Spanish” sets built at the foot of the Karwendel range of the Alps near the town of Mittenwald. When she arrived to inspect the sets, she realized that the buildings were too far apart and could not accommodate the camera angles she had in mind. By this point she had lost any sense of financial proportion, so she simply had the sets torn down—to the tune of half a million reichsmarks—and then rebuilt. At the same time, strict rationing regulations for food, clothing, and fuel were in effect for the general public. Riefenstahl was confident of support from the very top; she could play by different rules and use as much as she pleased. She squandered more money on Lowlands than on any of her other films. A year and a half after filming began, five million reichsmarks had already been spent. On December 16, 1942, Goebbels noted in his diary: “Leni Riefenstahl reports to me about her Lowlands movie. A whole host of complications has evolved. A total of more than five million has already been squandered, and it will take one additional year to be finished.”26 What sort of a film was this, if it neither supported the war effort nor provided comic relief?
Marquis Don Sebastian (played by Bernhard Minetti) rules over the village of Roccabruna with despotic power. He diverts the only source of water in the area to support his prized bulls and leaves the peasants without water. One day, the beautiful dancer, Marta (Riefenstahl), comes to the village and all the men go crazy for her. Don Sebastian takes her on as a lover. Marta wants to help the villagers, but the marquis refuses to allow them access to the water and hits his headstrong lover, who flees to the mountains and meets a shepherd named Pedro. To pay off his debts, the marquis marries the daughter of the rich mayor, but because he cannot let go of Marta, he marries her off to Pedro. On their wedding night, the marquis hastens to Marta and demands his right to her body. Meanwhile, she has fallen in love with the shepherd. Pedro is the virginal figure in this movie; he is chaste and naïve. The men battle it out, and just as Pedro had strangled a wolf with his hands at the beginning of the film, he strangles the marquis and frees the village from its oppressor. The lovers move to the mountains and leave the lowlands behind them.
The similarities to The Blue Light are obvious. The good people live on the mountain in freedom and in harmony with nature, while greed and avarice prevail in the lowlands. Like Junta, Marta is a Gypsy-like figure. No one knows where she comes from. Marta is a wild, irrepressible woman and a child of nature all in one. Junta and Marta are fairy-tale figures. Although Marta is on the peasants’ side, she has no ties to them. Riefenstahl, in her role as Marta, is once again an outsider with great sexual vigor. Her mode of expression is her beautiful body, which she puts on display in dance. While the men cast lewd glances at her, she is focused inward. Marta is an innocent soul, but she is not sexually innocent. Pedro and the marquis take turns carrying her off to their beds.
The characters lack any psychological depth. As always, images take precedence over words. Riefenstahl devoted all her efforts—as screenwriter, producer, director, and actress—to orchestrating a self-image she had been dreaming of all her life. She wanted to be both goddess and woman, and rule over men with her body and her artistry. Like Junta and Marta, Riefenstahl was subject to a higher power that protected and preserved her. Junta and Marta were roles with which she fully identified. In both cases, she cast herself as characters who, like herself, step outside reality.
A look at the genesis of the film and the historical circumstances under which it was produced reveals a delusional side of Riefenstahl. In the five years from 1933 to 1938, she made four films, of which two established her international fame. In the five years from 1940 to 1945, she was unable to complete Lowlands. Contrary to her own account, her failure had only peripherally to do with the war situation. As usual, she denied having been financed and supported by the National Socialists and tried to convey the impression that she had launched the project as an independent producer with Tobis as a distribution company. However, sources make it perfectly clear that this was not the case.
Since the war broke out, it had become harder for Riefenstahl to set up a meeting with Hitler. In the spring of 1941, when she was suffering from one of her bouts of severe abdominal pain, he paid her a visit and offered her the services of Dr. Morrell, his personal physician. He also chatted about the films they would work on together once the war was over. That was one of the last times they got together. There were no more teatimes in the chancellery or merry evenings over a glass of punch at the Goebbels’. With his special armored train, Hitler traveled through Germany behind closed curtains. He spent many months far away from Berlin in his “Wolfschanze” military headquarters in East Prussia. After Rudolf Hess flew off to Scotland in May 1941, Martin Bormann became the man at Hitler’s side pulling the strings in the background. In the 1940s, Bormann was Hitler’s almighty secretary. He was put in charge of managing Hitler’s personal finances; even Eva Braun supposedly had to ask him for money. Albert Speer, who competed with him for the Führer’s favor, wrote about Bormann: “Even among so many ruthless men, he stood out by his brutality and coarseness. He had no culture, which might have put some restraints on him, and in every case he carried out whatever Hitler had ordered or what he himself had gathered from Hitler’s hints. A subordinate by nature, he treated his own subordinates as if he were dealing with cows and oxen. He was a peasant.”27
Riefenstahl got along well with this brutal man, who utterly lacked any sense of art. Bernhard Minetti remarked: “She dealt only with Hitler’s secretary, that is, she had direct access to him. She used this access to clever advantage; if she could not obtain something, she threatened to lodge a complaint. Then she would say: ‘It will happen immediately’ and it did.”28 In the summer of 1942, she wanted to shoot a film in Spain, but lacked the foreign currency. She had already received 320,000 peset
as, but insisted on being paid an additional 240,000 pesetas. Walter Funk, the Reich economics minister in charge of foreign currencies, had given priority to the wartime economy and denied the payment. He argued that transferring this sum of money would require “cutting back the purchase of urgently needed raw materials for the war in that same amount. This would weaken our defense capability, and I cannot assume responsibility for that under the current circumstances.”29 Riefenstahl called in Bormann, who invoked the name of the Führer. “As you know, Riefenstahl Film Inc. was established with the special support of the Führer; the costs of the Lowlands film, which has been in production for more than two years, are borne by funds I manage on behalf of the Führer. I have submitted the records to the Führer, and he has decided that if at all possible, the sum of foreign currency requested by Riefenstahl Film Inc. is to be made available.”30 Riefenstahl received her money.
Her repeated assertion that Lowlands was doomed to failure because all resources were used for the war was therefore ludicrous.31 She faced difficulties with bad weather, locating a tamed wolf, booking a studio, preparing studio sets, financing the film, and signing theater actors and codirectors. She initially envisioned having G. W. Pabst, who had come back to Germany from Hollywood in 1939, as her codirector, no doubt expecting that partnering with him would be a boon to her acting career. Pabst’s work in France and the United States would also lend an international flair to the film, and, by extension, to her. However, she saw no trace of his much-touted originality and so she tried out Arthur Maria Rabenalt, Arnold Fanck, and Mathias Wieman instead. But the greatest difficulties came from within her own body. The severe case of cystitis she had contracted in Greenland had developed into a chronic illness, and she suffered from abdominal pain. She needed painkillers and nutritional supplements to get out of bed and carry on with her work. At times she could not appear before the camera because her face was so contorted with pain that even veils and a soft focus could not mask her condition. Since she was nearly forty—at least fifteen years too old for the role of Marta—she had to look her best on the set, but she was in no condition to do so. Even Goebbels was worried about her state of health: “Frau Riefenstahl has become quite ill as a result of her work and the burden of responsibility, and I urgently advise her to go for a vacation before she takes on the additional work.”32 She took his advice, and spent longer and longer periods of time recuperating in the mountains.
On June 22, 1941, the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. As of September 19, 1941, Jews were required to wear a yellow star on the left side of their chests. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. Hitler assumed supreme command of the army. On January 20, 1942, the infamous Wannsee Conference was held. In early February 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad ended with the destruction of the German 6th Army. The mood in Germany was dark and depressed, especially in Berlin. The Germans began to fear for their future with their Führer. In the summer of 1943, Riefenstahl traveled to Spain to shoot her film. “Here we had real coffee, bananas, oranges, chocolate, simply everything the heart desired,” she exulted. Riefenstahl was filming her bullfighting scenes with six hundred rented fighting bulls and was delighted to report that “the locals have a pro-German attitude.”33
When she looked over her bank statements that summer, she had even more grounds to rejoice. On March 31, 1943, Riefenstahl Film Inc. charged 102,329,893 reichsmarks to the General Building Inspector, Main Office of Administration and Management. The expenses for four unfinished films—about the construction of the Reich chancellery, the construction of bunkers, and bomb damage, along with a filmstrip called The Führer Builds His Reich Capital—were estimated to exceed one million reichsmarks. As producer, Riefenstahl had stipulated that an additional 10 percent of the production costs would go directly to her. In the “Reich chancellery” file at the federal archives, there are payment orders to Riefenstahl Film Inc. that range between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand reichsmarks. Her production company had also billed for every bouquet of flowers. The records indicate that the idea for the film about the Reich chancellery had come about in 1940 at the request of Hitler, who made an initial sum of seven hundred thousand reichsmarks available to her.34 Arnold Fanck, who had joined the NSDAP in April 1940, was in charge of the project. In his memoirs, he stated that the inspector general’s office in Berlin had commissioned it, but he made no mention of all the benefits that had accrued to him personally from his work for the NSDAP.35
Fanck had to defer to Riefenstahl, but he earned an enormous amount of money, and he and his wife could live in a swanky villa at the Wannsee. Fanck would work on this film for three years. He filmed in Vienna, where Gobelin tapestries were being woven for the Reich chancellery; visited Carrara, where marble for the chancellery was quarried; and took photographs in the Munich Workshops for Arts and Crafts, where the furniture was made. In February 1943 the project was called off because of the bombing, and the film was never completed. However, they continued to submit bills, albeit for more modest sums.
Working with Hitler made Riefenstahl a wealthy woman. She never put a stop to their complicity, and it continued during the war years. For Lowlands, she even haggled with her star, Minetti, over his acting fee. In December 1941, she tried to make him understand that he could no longer count on a daily payment. Arrangements of this kind were standard for films produced by the “industry,” she explained, but not for Riefenstahl Film Inc. She offered him a lump sum, which worked to her financial advantage. Many of the people who appeared in this film did not cost anything. Once again, she had brought in the Sarntal peasants. The filming was taking too long for the peasants, who had to get home and harvest their crops, so they shaved off their beards, figuring that they would no longer look presentable for the camera. This ploy backfired, however: the makeup artist pasted fake beards on their faces and the filming went on. Riefenstahl evidently could not imagine what it meant to delay the harvest in a period of food rationing.
Maxglan, a district of Salzburg, had been a traditional gathering place for Sinti and Roma people. Barbed wire was placed around the site, and the Roma and Sinti were brought from other regions in Austria to be transported to Poland. Riefenstahl, who was intent on using any available resources for her art, had no apparent qualms about selecting her extras from this camp. Survivors testified that it was the director herself who chose the extras. In addition, she had Roma and Sinti brought to Mittenwald from the “Gypsy camp” in Berlin-Marzahn. Because these inmates were forbidden to use public transportation, Riefenstahl’s production company arranged a travel permit for them. For the interior shots, which began in the studios in Babelsberg in April 1942, she worked exclusively with Sinti and Roma from Marzahn. The camp in Marzahn had existed since the spring of 1936. On the occasion of the Olympic Games, the capital had been made “Gypsy-free.” Hundreds of Roma and Sinti were brought to the outskirts of the city, into the concentration camp in Marzahn. Reimar Gilsenbach and Otto Rosenberg have analyzed Riefenstahl’s use of the Roma and Sinti by examining a list of the extras from the camp in Marzahn who were subject to taxation.36 Riefenstahl Film Inc. drew up a detailed list of the “social compensatory levies for the Gypsies in making the film Lowlands” beginning on April 27, 1942. The list contains the names of sixty-five Sinti and Roma from the camp in Marzahn, not including the children, who probably received no wages for their work. Gilsenbach used the stills from Lowlands to track the Gypsies from Marzahn down to the death ledgers of Auschwitz and identified twenty-nine former Riefenstahl extras among the deportees. The ledgers of the Auschwitz concentration camp administration, some of which have been preserved, made it possible to determine the prisoner numbers. In sixteen cases, their deaths were expressly noted. “The Gypsies, both adults and children, were our darlings. We saw nearly all of them after the war. The work with us was the most beautiful time of their lives, they told us.”37 That is the version provided by “Aunt Leni,” as t
hey called Riefenstahl. Undoubtedly the prisoners had hoped that Aunt Leni, who got along so well with Hitler, would put in a word with him on behalf of her new friends. However, once they had played the roles of Spanish peasants and maidservants, they were brought to the extermination camp. To find her way into the role of Gypsy Marta, Riefenstahl had requested Gypsies from the camp, dressed them as Mediterranean types, and instructed them to applaud her dancing. Then they had done their part. This is particularly horrifying in the case of the many gleeful-looking children in the film. In none of her other productions had Riefenstahl demonstrated more clearly that she had no qualms about victimizing people for her own ends.
It was the beginning of the end in Berlin, and Riefenstahl left town. Her villa was still intact, but she was not willing to face defeat. In November 1943, she turned her back on Berlin and would never return to her hometown for any extended period of time. A year and a half later—on March 1, 1945—the Berlin office of Riefenstahl Film Inc. on Harzer Strasse in Neukölln would be closed down. In the late fall of 1943, she moved to the vicinity of Kitzbühel with a great deal of film footage and several crew members. She had bought a house there. Haus Seebichl was a magnificent property with a large screening room, a sound mixing studio, several editing rooms, and ample living space for her crew. The Tyrol and Vorarlberg regions were still considered the “air-raid shelters of the Reich,” and anyone who had made it here could be considered lucky.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 34
