For her first denazification hearing in July 1948, she wrote up a chronology of her life. A key strategy in getting herself exonerated of the charge of shooting movies with National Socialist ideology was emphasizing the international recognition these films had brought her. To substantiate this point, she attached press reviews from fascist Italy and Nazi-occupied France. In addition, she asked many of her former crew members for affidavits. The overwhelming consensus was that she selected her crew solely on the basis of their technical and artistic merits. Personal adjutants of Hitler also affirmed that Riefenstahl had never been Hitler’s lover. On November 9, 1948, the verdict was handed down: Riefenstahl was found “not in violation of the law.” The explanation for this decision was a virtually verbatim restatement of Riefenstahl’s own argument: Riefenstahl, the daughter of a respectable family in Berlin who overcame considerable obstacles to become an artist, denied any connection to National Socialism. She had enjoyed international renown even before 1933. When Hitler came to power, the film industry was nationalized and fell under Goebbels’s authority, and her difficult struggle for artistic autonomy commenced. Because she was treated so badly and her movies were not authorized (Mademoiselle Docteur was cited as an example), she even left the country and went to Spain. Once she was back in Germany, she was forced to make a documentary about the Nuremberg Rally in 1934. She had repeated serious conflicts with Goebbels, who tried to compromise her in public and to disparage her accomplishments. Contrary to popular belief, Goebbels did not back her; he persecuted and impeded her. The fact-finding commission determined “unequivocally” that Riefenstahl had nothing in common with either the party’s or Hitler’s ideas.
The assumption among the general public that Leni Riefenstahl must be regarded as a beneficiary of the Third Reich because of her high income level and financial holdings is not correct. We do know that she made 7 films prior to 1933, she did not receive a penny from the propaganda ministry, and the last 2 films, including Lowlands, have yet to be completed because nearly all of her film products and materials have been seized and removed from her possession. Frau Riefenstahl is a poor woman today. Her home in Berlin is destroyed, as is the one in Kitzbühel, and the only livable property has been impounded by the occupying power, so she has no rental revenue.15
At the hearing on July 6, 1949, Riefenstahl essentially stuck to her story from the previous year. Since the Goebbels diaries were still undiscovered at this time (they were in storage in Moscow), she could get away with outright lies. Riefenstahl claimed that she had never been invited to the homes of Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Bormann or other high-ranking National Socialists. The formal decision came down that there was no presumption of guilt in Riefenstahl’s case and that she was not a beneficiary of National Socialism. On December 6, 1949, the Baden State Commission for Political Purgation ordered a new scrutiny of the case, and on December 16, Riefenstahl was classified as a Mitläuferin (usually translated as “fellow traveler,” it essentially means “active sympathizer”). However, the statement justifying this classification reads more like a vindication. Several pages from the document classifying her as “not in violation of the law” are quoted, and at the end, there is no more than a brief mention of the fact that her non-member status in the party, associations, and so forth was not a sufficient reason to dismiss her political liability. Riefenstahl’s work on the party rally and Olympic films, which were used for National Socialist propaganda, sufficed to regard her as a Mitläuferin. She was not charged, nor was she banned from her profession. There were no sanctions or prohibitions.
After this decision, which enabled her to work again, she packed up, left Königsfeld, and moved to Munich. She knew exactly what to do: she would pick up where she had left off, which meant that she would complete Lowlands. This restart to her career had only one catch: Lowlands was still in the hands of the French. To play up the artistic and political importance of the film, she later claimed in her memoirs that bitter disputes had broken out among various political groups in Paris about whether to return the film.16
Many other artists hailed the heady combination of chaos and freedom they experienced after 1945, but not Leni Riefenstahl. She lacked their curiosity about the aesthetic trends from which Germany had been cut off for so long, and saw no need for a personal or professional reassessment or an artistic new beginning. Driven out of her paradise, she was offended that she was not being welcomed as a key figure in the artistic world. Once she had been officially denazified, she could litigate—the courtroom offered her a new stage for performances that would earn her press coverage. A suit she brought against the publisher, Olympiaverlag, inaugurated a virtual orgy of court cases—fifty in all. Wochenend magazine had published excerpts of the supposed diary of Eva Braun, and Luis Trenker, of all people, claimed that Braun had given him this diary. Riefenstahl appears in the diary as “the rival,” and she is said to have danced in front of Hitler and received monetary gifts. In September 1948, Riefenstahl won her suit in the Munich district court. Photographs of the trial show her sitting among her lawyers, sometimes wiping away her tears or shouting indignantly, always sporting a jaunty hat and elegant suit with a white blouse in the style of Dior’s New Look. She knew how to plant herself in the limelight. People rightly wondered how a lady like this could possibly qualify for legal aid, which was how she financed these cases. One year later Riefenstahl brought a private suit against the publisher Helmut Kindler. On May 1, 1949, Revue magazine, of which Kindler was the editor in chief, had published a long illustrated article bearing the title “The Uncompleted Film by Leni Riefenstahl. What will become of Lowlands?” The article claimed that shooting this film had already cost seven million marks, and that for Riefenstahl, money was no object. She had selected Gypsies in concentration camps who had been mistreated to act as extras. Riefenstahl was suing Kindler for libel and defamation. In this trial as well, she was granted legal aid.
The usual suspects were summoned as witnesses; they swore that the subject of concentration camps had never come up and that the atmosphere on the set was upbeat, even jolly. The court did not buy the witness’s story cited in the Revue and determined that because the witness was herself a Gypsy, her “subjective feelings were tarnished.”17 An additional key exonerating witness for Riefenstahl was the former SS-Sturmbannführer who had overseen the construction of the Maxglan camp. He was listed as an “expert in matters pertaining to Gypsies.” In his statement, which ran on for several pages, he pointed out that Gypsies were criminal and abhorrent. The camp had been set up because there had been many robberies in the area, and this was a way of keeping better watch over the Gypsies. In Maxglan, they lived in a supervised environment behind barbed wire. To pay for these costs, the Gypsies were lent out, in this case to Frau Riefenstahl, who pampered them so extremely that he had to remind her to comply with the rules.
Alfred Polgar, a prominent drama critic, fiction writer, and essayist, attended this trial, and reported that although the topic was a horrifying one (“concentration camp inmates as film extras”), the atmosphere in the courtroom was exuberant. Everyone—including the judge and the opposing counsel—was charming to Riefenstahl, and her “birdlike profile” lost a little of its sharpness. The spectators hung on every word of her reports about meetings with the Führer, who was so understanding, and Goebbels, who was evil. “But even in these buoyant moments, the coldness never left Frau Riefenstahl’s eyes and expression. Earlier in her life, she had been heavily involved in movies about glaciers, and maybe the frostiness in her face was a holdover from that time.”18
Riefenstahl did not deny that she had worked with Gypsies, “but she emphasized that these people had been happy to have escaped the concentration camp for a few weeks.”19 She insisted that she had not brought the suit against Kindler of her own volition, but had been compelled to do so by the Allied authorities and the denazification tribunal in order to respond to accusations that had been made against her in court. There is no evidence to
back up this assertion. She used this propitious moment to announce that her pockets were full of foreign film contracts. The crowning achievement came when Riefenstahl’s lawyer belted out to the courtroom: “The nation can be proud of Leni Riefenstahl!” In the end, Kindler was fined six hundred marks and Riefenstahl emerged from this trial on stronger footing. She had been able to foil an ethical publisher and opponent of the National Socialists whose publications supported a new, democratic Germany.
In 1950, she bought a three-room apartment in Munich. Riefenstahl claimed to have gotten the money for it from Friedrich Mainz, the former head of Tobis Cinema. This was not just any apartment building. Ady Vogel, known as “the salt baron,” was a friend of hers and had the idea of building an apartment house that combined the advantages of a hotel and a rental building. Concierge, chambermaids, telephone switchboard, restaurant, hairdresser, and cleaning service were available to the residents. This luxurious lifestyle was new in Germany. The stately and elegant staircase at Tengstrasse 20 in Schwabing revealed the kind of setting Riefenstahl considered fitting for herself. Her new domicile was not some little hole in the wall in shabby welfare housing at the edge of town; this was a lavish apartment building right in the center of Munich’s arts district. Her dark days appeared to be over. When Peter Viertel, son of the screenwriter Salka Viertel, was stationed in Munich as an American soldier, he observed Riefenstahl holding court with friends at the elegant hotel bar of the Bayerischer Hof.20 She also profited from the currency reform and the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany. However, she was unable to gain a foothold in the film business. This had nothing to do with a “work ban,” as she maintained. People associated her name with Nazi propaganda films, and no one was drawn to those kinds of movies now. She had never made sparkling entertainment films, and her tepid reputation as an actress did not inspire people to look forward to her return to the screen. Unlike Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose return to the conductor’s stand was supported by renowned soloists and distinguished politicians from around the globe, and whose artistic reputation trumped any accusations of political and moral guilt, Riefenstahl lacked any political or artistic backing.
German film in the immediate postwar period was what Fritz Göttler has called a “transit space,” wedged between the old and the new. The first postwar films—entertaining flashes in the pan and highbrow social-problem films—were produced almost entirely by people who had previously worked at Ufa. These films lacked boldness, dynamism, ambition, and self-confidence. Film production was now centered in Munich and Hamburg; Berlin had been relegated to the background. Riefenstahl picked Munich as her new base and met up again with Harry Sokal, who had returned to Germany from the United States. Her memoirs have only snide remarks about him, but her old cameraman, Heinz von Jaworsky, reported that in 1948 he ran into Riefenstahl and Sokal arm in arm, enjoying a friendly chat in a Munich film studio. Riefenstahl pictured them producing films together, but Sokal no longer had as much money as before the war and would be unable to finance the completion of Lowlands. She would have to seek new investors.
The postwar films made it painfully clear that the Germans were in no position to summon up any real interest in their current era. Filmmaking was taking a very different path in Italy. Defeated and deprived, Italy was still able to achieve international recognition with its cinematic art. Thanks to Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica, Rome was soon regarded as the center of European film. Riefenstahl was invited to Rome in 1950 and later recalled: “I was in a state of euphoria. The blue sky, the warm air, the laughing people helped me to forget the grayness that I had left behind in Germany. They had found an elegant apartment for me, and next to the flowers there was an envelope with a large sum of money in lira bills.”21 At long last, she was being treated as a diva and revered once again. In the evenings she was taken out and there was great interest in her ideas for future projects.
Riefenstahl kept up with the times as far as her appearance was concerned. She dyed her hair titian red and wore an eye-catching green raincoat. With big hoop earrings, short curly hair, and chic summer dresses, she hobnobbed with the likes of Gina Lollobrigida in Cinecittà. She was still strikingly attractive and left no stone unturned in her quest to regain a distinguished place in society.
She continued to regard her films as classic masterpieces. Since she had also filmed on location, she mingled with the neorealists, conveniently overlooking the fact that the Italian neorealist directors knew how to tell a good story and she did not. Simple, powerfully expressive images told the unrecorded story of mankind. Italian directors such as Rossellini and Visconti drew on the great artistic tradition of their country using “genetic material” adopted from Giotto’s medieval frescoes and Renaissance painters, while Riefenstahl rambled about Dürer, Kollwitz, and Van Gogh. Italian filmmakers created a reality that was deeply rooted in the history and geography of their country. This distinctive symbiosis of everyday people and film made cinema the gauge of the cultural and social development of postwar Italy. Riefenstahl, like her former benefactor, Hitler, had only idealized images of people in her head. Whether she was in Sarntal, at the Nuremberg party rallies, or in the Maxglan camp, she looked for extras who could play the role of regular people. Riefenstahl’s films show no trace of having discovered the realism that infused the Italian cinema with new images.
People with political clout interceded to get the Lowlands footage back to her. It was the same old story: her valuable, irreplaceable film had been damaged, or even destroyed, by idiots. She spent days and nights at the editing table wrestling to restore the film. Lowlands premiered on February 11, 1954. After many glamorous premieres at the Ufa Palace in Berlin, Riefenstahl was now consigned to the boondocks. The distributor Allianz-Verleih arranged for a showing in Stuttgart. Although some reviews were scathing, others offered words of praise. Still, the outcome was clear: the movie that had sapped so much of her strength was a flop. The style and subject matter of this melodrama set in an unreal nowhere were behind the times. Riefenstahl had the sinking feeling that she had been “miscast” and was unable to breathe life into the role of Marta.22 No one accepted her as the young Gypsy—least of all herself. A curse seemed to hang over Lowlands. For the cinema, 1954 was the year of Fellini’s La Strada and Visconti’s Senso—not Lowlands. Riefenstahl withdrew the movie from theaters after only a few showings. She had spent nearly a decade working on a doomed project.
THE
ICON
The loss of Riefenstahl’s former status cut her to the quick, and she tried to blot out the gray postwar era by recalling better days gone by. She found solace in friends who were in the same boat and gathered them around her. Emmy Göring, the widow of Hermann Göring, lived just a few doors down the street. The two of them had a great deal in common; Göring had also been an actress, so they were colleagues of a sort. Riefenstahl and Göring felt like queens without a country. Driven out of their villas in Berlin, they had wound up in three-room apartments in the Schwabing section of Munich. The Haus Savoy restaurant was on the ground floor of Riefenstahl’s apartment building. It was owned by the wife of Hermann Esser, one of Adolf Hitler’s earliest supporters. He had gone into hiding in 1949 and was sentenced to five years in prison in 1950, but a mere two years later he was released. Rounding out this illustrious group was Max Amann, who had been Hitler’s sergeant in World War I and the third person ever to join the Nazi party. He had also taken part in the 1923 putsch, served as the business manager of the NSDAP in its early phase, published Mein Kampf, and later served as president of the Reich media chamber. SS-Obergruppenführer Amann was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp in 1948 as a Hauptschuldiger (major offender). He often stopped by the Savoy during his imprisonment in the Bavarian town of Eichstätt, which surprised the American secret policemen who reported on his whereabouts since they could not understand why he was permitted to leave the labor camp so often.1
On her journeys back and for
th through Europe, Riefenstahl desperately looked for investors for her absurd film projects. Nothing came of The Red Devils, but she devised a plan for a movie about the effects of nuclear energy, to be called Cobalt 60. For a documentary film about Spain—Sol y Sombra—she went on an extended trip to get to know the country and its people. For yet another motion picture project (Three Stars on the Cloak of the Madonna), she offered the lead role to Anna Magnani, a role in which Magnani would play a mother who has converted to the Christian faith. Magnani politely declined. Riefenstahl pictured big names—Brigitte Bardot, Jean Marais, Vittorio De Sica, and Ruth Leuwerik—acting in her films, but is unclear whether any of these celebrities were actually interested in working with her.
Riefenstahl was usually accompanied by her ex-husband on her trips through Europe. Despite their divorce, the two of them traveled as a couple. She now wore makeup. One of the first major social events where she put in an appearance after the war was the 1955 film ball in Berlin. The belle of this ball was Romy Schneider, but people also took heed of Riefenstahl, who wore a glittering evening gown that showed ample cleavage. She enjoyed being photographed and still knew how to strike a girlish, coquettish pose. Still, all the low-cut gowns, flirtations, and screenplays in the world did nothing to help her find a producer.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 43
