50 “A social revolution has roared into the land of the poets and thinkers, and has rendered poetry and thinking needless luxuries.” J. M. Bonn, “Die wahre Weltrevolution” in Die neue Rundschau, 34, no. 1 (1923): 394.
51 For a discussion of the difference between art that stems from a cause and art that aims at effect, see Clement Greenberg’s essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939): 34–49.
52 “Tanzmatinee im Lobetheater” in Breslauer Neueste Nachrichten, April 7, 1924.
53 Züricher Kämpfer, February 24, 1924.
54 Eugenia Eduardowa was born in St. Petersburg in 1882 and died in New York in 1960. She gave up her large and successful ballet school in Berlin in 1938 and followed her husband, Joseph Lewitan, whom the Nazis dismissed from his position as the editor of the magazine Der Tanz, to Paris.
55 Klamt’s school brochure was designed by De Stijl artist Cesar Domela. “The design created a bold sense of dance and dance study as a radically abstract conflict between elemental geometric forces, between line and curve, between relative powers seeking to penetrate the closed, inner, circular zone of connection.” Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 256.
56 “Dance was freedom because it made the body into a symbol of those innately healthy emotions that narrative logic suppresses by compelling the body to read the self in the life of another person.” Ibid.
57 Ulrich Linse, “Mazdaznan—die Rassenreligion vom arischen Friedensreich” in Stefanie von Schnurbein and Justus H. Ulbricht, eds., Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne. Entwürfe ‘arteigener’ Glaubenssysteme seit der Jahrhundertwende (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, 2001), pp. 268–91.
58 Like Adolf Hitler, Klamt was a confirmed vegetarian. She claimed that she had been adhering to a vegetarian diet since 1911. In the 1950s, she published essays on this topic in the magazine Vegetarisches Universum. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Lebensreform und verwandte Bestrebungen, and proudly asserted that she had been living meat-free for forty years. According to Mazdaznan, God does not reveal himself in an unclean body; it is regarded as the loftiest mission of the Aryan to regain his purity of body, which includes eating no meat.
59 Jutta Klamt, Vom Erleben zum Gestalten (Berlin: Dorn-Verlag, 1938), p. 104.
60 Leni Riefenstahl, Memoiren (Munich: Albrecht Knaus, 1987), p. 68.
61 “Wie Vogue die Mode sieht: Unsere Zeit ist von einem starken Willen zur Schönheit beseelt” in Vogue (German edition), October 10, 1928, p. 7.
62 Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat learned this from photographer Elisabeth Röttgers. See Beckers and Moortgat, Atelier Lotte Jacobi Berlin New York (Berlin: Nicolai Verlag, 1997), p. 35.
63 This photograph was printed in Scherl’s Magazin 6, no. 2 (February 1930): 201.
64 Riefenstahl, Memoiren, p. 74.
65 Ibid., p. 69.
66 Ibid., p. 70.
67 Ibid., p. 71.
68 In the first version of the story, which Riefenstahl published in 1933, she did not mention a travel companion or a letter sent to Trenker. She met Trenker in the hotel, and he tried to dissuade her from her plan. “Even if Trenker had explained to me a hundred times, and mobilized every last bit of his male logic to prove that the prospects of acting in a movie by Dr. Fanck were virtually nil, that wouldn’t have made the slightest impression on me. That is how firmly convinced I was that my wish had not arisen from mere impulse or accident. I would have tried anything, no matter how obsessive, to reach my goal.” She wrote that as soon as she was back in Berlin, she got in touch with Fanck. Riefenstahl, Kampf in Schnee und Eis, p. 12.
69 Harry R. Sokal, “Lebt wohl, Leidenschaften! Erinnerungen eines Filmproduzenten.” Unpublished manuscript, p. 53, SdK NLA, Berlin.
70 Luis Trenker, Alles gut gegangen. Geschichten aus meinem Leben (Hamburg: Mosaik-Verlag, 1965), p. 207f.
71 See Christian Rapp, Höhenrausch. Der deutsche Bergfilm (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1997).
72 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 112. Eric Rentschler has argued, however, that Kracauer’s attitude toward Fanck’s films is ambivalent: “Kracauer—for all his ideological misgivings—could not fully deny the haptic frisson of the mountain film.” Eric Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm,” in New German Critique, no. 51 (1990): 137–61; this passage is on p. 145.
73 In 2003, the theme of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto was the fascination with mountains. The captivating catalogue for this exhibition features a great many images that display the mystery and splendor of the mountains. Gabriella Belli, Paolo Giacomoni, and Anna Ottani Cavina, eds., Montagna. Arte, scienza, mito da Dürer a Warhol (Milan: Skira, 2003).
74 New mechanical devices such as carabiners made it possible to venture out onto mountain faces that had been considered impregnable.
75 Riefenstahl, Kampf in Schnee und Eis, p. 12.
76 Ibid., p. 13.
77 Riefenstahl, Memoiren, p. 73.
78 Arnold Fanck, Er führte Regie mit Gletschern, Stürmen und Lawinen. Ein Filmpionier Erzählt (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlag, 1973), p. 9.
79 A remake of the film was found in Allgeier’s estate, and the Cinématheque Suisse Lausanne has a nitrate copy.
80 “Berg, Film und Seele” in Der Berg. Monatsschrift für Bergsteiger, September 1924, vol. 9, Munich Film Museum, Nachlass Arnold Fanck.
81 “I made an agreement with Fanck to function . . . as a sports adviser. More importantly, however, I had to use my South Tyrolean connections to provide financing for him. There was inflation in Germany at that time, and so we needed to raise a portion of the foreign funding for our film, which I was able to do.” Luis Trenker, Alles gut gegangen! Geschichten aus meinem Leben (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1972), p. 201.
82 Arnold Fanck, “Wie der heilige Berg entstand” [newspaper clipping], Stadtarchiv Freiburg K 1/25, folder 35, no. 1a. This passage is noteworthy because Fanck does not mention his first encounter with Riefenstahl in his autobiography.
83 Berliner Morgenpost, December 19, 1926. Axel Eggebrecht praised the film’s technology, but could barely tolerate its message. “The Holy Mountain turned out to be quite a mundane heap of triteness and malicious misunderstandings. It is difficult to determine how much of that is Ufa’s fault. In any case . . . the intrusive propaganda for the cult of the superior blond species of man comes as a surprise.” Die Weltbühne, January 11, 1927.
84 “Henry Jaworsky, Cameraman for Leni Riefenstahl, interviewed by Gordon Hitchens, Kirk Bond, and John Hanhardt” in Film Culture 56/57 (Spring 1973): 122–61; this quotation is on p. 136.
85 Riefenstahl, Memoiren, p. 77.
86 Ibid., p. 78.
87 Luis Trenker, Alles gut gegangen. Geschichten aus meinem Leben (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1972), p. 213.
88 Sokal, “Lebt wohl Leidenschaften! Erinnerungen eines Filmproduzenten,” p. 54.
89 L. Andrew Mannheim, “Leni,” in Modern Photography, February 1974, p. 113.
90 Riefenstahl, Kampf in Schnee und Eis, p. 25.
91 “There is also quite a bit of sadism in this farce; Trenker in particular is shamelessly mistreated by Fanck here, that is, all the men in the film are positively emasculated.” Jan-Christopher Horak, “Dr. Arnold Fanck: Träume vom Wolkenmeer und einer guten Stube,” in Horak, ed., Berge, Licht und Traum. Dr. Arnold Fanck und der deutsche Bergfilm (Munich: GeraNova Bruckmann, 1997), pp. 14–67; this passage is on p. 36.
92 Riefensthal, Kampf in Schnee und Eis, p. 39.
93 Riefenstahl, Memoiren, p. 98.
94 One exception was a minor role in the movie Das Schicksal derer von Habsburg—Die Tragödie eines Kaiserreiches (1928), directed by Rudolf Raffé, in which she played Baroness Vetsera, the lover of the crown prince of Austria. Her fellow cast membe
r, Carmen Cartellieri, a Hungarian-Austrian silent film star, had been making mountain films since the early 1920s, and in 1921 she and Cornelius Hintner, the man who discovered her, had founded Cartellieri Film Productions. I would like to thank Helma Türk in Bad Reichenhall for this information.
95 Riefenstahl, Kampf in Schnee und Eis, p. 39f.
96 Harry Sokal, “Lebt wohl, Leidenschaften! Erinnerungen eines Filmproduzenten,” p. 71a. In a questionnaire issued by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which Riefenstahl filled out on March 25, 1994, she indicated that her greatest flaw was “a lack of humor.”
97 “To me, she was ‘kitsch’ personified and the only good film she ever made I think was Piz Palü, where she was in the hands of a very fine director, who wouldn’t stand for any sentimental nonsense.” Interview with Paul Falkenberg, “Six Talks on G. W. Pabst,” cinemages 3 (1955): 41–52; this quotation appears on p. 47.
98 Interview with Marc Sorkin, in “Six Talks on G. W. Pabst,” cinemages 3 (1955): 23–40; this quotation is on p. 36.
99 Fanck was continually accused of having faked individual scenes. He was incensed by these charges. His literary estate contains long letters that refute each accusation in detail. Like Riefenstahl, he could not stand to be criticized. However, he was never able to allay the many suspicions that the filming was not quite as perilous as he described it.
100 Riefenstahl, Memoiren, p. 112.
101 The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993), directed by Ray Müller. See http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-Horrible-Life-Leni-Riefenstahl/dp/B00000INUB.
102 Dr. Mühsam in B. Z. am Mittag, November 16, 1929; 8 Uhr Abendblatt, November 16, 1929, Munich Film Museum, Nachlass Arnold Fanck.
103 Berliner Morgenpost, November 17, 1929, Munich Film Museum, Nachlass Arnold Fanck.
104 Douglas Fairbanks to Arnold Fanck, in Lichtbild-Bühne Berlin 4 (1930), Munich Film Museum, Nachlass Arnold Fanck.
105 Christopher Hitchens, “Leni Riefenstahl interviewed by Gordon Hitchens,” in Film Culture 56/57 (Spring 1973): 94–121; this passage is on p. 119.
106 Riefenstahl, Memoiren, p.117.
107 Ibid., p. 120.
108 Ibid., p. 121f.
109 Ibid., p. 124.
110 Ibid., p. 125.
111 Bunte, June 20, 1987; Dietrich’s letter to the editor.
112 Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1965), p. 144.
113 Steven Bach based this information on an interview he conducted with Hans Feld on May 25, 1990; see Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (New York: William Morrow, 1992), p. 110.
114 Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, February 3, 1931.
115 Hans Feld, “Der Fanck-film der Aafa. Stürme über dem Mont Blanc,” in Film-Kurier, January 3, 1931.
116 “Das Mikrophon als Erzieher—Stimmbandtraining für den Sprechfilm” in Scherl’s Magazin 6, no. 5 (1930): 506–7.
117 Leni Riefenstahl, “Zwei Wochen Filmen auf dem Mont Blanc,” 1930; typed manuscript, Munich Film Museum, Nachlass Arnold Fanck.
118 Riefenstahl, Memoiren, p. 132.
119 Henry Hoek, Skiheil, Kamerad! Skikurs für eine Freundin (Hamburg: Gebrüder Enoch, 1934). The cover features a cheery picture of Riefenstahl on the ski trail.
120 In Bolzano people say that Paula Wiesinger sometime filled in for Riefenstahl in hazardous scenes. Paula Wiesinger (1907–2001) climbed the most difficult routes of the Dolomites, and was one of the few women who could achieve the sixth degree of climbing, which was then the highest level on the difficulty scale. She also won many ski trophies. I would like to thank Helma Türk of Bad-Reichenhall for this information.
121 Marta Feuchtwanger, Nur eine Frau. Jahre—Tage—Stunden (Munich: Knaur, 1983), p. 204ff.
122 The co-organizer was the German National Association of Visual Artists; all artists living in Germany were invited to participate. Three hundred sixty-five artists submitted their work, and twenty-six were selected, including Spiro with his portrait of Leni Riefenstahl. The prize came with a generous ten thousand reichsmarks, and the contest was promoted with a publicity campaign and numerous articles in the daily newspapers and art journals. Willy Jaeckel was awarded first prize.
123 Susanne Meyer-Büser, “Das schönste deutsche Frauenporträt,” Tendenzen der Bildnismalerei in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Reimer, 1994).
124 Sepp Allgeier, Die Jagd nach dem Bild. 18 Jahre Kameramann in Arktis und Hochgebirge (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorns Nachfahren, 1931), p. 44.
125 Luis Trenker, Kampf in den Bergen. Das unvergängliche Denkmal der Alpenfront (Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, 1931). It was the illustrated edition of his novel Mountains in Flames.
126 Hans Schneeberger, Der berstende Berg. Vom Heldenkampf der Kaiserjäger und Alpini (Berlin: G. Stalling, 1941); this book was the model for Trenker’s Berge in Flammen.
127 Harry Sokal, “Lebt wohl, Leidenschaften! Erinnerungen eines Filmproduzenten.”
128 Ernst Jünger, “Über die Gefahr,” in Der gefährliche Augenblick. Eine Sammlung von Bildern und Berichten, ed. Ferdinand Bucholtz (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1931), pp. 11–16; this passage is on p. 14.
Blue
1 Leni Riefenstahl, Kampf in Schnee und Eis (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, 1933), p. 67.
2 Leni Riefenstahl, Memoiren (Munich: Albrecht Knaus, 1987), p. 140.
3 Klaus Mann, Tagebücher 1931–1933 (Munich: edition spangenberg, 1989), p. 29.
4 Harry Sokal, “Lebt wohl, Leidenschaften! Erinnerungen eines Filmproduzenten.” Unpublished manuscript, p. 80, SdK NLA, Berlin.
5 Riefenstahl, Memoiren, p. 150.
6 Leni Riefenstahl to Béla Balázs, February 21, 1932 in Balázs-Nachlass, MTA (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia), Ms. 5021/320; quoted in Hanno Loewy, Béla Balázs—Märchen, Ritual und Film (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2003), p. 362.
7 In her book dedicated to Fanck, all these difficulties went unmentioned. “I never want to leave my cutting room at all; if I could, I would sleep there. And the many thousands of snippets gradually became a real film, more visible by the week, until at long last, the legend of the ‘Blue Light,’ which just a year earlier had been a mere dream, lay finished before me.” Riefenstahl, Kampf in Schnee und Eis, p. 78.
8 Heinz von Jaworsky, born in Berlin in 1912, was a cameraman for Riefenstahl’s films about the Olympic Games in 1936. A specialist in aerial shots, he served with the Luftwaffe during the war. In 1952, he moved to the United States and went by the name Henry V. Javorsky. He died in 1999.
9 Riefenstahl is quoted according to the documentary film by Ray Müller, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). See http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-Horrible-Life-Leni-Riefenstahl/dp/B00000INUB.
10 Leni Riefenstahl to Jürgen Kasten, February 9, 1994, quoted in Jürgen Kasten, Carl Mayer: Filmpoet. Ein Drehbuchautor schreibt Filmgeschichte (Berlin: Vistas, 1994), p. 38.
11 Carl Mayer was born in 1894 in Graz, and in 1917, he came to Berlin to try his luck in acting on various stages. Between 1919 and 1927, he wrote the screenplays for eighteen films. Mayer, who was Jewish, left Germany in 1933, first for Prague, and then for London. He died ailing and impoverished in June 1944. See Brigitte Mayr, “Aufbruch ins Ungewisse. Carl Mayer: Ein Leben im Exil. Graz, Wien, Berlin, Prag, London,” in Michael Omasta et al., Carl Mayer: Scenar(t)ist (Vienna: Synema Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, 2003), pp. 9–52.
12 Fanck’s Stürme über dem Mont Blanc. Ein Filmbildbuch (Basel: Concordia Verlag, 1931) was the only text in which he mentioned Mayer’s work on the film, giving credit to a “Karl Maier” for “participation in the staging.”
13 Joseph Roth, “Der letzte Mann,” in Frankfurter Zeitung, January 8, 1925; quoted in Hans Helmut Prinzler, ed., Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Ein Melancholiker des Films (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer Verlag, 2003), pp. 165–67; this quotation is on pp. 165–66.
14 Riefenstahl, Memoiren, p. 137f.
15 “From now on, I want only to be an artis
t, and nothing else. I have also decided to steer clear of any kind of revolutionary affiliation and do not wish to maintain contact with anyone.” Balázs’s diary entry in Vienna, dated December 4, 1919, in Èva Karádi and Erzsébet Vezér, Georg Lukacs, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis (Frankfurt: Sendler, 1985), p. 121f.
16 Béla Balázs to Emma Ritoók, fall 1919, quoted in Èva Karádi, “Introduction,” in Karádi and Vezér, Georg Lukacs, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis, pp. 7–27; this passage is on p. 21.
17 His first monograph about film theory was published in March 1924: Visible Man or the Culture of Film; his second, The Spirit of Film, followed in 1930.
18 Letter from Heinz von Jaworsky to Joseph Zsuffa, dated December 9, 1976, quoted in Joseph Zsuffa, Béla Balázs: The Man and the Artist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 215.
19 See Massimo Locatelli: Béla Balázs. Die Physiognomik des Films (Berlin: Vistas, 1999), p. 32.
20 Riefenstahl, Kampf in Schnee und Eis, p. 69.
21 Riefenstahl, Memoiren, p. 144
22 Ibid., p. 141.
23 Ibid., p. 151.
24 Film-Kurier 14, no. 73 (March 26, 1932).
25 Hermann Sinsheimer, “Zwei Legenden. Das blaue Licht im Ufapalast am Zoo,” in Berliner Tagblatt, March 26, 1932, SdK SGA, Berlin.
26 In 1932, all the advertisements read: “A joint effort by Leni Riefenstahl, Béla Balázs, Hans Schneeberger; production: LR Studio of H. R. Sokal-Film Inc. in Aafa Special Distribution.”
27 “Italy’s highest authorities gave their approval to what would rightly be considered the first international event of this type. The 1932 festival was held on the terrace of the Hotel Excelsior on the Venice Lido, and while at that stage it was not a competitive event, it included foremost films which became classics in the history of cinema: It Happened One Night by Frank Capra, Grand Hotel by Edmund Goulding, The Champ by King Vidor, Frankenstein by James Whale, Zemlya [Earth] by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Gli uomini, che mascalzoni [What Scoundrels Men Are!] by Mario Camerini, and À Nous la Liberté by René Clair.” www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/history/en/4791.html.
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