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Home » Leni Riefenstahl – “Pretty as a Swastika”

Leni Riefenstahl – “Pretty as a Swastika”

by | Feb 2, 2012 | Afri, Antisemitism, Art, Books, Cam, Death, Doc, Jewish, Magyar, Native, Photo, Politics, Quotes, Racism, Shoah, Wars, Women

Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s protégée, photographed by Martin Munkacsi (born Márton Mermelstein).

New Yorker Magazine: Where There’s a Will – The rise of Leni Riefenstahl by Judith Thurman

… Riefenstahl appeals to her friend and admirer Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer and the most fanatic anti-Semite in a crowded field (he was hanged for his war crimes in 1946), for help with, as she puts it, the “demands made upon me by the Jew Béla Balázs.” Balázs, Riefenstahl’s dramaturge and co-screenwriter on “The Blue Light,” was an avant-garde film critic who had also adapted Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” as a screenplay. She expunged his name from the credits so that a judenrein (Jew-free) version of the film could be released, and Balázs, hearing of its success, wrote to her from exile in Moscow to ask for his deferred fee. It was an easy and no doubt gratifying minor task for Streicher to deprive him of it.

… her boosters were the organizers of the first Feminist Film Festival, in Telluride, who, in 1974, touted Riefenstahl as a role model for women directors, impervious to the irony that she had used her singularly privileged role to glorify a cult of violence and misogyny. L. Ron Hubbard briefly collaborated on a remake of “The Blue Light.” Mick Jagger invited her to take his picture with Bianca. Andy Warhol added her to his collection of divas. Madonna, then Jodie Foster, aspired to star in her life story, but Riefenstahl judged neither to be worthy. George Lucas praised her modernity and acknowledged the indebtedness of “Star Wars” to “Triumph of the Will,” particularly, Trimborn notes, in the Caesarean victory celebration that concludes Part IV. And, in 1998, Riefenstahl was one of the guests of honor at Time’s seventy-fifth-anniversary banquet, along with hundreds of other newsmakers from its cover. Unshackled at last from the caption of Munkacsi’s photograph, she received a standing ovation. But perhaps as it died away she heard an echo of Streicher’s paean to her in 1937: “Laugh and go your way, the way of a great calling. Here you have found your heaven and in it you will be eternal.”
…Marcel Ophuls declined her invitation to celebrate her career in a television documentary, so she awarded the job to an unknown German, Ray Müller. He released “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.”

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