her hopping about is here and there hardly bearable
LA Weekly describes Leni Riefenstahl as "pretty as a Swastika" in this review of Stephen Bach's new biography
One wonders what might have been her destiny had Riefenstahl simply upped sticks and immigrated to Hollywood wholesale, along with the rest of the German UFA diaspora, in, say, the late ’20s, long before she ever met Adolf Hitler. Certainly, she would have found a large German-exile community to nourish her, and a studio system hungry for German talent. And, possessed as she was of sharp elbows, a functionally sociopathic determination to rise, a bottomless appetite for attention, and the bulldozing drive of a Joan Crawford, who knows how she might have rewritten the history of women directors in Hollywood?
In this fantasy, Riefenstahl — who, it transpired, would never make a conventional studio-based movie — might have taken her place on the honor roll of German talent that continually invigorated Hollywood at its high tide: Murnau, Von Sternberg, Stroheim, Lubitsch, Lang, Siodmak, Wyler, Wilder, et al. But it was already too late; indeed, by this time, Leni Riefenstahl’s filmmaking career was effectively already over (Bach perceptively titles his section covering the 64 years of her post-1939 existence “Aftermath”). She would spend the rest of her life issuing a blizzard of shifting denials, rationalizations and lies, and of libel suits against anyone who raised a voice against her. And in court, seasoned as she was by her lachrymose appearances before postwar denazification tribunals, she was very rarely bested. Thus, the only list she topped was a dark litany of those who flew too close to Hitler’s black sun: Albert Speer, Max Schmelling, Herbert von Karajan, Martin Heidegger, Winifred Wagner, Werner von Braun ... Among these, there was none in the end more notorious, and none closer to or more steadfastly beloved by the Führer, than Leni herself. It was small consolation, but she ran with it anyway.
