Berlin by Rory Maclean

Author:Rory Maclean
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250052407
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Leni Riefenstahl at the Luitpold Arena in Nuremberg directing the filming of Triumph of the Will at the Nazi Party Congress, 1934. (Corbis)

CHAPTER 14

Leni Riefenstahl, and the Fatal Flaw

Kurfürstendamm, 1935

A flash of light. A bugle blare of joy. A mass of young faces gaze in adoration, in hope, in black and white. Eyes and hearts lift in expectation. Arms snap up in salute. Their messiah steps onto the podium. He promises them the world, demands their obedience. ‘Here we stand, ready to carry Germany into a new era.’ Cut to an eagle clutching a swastika in its talons. Fade in a roll of drums. The massed ranks submit themselves to their new leader, binding their will to his own, falling into step behind him. The camera tracks through the marching men. ‘One People, one Reich, one Führer!’ Their weapons glint in the sun, catching the wide eyes of the audience.

In the dark hall Leni Riefenstahl saw the tears in those pale blue eyes. She felt his swelling pride. She sensed it spread out from their box, from row to row, through the vast UFA Palast, across Berlin and then the country, wiping away the shame of Versailles. Pride grew also in her own heart, loosening the knot of tension at the base of her spine, igniting a warmth in her groin. She had created a new cinema for the new heroic age. In the next three weeks in 1935 over 100,000 people would be seduced by her work at the Ku’damm’s great dream palace. Within a year every man and woman in Germany would have seen it. She no longer needed to feel like a victim. Instead she felt elated, empowered, and later bowed for form alone when her patron presented her with an enormous bouquet of lilacs on the cinema stage. Adolf Hitler praised her film’s ‘incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement’. Now Riefenstahl knew that his will would carry her – like Germany itself – to triumph.

* * *

Where did her journey to fame, and infamy, begin? In her childhood obsession with fairy tales? As a vivacious, headstrong Berlin teenager who seduced a Jewish banker to finance her dance debut? As a slender, topless servant girl in her first movie, Ways to Strength and Beauty? Or as a grasping, ambitious film star reading Mein Kampf?

Hitler’s egocentric and racist tome had exhilarated her. In 1931 she read it from cover to cover on a single train journey, and again on the set, by the mountain streams and forest locations of her latest movie. She called it beautiful. His proposals to tackle social problems – six million Germans were unemployed at the time – impressed her. She sensed that Hitler could ‘save’ the country and a 1932 Nazi rally confirmed her intuition. At Berlin’s Sportpalast his performance and presence struck her ‘like lightning’. He radiated ‘a kind of hypnotic effect’ and to Riefenstahl ‘it seemed as if the earth’s surface were spreading out in front of

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