It is twenty years since Leni Riefenstahl died in September 2003 at the age of 101. She is best known as a Nazi film director but as the large illustrated biography Leni Riefenstahl: five lives (S415.a.200.1) indicates, there were other aspects of her life – dancer and actress before 1933, and photographer and diver after 1945 – and these, rather than her work in the Third Reich, will be the focus of this blog post. 

As a young woman dancing was her passion despite her father’s discouragement. She began to make a career of it but suffered injuries which led to her turning to acting instead. In this respect there are parallels to be drawn with the very slightly older Marlene Dietrich who became an actress after her career as a violinist was cut short by tendonitis. The two women’s lives are contrasted in the recent Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a century in two lives by Karin Wieland (415:3.c.201.1579; the original German version is at 571:73.c.201.5).

Leni Riefenstahl became fascinated by the mountain films of Arnold Fanck, and in an unlikely twist, given her earlier injuries, she convinced him to give her a part in his next film, Der heilige Berg. She went on to act in several of his films including S.O.S Eisberg, the subject of his 1933 book SOS Eisberg : mit Dr. Fanck und Ernst Udet in Grönland : die Grönland-Expedition des Universal-Films S.O.S Eisberg (CCB.60.129*). Mountain films were physically very demanding for the actors and while these films made her a star she endured much hardship during the making of them. Her own 1933 book, Kampf in Schnee und Eis (CCC.60.223*) contains photographs showing some of her challenges. And the front cover of a recent book, Riefenstahl revisited edited by Jörn Glasenapp (C204.c.5879) in which a number of authors reevaluate aspects of her work, is a photograph of her balancing on a slender ladder above a deep glacial crevasse. 

From the 1950s onwards Riefenstahl reinvented herself as a photographer, and a new project became capturing the lives of Sudanese tribespeople who lived in remote areas. She was not the first person to do this – indeed she had been inspired by seeing the earlier work of George Rodger – but the culmination of her work was two volumes of photographs published in the 1970s. The UL has these in English translation: The last of the Nuba (9640.a.15) and The people of Kau (S644.a.97.33).

The translations are a good indication of just how popular and well received these books were. After wilderness years when she was regarded as untouchable because of her association with the Nazis it seems that enough time had elapsed for her to be rehabilitated. Not everyone was impressed though – in a 1975 essay, Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag singled out for criticism Riefenstahl’s book The last of the Nuba, suggesting that her photographs were a continuation of her Nazi work:

Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl’s portrait of them evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical.

More recently her Africa photographs have been beautifully reproduced in a huge volume (S950.a.201.235) which also contains an interview with her, conducted when she was 99 by the film historian Kevin Brownlow who introduces the book by saying:

If Leni Riefenstahl had done nothing but visit Africa and bring back her photographs, her place in history would be secure. For these pictures are an extraordinary record. Equally extraordinary is her stamina ; while she made her first visit in her mid-50s, she undertook her most recent at 98.

A somewhat more critical approach is presented in the recent thesis Der unschuldige Blick: Leni Riefenstahls Nuba-Fotografien by Gisela Schäffer (C212.c.4928) which addresses Riefenstahl’s work through the lens of 21st century decolonisation theories.

In her early 70s Leni Riefenstahl started diving which led to a desire to photograph what she saw beneath the surface. Coral gardens (9385.a.50), again a translation (the original German work is at CCD.60.116*), was published in 1978 and contains stunning colourful photos. In it she wrote of the technical difficulties of underwater photography and also confessed that in order to obtain her scuba diving certificate she had pretended to be 20 years younger.

A follow-up book came out in the early 1990s, Wonders under water (S404:9.a.9.111). In this she acknowledged the help of Horst Kettner  (40 years her junior and her companion for her last 35 years) and wrote that in the 17 years since passing their diving exams, they had done more than a thousand dives together. She continued to enjoy diving and her last dive was a few months before her 100th birthday!

In the postwar years Riefenstahl carefully constructed her public persona and her version of events, and was quick to sue for defamation anyone who challenged this – she won more than 50 lawsuits. Her memoirs were published in the 1980s (CCC.60.241*). The English translation, The sieve of time (415.c.99.811) came out a few years after. The written self-portrait she created here was later challenged by a slew of 21st century books about her.

Leni Riefenstahl: die Verführung des Talents  (415:3.c.200.239) / Leni Riefenstahl: the seduction of genius (415:3.c.200.149 and available online) by the academic film historian Rainer Rother was written and published while she was still alive. In his introduction he made clear that the book was not a traditional biography but was an attempt to understand the myth of her public image, analysing many statements she made in her memoirs and interviews. 

Another German film academic, Jurgen Trimborn, started work on a biography in the 1990s and interviewed Leni Riefenstahl in 1997. Their collaboration did not last long – in the preface to his book (Riefenstahl: eine deutsche Karriere – 415:3.c.200.163 which came out in 2002; English translation Leni Riefenstahl: a life – 415:3.c.200.1644) he wrote:

In the correspondence and phone calls that followed, it eventually became clear that I could not expect Riefenstahl to contribute to a balanced and objective account … it became apparent that there was nothing to be gained by further collaboration.

Both Trimborn’s book and the later Leni: the life and work of Leni Riefenstahl by the American film writer Steve Bach (415:3.c.200.945) correct some of the claims she put forward about her earlier life and place her work in a historical perspective.

Katharine Dicks

*The University Library acquired these works as part of a donation, the library of Walter Schobert, former director of the Filmmuseum Frankfurt.