Hitler's favourite film-maker and her five lives

Did the supremely talented Leni Riefenstahl sell her soul to the Devil? Or did simply make the mistake of putting art above all else?



She entered like a true diva, swept into the sweaty conference room at the Frankfurt Book Fair on a wave of applause, propped up ever so gently by nubile female assistants.

"She looks like Marlene Dietrich," an elderly German colleague sighed, devouring the shrivelled sex symbol of yesteryear with his eyes.

For someone pushing 99, Leni Riefenstahl, the once beautiful actress and film-maker who might well have rivalled Marlene Dietrich had she not sold her soul to the Nazis, certainly did not look bad.

"I have more steel in my body than bone," she complained, citing numerous fractures and operations that prevent her completing her oeuvre.

At 98, she is still working on an undersea documentary despite being injured in a helicopter crash in Sudan this year. She had returned there to visit the Nuba people she once photographed in one of - as she describes them in the title of her glossy new book - her "five lives."

Riefenstahl had not come to the Frankfurt Book Fair, however, to bore the public with medical reports or slides of sea slugs and corals.

Leni Riefenstahl - Five Lives, a "pictorial biography" with 400 illustrations, is nothing like her 1993 volume A Memoir, in which she told her story and argued her case. It is a panorama of her life and a gathering of some of her spectacular photographs.

But in the year that the world's greatest literary gathering salutes Poland, the Nazis' leading visual ideologist was here to - yet again - set the record straight.

It is a matter of fact that over the years she has been thought to be dangerous. She has been investigated thoroughly on several occasions. She was detained and effectively imprisoned. She was also cleared.

The anger never dies down, however. This month the news that American actor-director Jodie Foster was considering making a movie of Riefenstahl's life was greeted with outrage in some quarters.

Arnold Schwartzman, the British film-maker who won an Oscar for the Holocaust documentary Genocide, says: "A lot of people in Hollywood are horrified at this. There will be many objections. Leni Riefenstahl was probably the best propaganda tool that Hitler had, and a lot of the terrible things that happened were as a consequence of what she did."

The central message of Riefenstahl's new book and rare press conference is that everybody had been lying about her.

"Fifty per cent of what appears about me in the press is not true," she said. "I have conducted more than 50 law suits to establish the truth."

Judging by the reactions of the audience, her message is getting through. This was no press conference. It was adulation by sections of the German press to whom Riefenstahl embodies the sufferings of their deeply misunderstood nation.

Since the mid-1950s, Riefenstahl gave up movie-making for still photography, as it was obvious she would have the utmost difficulty in financing, making or showing any more films.

She started making journeys to Africa and she came upon the Nuba people and was moved by their beauty, publishing pictures of them in book form in the 60s and 70s.

The Africans in her photos are as handsome and nearly nude as ebony statues. They have a remarkable sense of power and strength of form. As pictures, they manage to be very beautiful and quite empty at the same time.

Now, cut back to a time when Riefenstahl was 31, a dancer and actress, a member of German artistic circles, a beautiful woman who was also skilled as a skier and a mountaineer.

First as an actress and then increasingly as a director and visionary, she had been involved in what were known as "mountain films" - deeply romantic tributes to the spiritual purity of mountains and those who loved them.

She won a high reputation in Germany as a film-maker, especially for a film called The Blue Light. In a mechanical, physical way this was plainly deserved. She had a feeling of rapture for obvious forms and surface flawlessness; she became skilled with a moving camera and montage.

She was then hired by Goebbels and Hitler to make two large documentaries: the one, on Nazi party rallies at Nuremburg, is called Triumph of the Will; the other is a film, Olympia, about the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin. No one interested in film, or concerned about how easily its skills can be put to meretricious and dangerous ends, can afford not to see them. They are, in the fullest sense of the words, fascist pictures.

Asked about Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl was showered with applause from some of her press conference audience when she declared: "I merely made a film which won many prizes."

Her reply to a question as to why she should have been so unfairly persecuted unleashed a storm of ovation: "Because we lost the war in which we perpetrated terrible crimes. A scapegoat had to be found. I was the perfect victim because I made the perfect film."

Modesty was never Riefenstahl's strong suite, but few would dispute her claim that Triumph of the Will is one of the most potent pieces of propaganda ever created.

Riefenstahl was not a member of the Nazi Party, as she constantly reminds us, but she hitched her wagon to the cause a year before Hitler came to power, and remained the Führer's intimate friend to the bitter end.

How intimate cannot be speculated upon, for fear of unleashing a 51st lawsuit.

She was in even closer contact with Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister and notorious womaniser, who liked to place his hands on the derrieres of actresses. Her book claims Goebbels did not like her at all. Yet the propaganda minister expresses his admiration for Riefenstahl in an entry in his diaries: "She is the only one of the stars who really understands us."

"Goebbels lies," Riefenstahl retorted when confronted with the quote.

Just like everybody else.

What is the greatest lie perpetrated against her?

"That I was in a concentration camp and engaged Gypsies there for my film Tiefland." Pure invention.

"The Gypsies that worked with me wrote me letters afterwards to say that was the greatest time of their lives."

She is certainly telling the truth here. Working on her set, having been selected from a "reception camp," sure beat Auschwitz, which is where many of her cast ended up after the filming.

Her former political leanings she has repudiated, her artistic credo she has not. "I prefer motives that are positive ... ideal.'

And the Germans applauded her for that. Just another idealist who ended up on the wrong side, and has been paying the price ever since.

- INDEPENDENT