Product Description

Leni Riefenstahl, the woman known as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” made some of the greatest and most innovative documentaries ever made. They are also insidious glorifications of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, Steven Bach reveals the truths and lies behind Riefenstahl’s lifelong self-vindication as an apolitical artist who claimed to know nothing of the Holocaust and denied her complicity with the criminal regime she both used and sanctified.

A riveting and illuminating biography of one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the twentieth century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125037 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-12
• Released on: 2008-02-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Tiefenthaler, an actress and writer of Austrian descent, was raised and educated in England, but her reading of Bach's biography of the famed and reviled Nazi filmmaker betrays a puzzling lack of familiarity with the rhythms of the English language. Her fruity accent notwithstanding, Tiefenthaler delivers a halting performance, pausing in the middle of linked phrases, or unexpectedly extending a sentence, as if she had not realized that further work remained to be done. The reading of an audiobook should be fluid, as if the reader was the composer of the book, intimately familiar with each and every word. Tiefenthaler evokes images of a reader squinting at a piece of paper, attempting to suss out the words on the fly, and the results cannot help detracting from Bach's solid work. Available as a Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 29). (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Riefenstahl revered "what was beautiful, strong, and healthy," but her greatest achievements, the paradigmatic films Triumph of the Will and Olympia were made to glorify Hitler and the Third Reich. In his penetrating and superbly well-written biography, Bach ponders the difficult questions raised by Riefenstahl's many-chaptered life (she was 101 when she died in 2003). Is there a moral dimension to art? Is devotion to making art an excuse for moral failings? As Bach expertly elucidates the opportunistic Riefenstahl's exploits as a dancer, actress, filmmaker, Nazi insider, African adventurer, photographer, and deep-sea diver, he takes measure, as no one else has, of her ruthless ambition, idealized aesthetics, and extreme egocentricity. Dexterously fitting together newly recovered puzzle pieces, Bach presents evidence suggesting that Riefenstahl was part Jewish; explicates her close relationships with Hitler, Goebbels, and Albert Speer; documents her use of "film slaves" borrowed from "holding pens for the Holocaust"; and analyzes her "self-righteous entitlement" and personal revisionist history. Possessed of phenomenal vitality and physical courage, if lacking in compassion and integrity, Riefenstahl loved fairy tales, and, as Bach so perceptively and artistically reveals, she succeeded in living one, however insidious. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Brilliant. . . . It’s difficult to overpraise Bach’s efforts. . . . A compulsively readable and scrupulously crafted work . . . . [Bach created] an almost novelistically compelling narrative of a life endlessly obfuscated by lies.”
—The Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Energetic . . . Serves as [a] much needed corrective to all the spin, evasions and distortions of the record purveyed by Riefenstahl.”
—The New York Times

“Fascinating. . . . The definitive new biography from Steven Bach should silence any lingering Riefenstahl apologists. . . . [He] bravely sorts through the mountain of falsehoods.” —Film Comment

“Fascinating. . . . Leni is a cautionary tale about an artist whose prodigious determination and ambition seem to have been unmediated by the slightest influence of conscience, soul, or heart.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

Customer Reviews

Shame
There have been many attemps to stain Riefenstahl's image along the years, and this one is not the most successful at all. It serves little purpose to the academic bunch. It ashames those that search for objectivity. It ashames those that perceive that Bach has waited for Leni's death (102 years old) to publish this piece of propaganda.

Bach fails on piercing the German mindset that prevailed in the pre-Shoah years. From Triumph of the Will (1935) to the final solution (1942) there are 7 years that searchers will keep on investigating otherwise than in this failed book. Years that can't be blamed on Leni.

Mr Bach, Leni Riefenstahl is a victim of her time. Don't try to bury her merits as an artist into this pile of ordure you have written. The reasons for the Shoah have to be sought somewhere else.

Look for Fiendlander's works for example and leave Leni aside. That's too cheap and un-academic. It's 2008 now and we don't need Leni's head to be cut off to please the masses. She was an artist. We need a deeper insight. The kind of insight that explains how such a German cultivated country faced a cultivated Jewishness in such a violent, deranged manner as to lead to a Shoah. And for that, Mr Bach, Leni's influence plays little relevance.

Good Intro to Leni
After reading Jurgen Trimborn's admirable but somewhat inaccessible biography of Riefenstahl, I sought out this book in hopes that it would be friendlier to a Riefenstahl novice such as me. It certainly is an easier read and a much better starting place.

Steven Bach, of Final Cut fame, writes from the standpoint of a motion picture enthusiast. He also has a POV where Riefenstahl's Nazi associations are concerned and he doesn't hide it. For Bach Riefenstahl is the living version of Klaus Mann's Mephisto, a careerist willing to do anything and associate with anyone to advance her "art." He also makes the case (clearly building on Trimborn's work, among others) that Riefenstahl not only had no problem with anything Hitler did or said, she likely agreed with most if not all of it.

Bach's style is that of a gossipy Hollywood bio, which is fine by me, but he's no fan magazine hack. He knows the power of the snide observation and, best of all, how damning Leni's own words were. At times Riefenstahl comes across as downright delusional about her artistic abilities and men's lust for her. To hear her tell it no man so much as entered the same zipcode as Leni Riefenstahl without falling madly in love with her.

Some may have disagreements about Bach's assessment of Riefenstahl's artistic contributions. I've only seen clips of her work so my own opinion is somewhat limited. Bach does make a good case the Riefenstahl either stole the ideas of others or took credit for their work. Bach doesn't buy the argument that the art is more important than the character or actions of the artist. He also doesn't buy that Riefenstahl was much of an artist.

This is no love letter to Leni. It is an entertaining read. Gossipy, slightly bitchy (as one reviewer here has aptly noted), and full of telling details and quotes, this is a easy entry into the myths and controversy that make up Leni Riefenstahl.

Brilliant But Petty and Cruel -- Oh, Wait, That's The Author!
Not since Albert Goldman's ELVIS has a dense, full length biography of a sexy, glamorous larger than life legend been written with such sadistic relish, such delicious malicious bitchery and pure venomous guile.

There's no question that Leni Riefenstahl, the stunningly beautiful German woman who made hypnotic propaganda films for the Nazis, was guilty of moral cowardice and hypocrisy, if not during the war, then certainly afterwards. She persisted to the end of her life in wanting to have it both ways -- saying in effect "I didn't know," and at the same time "I was too scared to stop Hitler -- too scared that I would be next." She claimed to have legions of Jewish friends before the war, but she never tried to help them when things got bad, even though she had lots of Nazi influence and power. And she always seemed weirdly out of touch with the human results of Hitler's evil deeds.

The problem is, Steve Bach doesn't know when to quit. He sneers at Leni Riefenstahl not just for the big things -- not strangling Hitler with her bare hands, the way he seems to imagine he would have done -- but for the little things too. The book is full of catty little remarks like, "Leni was always conscious of her hypnotic effect on men" or "Leni didn't mind having handsome, powerful men buy her presents" or "Leni's fearless mountain climbing only made her feminine allure more overpowering to the distinguished male cinema artists who indulged her every creative whim."

It's hard to tell whether Bach hates Leni for being heartless and callous or for being beautiful, talented -- and very knowingly seductive.

There is a much more serious issue here than the hissy ALL ABOUT EVE style bitchery of a jaded Hollywood insider. Bach insists on judging a German film maker by a far more rigorous standard than he would ever apply to the film industry in Hollywood today -- or seventy years ago, for that matter. When Leni goes to Hollywood he brags that the left-leaning Hollywood of 1938 treated the lovely German visitor with scorn -- but how did they treat Margaret Mitchell when she came to town the very next year? Bach has nothing to say about why those same "leftists" failed to prevent the making of a racist epic like GONE WITH THE WIND.

If Leni Riefenstahl shares any part of the guilt for Auschwitz -- and I agree that she does -- then David O. Selznick is equally responsible for the murder of Emmitt Till, the bombings in Birmingham, and all the other hate crimes perpetrated in the Jim Crow south. Bach is in a big hurry to compare Leni to the Stalinist film maker Eisenstein -- arguing in a feeble and half-hearted way that Eisenstein "probably" rebelled at what he was doing. But why not compare Leni Riefenstahl to D.W. Griffiths, or Margaret Mitchell, or David Selznick? All of them dealt in racial hate. They looked the other way while helpless people were tortured and murdered, too. But mentioning America's poisonous history of racial hate would reflect badly on Bach's own milieu. Bach's beloved Hollywood elite never questioned the racial status quo in the Jim Crow south -- at least, not until long after blacks had begun risking their lives to bring the horror of their situation to national attention.

What's really going on here is not genuine, humanistic outrage, but elitist hypocrisy. Bach hates Leni Riefenstahl because he knows that, for all their tiresome liberal cant, just about everyone in Hollywood (and the book world, and the world of leftist Manhattan politics) has the same rat-like survival instincts that Leni had. None of the liberals who demonstrate their courage by hating her guts now ever had to look Hitler in the eye. But they know who would have blinked first. And they know themselves too well to ever show mercy to someone just like them.