People's Democracy

 The Nazi Who Refused To Die

 Sudhanva Deshpande

LENI Riefenstahl, poster-girl of the Third Reich, is dead. Some would say about time too. She was 101.

When one thinks of the propaganda machinery of the Third Reich, one thinks automatically of the stunning spectacle of thousands marching in perfect unison at Nuremberg under the gigantic swastikas, and the image of the Führer rising majestically over the crowds of delirious followers. This image achieved its most perfect expression in the films ‘Triumph des Willens’ (‘Triumph of the Will’) and ‘Olympia’ (on the 1936 Olympics) by Leni Riefenstahl.

In 1933, Eugen Hadamovsky wrote: ‘All the power one has, even more than one has, must be demonstrated. One hundred speeches, five hundred newspaper articles, radio talks, films, and plays are unable to produce the same effect as a procession of gigantic masses of people taking place with discipline and active participation.’ Hadamovsky, unsurprisingly, went on to become the National Broadcasting Director of the Third Reich.

The power of the regime was in the demonstration of it, and people like Leni Riefenstahl demonstrated it better than anyone.

‘Triumph of the Will’ is ostensibly a documentary, but as is by now well known, it freely changes the sequence of events, juxtaposes discrete shots as if they happened simultaneously and in the same locale, and, most importantly, many of the sequences are not spontaneous, but carefully orchestrated and rehearsed. Indeed, Leni Riefenstahl herself wrote how ‘the preparations for the Party Convention were made in connection with the preparations for the camera work’.

The apparatus of filming that Riefenstahl conducted was, in that pre-computer and mobile phone era, awesome. She used thirty cameras, sixteen principal cameramen with an assistant each, four complete sound recording trucks, 120 assistants, and several hundred thousand feet of raw stock. All this was used to craft a film that starred one superstar and half a million extras.

The superstar himself, every bit a demagogue, thrived on the adulation of gigantic crowds. Riefenstahl filmed him alone, in solitary splendour, often from below, so that he loomed over the frame, with the sky and the clouds forming a grand backdrop. The crowds, on the other hand, were usually filmed in multitudes, and even when individual faces were shot, the impression created was that of mass frenzy or mass discipline. The collective will was expressed through the iron will of one man; the destiny of a people and a nation was actualised through the triumph of his will. Every participant in these spectacles was expected to turn, as Goebbels famously put it, ‘from a little worm into part of a large dragon’.

In that moment of sheer performance, when all those involved are ensconced in the circle of magic, everything else is forgotten – the terror of the Gestapo, the concentration camps, the extermination of six million Jews, the killing of Communists, the persecution of gypsies, all that melts away into nothingness and the only reality remains the fiction of the ‘pure’ Aryan-German race and its divine right to rule the world via the ‘thousand-year Reich’. Neoliberal philosophers of post-Communist times would do well to remember that the End of History idea has some rather unsavoury antecedents.

No actor, however, ever fully believes in the fiction he or she performs, and I sometimes wonder how it is with men like Adolph Hitler.

Nietzsche, in his 1878 text ‘Human, All Too Human’ wrote: ‘Even when in the deepest distress, the actor ultimately cannot cease to think of the impression he and the whole scenic effect is making . . . If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to APPEAR something it is in the end hard for him to BE anything else. . . . With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception, with all its preparations, its enthralling voice, expression, and gesture, in the midst of the scenery designed to give it effect, they are overcome by BELIEF IN THEMSELVES: it is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them. The founders of religion are distinguished from these great deceivers by the fact that they never emerge from this state of self-deception: or very rarely they experience for once that moment of clarity when doubt overcomes them . . . Self-deception has to exist if a grand EFFECT is to be produced. For men believe in the truth of that which is plainly strongly believed.’ [Emphases in original.]

Nietzsche, then, tells us two things. One, that ‘founders of religions’ are more than ‘great deceivers’. While the latter have moments of self-doubt, the former never ever emerge from the state of self-deception. Two, for ‘belief in themselves’ to become possible, a great deal of preparation is required, including ‘the scenery designed to give it effect’. The scenery, then, is as much for the actor himself as it is for the spectator.

One such master of creating that scenery was the architect Albert Speer, who constructed a ‘cathedral of light’ for the 1936 Nuremberg rally by aiming 130 anti-aircraft lights vertically upwards into the night sky. In his own words: ‘The actual effect far surpassed anything I had imagined. The hundred and thirty sharply defined beams, placed around the field at intervals of forty feet, were visible to a height of twenty to twenty-five thousand feet, after which they merged into a general glow. The feeling was of a vast room, with the beams serving as mighty pillars of infinitely high outer walls. Now and then the clouds move through this wreath of lights, bringing an element of surprise to the image. I imagine that this “cathedral of light” was the first luminescent architecture of this type, and for me it remains not only my most beautiful architectural concept but, after its fashion, the only one which survived the passage of time.’

Leni Riefenstahl was the other such master. Her films will also, whether we like it or not, survive the passage of time for their stunning power and hypnotising craft.

Her life, though, poses some uncomfortable questions. The Nazi regime was intensely patriarchal, and believed that the role of women was to be good healthy mothers producing strong Aryan male children. Leni Riefenstahl was one of the handful of women who won for themselves high praise in the public sphere, excelling in a medium that was then almost exclusively male dominated. Does that make her something of a feminist, or was she a mere instrument of patriarchal domination? How do we look at the triumph of her will in the face of the undoubted male opposition she faced?

Speer, who later became director of war industries in the 1940s, was convicted of war crimes and served 20 years. Leni Riefenstahl was arrested more than once as the war wound down, but eventually not convicted. She always claimed she was just a professional carrying out her duties. Is she Mephistopheles, out to buy our soul, or is she Faust, having sold hers? How complicit do we believe people like her to be in the crimes committed by regimes they served, and served so outstandingly? Is the act of creating consent for a genocidal regime any less criminal than carrying out other duties of state?

Leni Riefenstahl pioneered the technique of filming charismatic leaders, frenzied crowds, symbols and icons of empire, marching soldiers, and powerful athletes. Each and every one of her techniques, made more seductive still by modern technology, enters our drawing rooms on a daily basis today. We only have to open our eyes to the incessant spell that the advertisers of global brands and propagandists of modern empires cast on us to see that the legacy of Leni Riefenstahl is far from dead, even though she finally is.