LENI'S OLYMPIA

She might have been another Dietrich. Or even a Fritz Lang. Instead, Leni Riefenstahl became notorious as the Aryan muse handpicked by Hitler to document his Fascist vision in Triumph of the Will. What was behind her pact with the Devil? In Germany, STEPHEN SCHIFF talked to Riefenstahl, now ninety, on the eve of the English publication of her memoirs

STEPHEN SCHIFF

He descends from the clouds like Apollo, while the populace of the medieval city below visibly thirsts for him. For a moment, we glimpse his face —modest, gentle, serenely appreciative—and then his saluting hand, which glows mysteriously; he's like a benign sorcerer, cupping the sunlight in his palm. As his car parades past the rapturous throngs, a Baroque statue gazes in wonderment; a cat in a window turns to greet him; a mother breaks from the crowd to present the child in her arms, and, as the masses exult, the child beams and salutes. He vanishes into one of the ancient stone buildings, but the crowd won't have it—they're mad for him, desperate. And eventually he appears on a balcony above them, nodding sagely, allowing himself, just this once, to drink in the adulation—more for the sake of his idolaters than for his own.

He is, of course, Adolf Hitler; the setting is Nuremberg; and the film is Triumph of the Will, perhaps the most potent and chilling documentary ever made, a record of the 1934 Nazi Party rally whose ecstatic depiction of absolute power—of what absolute power looks like—ranks among the most influential visions this century has produced. The film's hero has been dead for nearly fifty years. But the woman he hired to make it is not only alive and well, she's improbably hale. When Leni Riefenstahl descends the stairs of her modern prefab home in a woodsy suburb of Munich, she's wearing black filigreed tights, high heels, and a purple silk blouse. Very Dietrich. Her hair is dyed a canary blond, and her wide eyes flash vampishly. At the foot of the stairs, she greets me, cocks her hip, and bursts into chatter about the undersea wonders she photographed just last month while scuba-diving in the Maldives. "It was for me more than diving,'' she says in her dense German accent, "more than making film of water creatures. If you see this world, you are very close to creation; if you see the small things there, how it all fits together in nature, the silence—you hear nothing, ja?— it's fantastic. Fantastic." Her eyes blaze. It's very hard to remember that on August 22 Leni Riefenstahl will be ninety years old.

"If I had said I had slept with Hitler, or he kissed me or something, maybe it would have been better tor me!

"If the Communists had won Riefenstahl would have made for Stalin. No doobt aboot it."

"I started photographing only because I couldn't make films anymore. Otherwise, I would make him,film,film."

"You just can't think of Leni as, you know, a substitute grandmother,'' says a young male friend. "It's impossible. You actually get caught up in her sexuality, and she's so captivating that you start thinking things you shouldn't be thinking."

That may be going a bit far, but Riefenstahl at ninety is amazingly flirty and sensual. In fact, her supernal vigor is almost too apt: it fits too well with her long-standing image as a sexy Third Reich she-wolf, the Brunhild in jodhpurs whom Hitler allegedly (and probably apocryphally) called "the perfect example of German womanhood."

Riefenstahl has always been almost comically German: fanatically well organized, nature-loving, athletic, mystical. Her movies—especially the two documentary features that have secured her place in film history—remain impressive not just for their ominous beauty and grandeur but because they were such enormous logistical feats, requiring dozens of cameramen, years of editing, the strategic skills of a general. Critics like Siegfried Kracauer, Lotte Eisner, and Susan Sontag came to view them as the sulfurous flower of the Fascist aesthetic—and went on to condemn Riefenstahl herself as Hitler's pawn, a knowing propagandist who somehow got away with the sort of iniquity the Nuremberg criminals paid for with their lives. Triumph of the Will glorified the way a rabble of golden youths could be marshaled into vast geometric ranks, the way raw animal power could be disciplined into submission and then cloaked in empyreal mist. Olympia, Riefenstahl's masterly record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, celebrated striving and grit and flawless bodies twisting against the sky. After the war, when her association with Hitler made it impossible for her to pursue her filmmaking career, she turned to photography, and, during the sixties and seventies, her magnificent pictures of the godlike Nuba tribe of Sudan emphasized their statuesque physiques, their love of fierce militaristic competition—all of which drew further accusations of Fascism. Whatever one called it, Riefenstahl's art was about the rigorous pursuit of an almost inhuman perfection. And so was her life. She was forever off on some heroic quest—mountain climbing, skiing, exploring Africa, deep-sea diving. It was as though nothing on earth, not even time, could oppose her ferocious will.

In 1946 the screenwriter Budd Schulberg wrote a rabid Saturday Evening Post article about her entitled "Nazi Pin-Up Girl," and one can well imagine generations of slavering fantasists, German and American alike, mooning over the tabloid vision of Riefenstahl as some creamy Aryan dominatrix, snapping her riding crop and bidding her troops to the brink. Over the years, one also heard hideous stories about her— about how she stood by dispassionately and watched a massacre of civilians during Germany's invasion of Poland, about how she was Hitler's mistress, or Goebbels's mistress, or both. As myth, in fact, Leni Riefenstahl is nearly perfect. To her critics, she's a living object lesson, a symptom of the malignancy that might once again bloom in our midst if we were ever to drop our guard.

There's just one problem. The evidence supporting these tales of Riefenstahl's outrages is consistently flimsy or spurious; the evidence disputing them is, at the very least, far more detailed, and in many instances it's substantiated by documents, eyewitnesses, and court testimony. Riefenstahl never was Hitler's mistress, nor Goebbels's (after several failed attempts at seduction, the propaganda minister became her most implacable enemy). And while those civilians in Poland were being massacred Riefenstahl was apparently protesting to the German general Reichenau about his soldiers' mistreatment of Polish prisoners—and about how her indignation had almost gotten her shot. Whether one views her as an evil genius or a narcissistic naif, she is certainly among the most widely slandered figures of the century.

Which is why the appearance in English of her memoirs, published in Britain this month by Quartet Books (they have not yet found an American publisher), is something of an event. Riefenstahl has been threatening to clobber the world with this mighty tome practically from the moment the war ended, and though the tome itself finally proves too tumid by half, in some ways it was worth the wait: there's valuable material here for film scholars, for African specialists (her exploits among the Nuba are recounted at great length), and especially for anyone who wants a cutaway view of Hitler's Germany from a fresh, if somewhat bizarre, angle—the angle of an ambitious young artist trying to manipulate the Fiihrer faster than he could manipulate her.

For better or worse, though, the book is also Riefenstahl's testimony for the defense. It includes endless litanies of the libels against her and the lawsuits that resulted (they number more than fifty), and you can't help noting that she has won every suit she's brought—except one. In 1985, a documentary by the German filmmaker Nina Gladitz showed that during the making of her last movie, Tiefland, Riefenstahl used Gypsies from the Maxglan prison camp as extras— Gypsies who eventually wound up in Auschwitz. Although the court ordered Gladitz to excise passages of the film asserting that Riefenstahl made "empty promises" to the Gypsies about keeping them out of Auschwitz (she almost certainly had no idea of their fate), the rest of the film—including damning interviews with surviving Gypsies—was cleared for broadcast. Riefenstahl insists that Maxglan was at the time not a prison camp but a reception center for the indigent, and that she treated the Gypsies very well indeed.

"They make lies," she says with a protracted sigh. "Look, for me it would be much easier if after the war I had said, 'Oh yes, I have done this and that and I'm very sorry; I feel guilty.' If I had said I had slept with Hitler, or he kissed me or something, maybe it would have been better for me, and I would have got a lot of money, too."

"Risks don't exist for me. I'm not afraid."

Not that she's destitute. We are sitting across from each other at her sunny dining-room table; the floors are white marble, the furniture is leather and rattan, there are African knickknacks placed tastefully here and there, and on the wall hangs a fancy clock with an annoying ding. Riefenstahl's conversational style, bolstered as it is by her drill-bit gaze and her huge, coaxing smile, is so intense that it's easy to forget all the people running around in the background—the secretaries scurrying, fetching documents to support Riefenstahl's version of her history, the phones buzzing, the legal and financial abscesses being lanced just out of view. It wasn't always this way. ''When I first met her, in 1972," says Claus Offerman, an American translator and historian who helps her with English-language correspondence, ''she was living from hand to mouth. She didn't even have a bed; she had a mattress on the floor." That was before the success of her two remarkable photography books The Last of the Nuba and The People of Kau. The house we're sitting in, with its big picture windows and its gently sloping yard, might be called the house the Nuba built.

Suddenly she reaches across the table and grabs my hand. ''It's so horrible, the artists and the people in industry who were a hundred percent for Hitler, and then after the war they said, 'No, we hated him.' Like Austria. 'No, we hated it, we were forced to do it.' I am the only one who has said, 'Yes, I was in the beginning an admirer of his. I did believe in him.' At the end of the war, when I found out the things he has done, I hated this, and from this moment I started to hate him. Really, I had the feeling at the end of the war that if I had a knife I would kill him. But only at that time—before, not." She shakes her head and stares down at the table. ''Because I told the truth, I have suffered. You are young. You can't understand how many lies can be written."

Yet Riefenstahl can't claim true innocence, either. Indeed, the facts in her case raise questions that are far more complex and fascinating than the myth. For the real Third Reich was not so much a nation of jackbooted fiends, but of variations on Leni Riefenstahl—people who found a way to live, work, and even flourish amid the most monstrous society this century has produced. Were they themselves monsters? Were they blind? If the phenomenon that Hannah Arendt called ''the banality of evil" could produce an Adolf Eichmann, what was it that produced a Leni Riefenstahl? If she was Hitler's favorite filmmaker, does she share in his guilt? And if she made a great Elm that celebrated a great evil, was she definitively a part of that evil? What do we ask—what should we ask—of a Leni Riefenstahl?

'Look, my dear," she says. ''The time was so different that it is impossible to speak of it if you were not there. Can you understand that you were living in a country that was very poor, almost kaput, with six million people out of work? It was horrible in Berlin."

KH Indeed it was. The Germany that brought Hitler to power in 1933 was wracked by hyperinflation, economic depression, and the lingering demoralization that followed defeat in World War I. ''When I first saw Hitler speak," she says, ' 'before he came to power, he had a very strong aura. Very strong. Only people who saw him then can understand it. I didn't believe in what he promised, that all people would work and so on, but later I saw it happen. The people found work; they were happy."

During the first four years of his regime, Hitler murdered hundreds of his former allies, put Germany on a war footing, pulled out of the League of Nations, destroyed the country's labor unions, and unleashed the beginnings of the anti-Semitic program that would eventually culminate in the Final Solution. But he also revolutionized the German highway system, launched innovative anti-pollution measures, improved the country's working conditions, initiated a Utopian city-planning program, raised health standards, reduced infant mortality, chipped away at German class barriers, and rejuvenated the economy. As the American historian John Toland wrote, ''If Hitler had died in 1937, on the fourth anniversary of his coming to power.. .he would undoubtedly have gone down as one of the greatest figures in German history."

''All people loved Hitler at that time," Riefenstahl claims. "And all the diplomats came from America and from everywhere to see the new Germany. Even in Nuremberg in 1934 they vvere all happy to see Hitler." But after the rest of the world stopped loving him, Riefenstahl's ardency continued. In 1940, following Hitler's invasion of France, she sent him a telegram that read, "With indescribable joy, deeply moved and in fervent gratitude, we experience with you, my Fiihrer, your own and Germany's greatest victory, the arrival of German troops in Paris... "

Yet now she tells me, "I thought, like many people, that he would be the guarantee of peace."

She shrugs—but it's bigger than a shrug: her arm makes a sweeping arc of helplessness and disappointment. Riefenstahl's gestures are grand, dramatic, like a silent-movie star's; her eyes often go moist as they search the middle distance, and she dips in and out of the most fervent emotion at the drop of a hat. In her memoirs, she writes of fainting spells, psychosomatic breakdowns, and bouts of public weeping, and even watching her discuss the day's business with her loyal minions, you feel as though she's tossing on stormy seas. Strong though she is, panic and desperation are never very far away. Nearly every conversation begins with a complaint or a crisis or a vast insoluble dilemma (the chapters of her memoirs bear such titles as "Endless Difficulties," "Turbulent Weeks," "A Disastrous Accident," "A Difficult Year"), and she often requires soothing before she can settle into her usual concentrated hum.

At once masterful and terribly needy, Riefenstahl has the kind of vulnerability that addicts people to her, that draws them in and makes them feel they're serving a worthy cause. Here in her house, there's only one topic to discuss, one project to undertake: Leni Riefenstahl, her life, her art, their furtherance. Her secretaries, Gisela Jahn and Inge Brandler, work tirelessly for a pittance; the American Claus Offerman handles her English-language affairs for free. That's not to mention her companion, Horst Kettner, a tall, floppy-looking forty-eight-year-old with eggshell-blue eyes and lank white hair and the slow, ingratiating smile of a wry Nebraskan farmhand.

Just now, Kettner is hovering with intent. No visit to any German home is complete without rivers of coffee and mountains of cake, and Kettner is muttering darkly at the cookies Riefenstahl has provided: they don't look fresh enough; the chocolate on them has turned gray; they've got to be replaced. His fastidiousness sends Riefenstahl into a fit of schoolgirl giggles, and her hands flutter across the table in a halfhearted attempt to help him right her wrong. "Iam the worst housewife that ever lived," she burbles. "I can't even see that these cookies are no good." At the age when most girls of her generation were learning the nuances of strudel and weisswurst, Riefenstahl was entrancing herself with ballet and theater; she never learned to cook so much as a frankfurter. Kettner, meanwhile, is the sort of homebound tinkerer who could probably roast a pheasant on a leaky radiator—and then use his fork to fix the leak.

They met in 1968, when Riefenstahl hired Kettner, who was then a somewhat aimless part-time auto mechanic, to fix cars and work cameras on one of her African expeditions. He was twenty-four, she sixty-six, and they've been together ever since. But even at ninety, Riefenstahl strikes one as surprisingly impetuous and provocative; it's hard to imagine her settling down for twentyfour years with someone as stolid as Kettner. Friends say she spends most of her life these days either off on some diving expedition or working at home, organizing, editing, or attending to the healthy stream of fan mail that, according to Claus Offerman, comes from "places like Arizona, where blue-haired ladies still remember her in The White Hell of Piz Paid." She rarely ventures into Munich, which is some twenty miles to the north, rarely socializes except with her staff. "I am slowing down these days," she says rather cheerfully. "I'm only 10 percent of what I was. Ja, look. Last night I worked until two o'clock because we were looking for a slide that we couldn't find, Horst and me. But after that I'm very tired. In the past I worked for eighteen hours every day." Not every day, surely. One recalls a famous Eisenstaedt photograph of her at a fancy party, standing with two other actresses, Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong. Didn't she ever lock up the editing room, slip into something silky, and spend the night tantalizing Berlin's power elite?

Afraid not. "In my life," she says, "I have had only friends who have been poor and have had no influence, who can't help me in any way. None of the men in my life were famous people. I was never ambitious that way. When I worked, I slept in the cutting room, and even my parents didn't see me. Nobody. And with men, I have never thought to sleep with a man to have a better job. The quality of my work— this was all of my life."

Well, not all. Riefenstahl's memoirs are unexpectedly frank about her love life, which during her youth seems to have been a series of bodice-ripping encounters with hunky young skiers and tennis players and cameramen. Apparently a lot of her most tempestuous trysts were the kind that started with a smoldering glance across a crowded room. Her brief romance in 1936 with the decathlon champion Glenn Morris, for instance, began when he received his Olympic gold medal and headed down the steps from the award podium. "I held out my hand and congratulated him," Riefenstahl writes, "but he grabbed me in his arms, tore off my blouse, and kissed my breasts, right in the middle of the stadium, in front of a hundred thousand spectators. A lunatic, I thought. I wrenched myself out of his grasp and dashed away. But I could not forget the wild look in his eyes..."

Riefenstahl was married once, to an army major named Peter Jacob—another smoldering-glance romance. "If you ask me the strongest feeling I have ever had in my life," she says, "it was my love for my husband, Peter. But I suffered horribly, because he loved me also extremely, but he was never able to be faithful for more than five days. And even still I could have stayed with him, but he lied so much. He would always say, 'It isn't true, you're having a bad fantasy,' and so it was going, going, going like this." Married in 1944, they were divorced two years later because, she says, "the love feelings were kaput. I forgave him for everything, but now he was like a brother or family—the erotic feeling was for me dead." I ask her whether she ever wanted to marry again. "Not very much, because I want to do what I want to do. I want to be independent. My father was a kind of despot, and I fought with him ever since I was three or four, and that made me want only one thing, to be free." Did she ever want children? She smiles rather wistfully. "For a very short time I did, but I did not have a man who would be a good father. My films are really my children. I started photographing only because I couldn't make films anymore. Otherwise, I would make film, film, film—a lot of films."

That she has not, and cannot, is the great tragedy of her life— and a direct consequence of her prosperity under the Third Reich. Immediately after the war, the elaborate competing bureaucracies of the victorious Allies virtually swallowed her up. Interrogated and incarcerated in various relocation centers and prisons, she claims she was held at times without food or water and even shut up in a mental hospital where she was subjected to electroshock treatment. In all, she was confined for some three years. By 1952, the Allies' denazification tribunals had determined that she would not be charged with Nazi crimes, although she was deemed to be a "sympathizer." The stigma proved indelible. Riefenstahl was able to complete Tiefland, the melodrama she had been working on throughout the war, but whenever any other film project approached the production stage, accusations would appear in the press and backers would flee.

In the mid-fifties, Riefenstahl read Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa and became entranced by the idea of Africa, an Africa untouched and untamed and very far from the world of gossip and controversy that had been hounding her for a decade. "I had to see it,'" she says, and she began to prepare a movie about slave trading called Black Cargo. That film, too, would fall through, but while researching it Riefenstahl came across a magazine photograph that intrigued her. It showed a pair of tribal wrestlers; they looked genuinely wild and beautiful and strange. By 1962 Riefenstahl had arranged the first of seven expeditions she would eventually make to visit the Nuba—to live among them, study their ways, and, of course, photograph them.

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The Nuba might have been invented for Riefenstahl—they were naked, athletic, artistic, free. "These people had nothing," she recalls. "They had the earth, a little bit of water, no money, no iron, and what they ate is only barley and oats. But they were happy, and their life was fantastic. And this was the happiest time of my life. It was so fantastic that I wanted to stay with them always." Later, when her photographs appeared, a great many people found the idea of Riefenstahl living among the Nuba—especially the Nuba men—almost as fascinating as the Nuba themselves.

Riefenstahl giggles and claps her hand to her chest. "No, no," she says, "for me the Nuba men are like big, happy children. I was sleeping together with them in a hut, but there was nothing erotic about it, not a little bit. Tribal people have a very strong feeling about the difference between young women and women who are not young—not just the Nuba, the Masai too. And they saw that I was not a young woman, so they were not interested in that way. And for me, all of my feeling is for art. I want to see, and if I see, I want to make a photograph—not other feelings."

The Nuba books rescued Riefenstahl from poverty, but they couldn't rescue the Nuba themselves from the encroachments of civilization. Under the influence of Muslim governments and Western tourists (perhaps attracted by Riefenstahl's books), the Nuba gave up their proud nudity and took to wearing whatever rags they could come by. As their culture dissipated, so did her interest. Besides, she now had a new passion. On vacation in the Kenyan seaport of Malindi during the early seventies, she discovered snorkeling, and the glimpse it gave her of the underwater world made her once again "want to see." She told her scuba-diving instructor that she was fifty-one—which would have made her the oldest participant in the course if it had been true. But it wasn't. When Leni Riefenstahl received her diving certificate, she was seventyone years old.

"Iam happy now that I had such a long life," she says, "because at the end of my life I have seen the fantastic world underwater. And I want to live more now, to make an underwater film." Except for some pain from an old hip injury, her health is good; one can easily envision her chugging into the next millennium. "I have never had fear of dying," she says. "No, on the contrary, but I would like to die when my work is finished. The reason I haven't died in the past was always people who need me, like Horst; he needs me very much. What will he do when I am gone? We are so different. I am active, he is passive. And he doesn't like risk. Risks don't exist for me. You have to try. I'm not afraid."

Horst thinks she should be. Now, in keeping us supplied with caffeine and carbohydrates, he has an ulterior motive: he's watching over Riefenstahl. She doesn't give many interviews, and if he had his way, she'd give none at all. "Leni is convinced that if people only know her she'll have no more problems," says a friend. "But Horst has written off everybody, and he thinks, Don't talk to anybody, because they're all against you and they will destroy you." Now his ears have perked up because we've left off discussing the happy Nuba and the little fishes. We've taken up the most dangerous subject in the Riefenstahl canon. We're talking about her relationship with Adolf Hitler.

Riefenstahl says she first set eyes on Hitler in February 1932, when "on the spur of the moment" she attended a speech he gave at the Berlin Sports Palace. In her memoirs she writes that watching him left her feeling "quite paralyzed. Although there was a great deal in his speech that I didn't understand, I was still fascinated, and I sensed that the audience was in bondage to this man." She discussed the experience with a Jewish friend, Manfred George, then an editor of the Berlin evening newspaper Tempo (and later editor in chief of the German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau in New York). George thought Hitler was "a genius—but dangerous," and Riefenstahl decided she wanted to meet him. She wrote him a letter, and though she says she had little hope of a reply, she may be being disingenuous. For by that time Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most attractive and celebrated women in Berlin.

Bom Helene Berta Amalie Riefenstahl in 1902, she was the daughter of a wellto-do Berlin businessman who owned a large heating and ventilation company. A cultivated man with a passion for the theater, Alfred Riefenstahl nevertheless had no intention of seeing his daughter follow the artistic inclinations that her mother indulged. Leni's passions were nature, fairy tales (her favorite reading, even at the late age of fifteen, was a magazine called Fairy Tale World), and the ballet; unbeknownst to her father, she began taking dancing lessons at sixteen. By the time she was twenty-one, her free-form, Isadora Duncan-style dance performances had made her a star throughout Middle Europe, even attracting the attention of the great theater director Max Reinhardt, who wanted her to play the eponymous Amazon queen in Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 play, Penthesilea.

But in 1924 a dance injury—and a chance trip to a local movie theater—led her to seek out the film director Dr. Arnold Fanck, whose specialty was mountain pictures, movies in which the real star was the Alpine scenery against which Fanck's actors struggled like so many squirming specks. A meeting with Riefenstahl turned his head; he conceived a film called The Holy Mountain for her, and she threw herself into it with her usual impulsiveness. Like almost everything else in her life, climbing and skiing came easily to her; her facility at slipping among the rocks even led one disapproving critic to dub her diese olige Ziege—"this oily mountain goat." But The Holy Mountain was a hit, and so were the next few films she made under Fanck's aegis. The mountain goat had become a movie star.

Riefenstahl was more ambitious than anyone knew. She had watched Fanck carefully over the years, had even manned the camera for him, and now she felt ready to direct a mountain film of her own. Yet her mystical and somewhat childish sensibility, fed by the lingering love of fairy tales, led her away from Fanck's ruddy-cheeked realism; she wanted to make the kind of moony Alpine fantasia Fanck would only cluck at. Taking her cue from an old Dolomite legend, Riefenstahl directed The Blue Light, in which she played the ineffable mountain girl Junta, a village outcast who alone knows the secret of the mysterious light that glows atop Monte Cristallo whenever the moon is full. On the face of it, the movie was downright silly, but Riefenstahl's visual gift was undeniable; she adopted Fanck's glaciers and clouds and, using innovative filtering techniques, created an authentically legendary shimmer, not unlike the atmospheric mists that haunt such German Expressionist masterpieces as Fritz Lang's Nibelungen saga. The world took note. The Blue Light was a modest hit in Germany and a big hit abroad—it ran for months in New York's Times Square—and it won the Silver Medal at the 1932 Venice Biennale.

Among its admirers was the rising National Socialist Party leader Adolf Hitler, who, according to Riefenstahl, had once told his adjutant Wilhelm Bruckner, "The most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a film was Riefenstahl's dance on the sea in The Holy Mountain." When he received the fan letter she wrote him after his Berlin speech, Hitler sent for her, and they took a stroll on the beach near Wilhelmshaven, while Bruckner and another adjutant, Julius Schaub, crept along at a safe distance behind them.

According to Riefenstahl's memoirs, Hitler praised The Blue Light and then told her, "Once we come to power you must make my films." Riefenstahl says she protested that "I will never make prescribed films. I don't have the knack for it—I have to have a very personal relationship with my subject matter. Otherwise I can't be creative." Besides, she added, "I have no interest whatsoever in politics; I could never be a member of your party." According to Riefenstahl, Hitler took these outbursts rather benignly, even when Riefenstahl told him, "You have racial prejudices. If I had been bom an Indian or a Jew you wouldn't even speak to me, so how can I work for someone who makes such distinctions among people?" That remark may sound improbable, but then, so does the reply Riefenstahl claims Hitler made: "I wish the people around me would be as uninhibited as you."

That night, Hitler invited Riefenstahl to dinner and told her how pleasant it was to have her there, since "no woman had ever been present at any such function." Some sources suggest that Riefenstahl may have tantalized Hitler with some dancing, but she herself is silent on the matter. In any case, after the meal, she and Hitler took another walk, and this time he carried on a monologue about Wagner and King Ludwig of Bavaria, and, mostly, about his own mission to save Germany. Then, Riefenstahl writes, "he halted, looked at me, slowly put his arms around me, and drew me to him. I had certainly not wished for such a development. . . . Then I saw him raise his hands beseechingly: 'How can I love a woman until I have completed my task?' Bewildered, I made no reply and, still without exchanging a word, we walked back to the inn; there, somewhat distantly, he said, 'Good night.' I felt that I had offended him and regretted that I had come in the first place."

Riefenstahl's description fits what we know of Hitler's erotic life. Although he enjoyed the company of women—and never had any difficulty attracting it— most historians now agree that he was probably impotent, and that, in the words of his biographer Joachim Fest, "his fear of all undignified attitudes" made him anxious about being publicly linked with a woman. The love of his life was undoubtedly his niece, Geli Raubal, who died, an apparent suicide, in 1931; Eva Braun, who became his occasional mistress in 1929, was probably his steady girlfriend from 1931 until their double suicide in 1945. More than one historian has theorized that Hitler's most vital erotic relationship was with the masses who followed and adored him. As Fest points out, he frequently compared them to "woman" and once called them his "only bride." "The sound recordings of the period," Fest writes, "clearly convey the peculiarly obscene, copulatory character of [the] mass meetings." The writer Rene Schickele even described Hitler's speeches as being "like sex murders."

Stiff and repressed though he was, there's little doubt that Hitler found Riefenstahl attractive; there's also little doubt that his "type" ran to women who were less independent, more submissive and compliant. But what did Riefenstahl think of Hitler? Was he attractive to her?

"The contrary," she says with a dismissive wave of her hand. "People say women liked him, but for me, no. When I saw him before I met him, in photos, I thought, This is an ugly man, ugly, an ugly person. If you spoke with him, he was not ugly. But to me not a little bit sexy." She giggles. "If he were, then naturally I would have been his lover. If he would have been sexy, then Eva Braun would never have existed." A huge laugh. "That's for sure—no problem."

One tends to think that Riefenstahl and her countrymen were seduced by Hitler's indefatigable speechifying, by the stormy melodrama he brought to the podium, not to mention the nationalistic passions he aroused. But there was something else, too. To Riefenstahl, Hitler resembled nothing so much as a holy man, a selfless, purehearted guru.

"He lived very modestly," she says. "He was not a little bit corrupt. His rooms were like the rooms of a simple soldier, not rich in any way. So we thought he was a very unusual person. He was very friendly and very polite to his guests— very—and also a very hypnotic presence. He had a special aura, like an energy you could feel. It was funny; after you spoke with him, you felt better. He gave you vitality. There was a feeling that he was very moral, and after you talked to him, you were happy or stronger, and you had the feeling that he was a very good man, always better than the people he was talking to. During a lunch, he would be speaking about the problems with the autobahn or some projects, and people would say, 'It's impossible,' and he would always point out the way that it would be possible. He seemed to know more than everybody else."

Hitler's presence obviously enthralled Riefenstahl, but can her claims to have been uninterested in politics—and even abysmally ignorant of it—be taken seriously? "You must understand how it was," she says. "In these times, no radio, no television, no information, no CNN. We only knew what we were told. Artists like Leni, we didn't even read the newspaper. I only read to see who was playing in the theater and which painter was showing. I didn't even know the names of who was in the government."

In the spring of 1933, during the first flurry of anti-Semitic persecutions (including the notorious book burning in Berlin), Riefenstahl was out of the country, filming S.O.S. Iceberg, the last picture she would make with Fanck. When she returned in June, many of her Jewish friends had fled, and Riefenstahl claims she was aghast. "I tried to ask Hitler about it," she says, "but he wouldn't discuss it. If I was more powerful to Hitler, maybe I would have done more. But nobody could change his mind; it was impossible. And I never thought it would get worse. I thought it was a short, momentary fear, and it would pass. We all thought this."

The infamous "Kristallnacht" of November 1938, during which storm troopers demolished nearly two hundred synagogues, burned Jewish neighborhoods, destroyed shops, and killed ninety-one Jews outright, took place when Riefenstahl was in the United States. Naively unaware of how decisively world opinion had turned against the Reich, she had gone to America to promote Olympia and arrange for its distribution there. But she was snubbed and heckled practically everywhere she went. Reporters peppered her with questions about what was happening in Germany, and she told them, apparently in good faith, that the reports of killing and burning were all lies. When she returned to Germany, she says, she began asking questions.

"And then, I did not hear about Kristallnacht the way you heard in America. It was told to me very differently—as it appeared in the German press, not as it appeared in the foreign press. The German press, of course, emphasized the murder of [Legation Secretary] Ernst vom Rath in Paris, by a Jew. [This was the incident that gave Hitler the pretext he sought for calling Germans to avenge the "assaults of world Jewry."] And the press stated that there was not an order for the plundering and desecration. I met Anny Winter, Hitler's housekeeper, and she and the adjutant Bruckner told me that Hitler was enraged at this Kristallnacht, because while he was away from Berlin Goebbels had given the order. And then the adjutant told me that Hitler couldn't do anything against Goebbels. Couldn't stop him. So it looks different. It looks very, very different. In my eyes, Hitler was not the man who did it, because he didn't want it, and he didn't want Jews to have to wear the Jewish star, either. It was Goebbels. Hitler was anti-Semitic also, but he was too clever to commit these international outrages. So I thought Hitler would stop them."

She pauses, spreads her hands on the table, and, looking down at them, sighs. What she has just told me has left me speechless; it seems impossible, beyond justification. Could anyone have been so credulous?

Riefenstahl claims that she first heard of the death camps when she herself was imprisoned by the Allies after the war. "And in my cell," she says, "was Hitler's older secretary, Fraulein [Johanna] Wolf. She had been Hitler's secretary since '21 or '22, and she almost went insane when she heard about what was done to the Jews. I remember she said, 'It can't be true, it isn't true.' And with the other secretary, [Christa] Schroder, it was the same. Hitler's own secretaries knew nothing about it, even though they saw him every day. So how could we know anything?"

Claus Offerman, who has talked extensively with Schroder, confirms that story, and he also mentions another illuminating tale, the one about the late Henriette von Schirach, a member of Hitler's inner circle who had known the Fiihrer since her childhood. The wife of Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth, she was the daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's photographer and one of his closest confidants. By all accounts, she was a spirited, headstrong young woman, and Hitler doted on her. But on Good Friday 1943 she stormed into a party at Obersalzberg, Hitler's mountain getaway. She had just been in Amsterdam and had seen something that shocked and frightened her: Jews wearing yellow stars were being herded through the streets.

Offerman, who befriended Schirach in the years before her death, says, "Henriette really thought that Hitler didn't know about this. People like Goebbels and Himmler were evil people who would do anything, but Hitler, no. Henriette said, 'Herr Hitler, have you heard about this? It's terrible. You have to do something.' And Hitler's face turned to stone. Conversation stopped. You didn't confront Hitler with problems at Obersalzberg. You talked about films and theater and trivia, you didn't talk politics. So Hitler's adjutant Bruckner told her she had to leave immediately—she was accustomed to staying overnight. And that was the last time she saw Hitler. After that, she was banned from the court."

Riefenstahl was never as much a part of the inner circle as Schirach; still, her obliviousness of what was happening in Germany seems extraordinary—that is, unless one considers that she, like so many other Germans prospering under the Third Reich, was blind probably because she didn't want to see. By 1934, after all, Riefenstahl found herself in a position unique in all Germany. Without quite acknowledging it, she had made a pact with the Devil.

As Riefenstahl tells it, during the summer of 1933 Hitler had asked her to "be in charge of the artistic aspect of the German cinema," working under Propaganda Minister Goebbels. Since Goebbels had already made several attempts to seduce her—and had been sharply rebuffed—she was horrified at the thought of working with him. Besides, what she really wanted to do was continue her career as an actress; she still wanted to play Kleist's Amazon queen, Penthesilea. Though perturbed by her refusal, Hitler nevertheless let it pass.

But in August he summoned her to the Reich Chancellery to ask her how preparations were going for another film, her record of the upcoming Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. According to her memoirs, this was the first she had heard of it; Goebbels had failed to deliver the assignment. Three days before the rally, Riefenstahl allowed Hitler to browbeat her into accepting the job, and eventually, with the help of the cameramen Walter Frentz and Sepp Allgeier, she managed to cobble together a one-hour short called Victory of Faith. Hitler was apparently pleased with it; he asked Riefenstahl to do the same thing for the next party rally in 1934.

Somehow Riefenstahl didn't take that request seriously. Instead, she went to Spain and spent six months directing her new pet project, Tiefland, based on the Eugen D'Albert opera. But when she returned to Berlin in August 1934, she met again with Hitler, who fairly snarled at her; according to her memoirs, his words were "You can and will do this project."

Riefenstahl claims she still resisted, protesting that she knew nothing about the party, that she couldn't tell the SA from the SS, that she wouldn't know who was speaking or which leaders to focus on, and, besides, Goebbels hated her and would be sure to interfere. About that, she was certainly correct: Goebbels wanted anyone but Riefenstahl to make the film, since he had under his supervision scores of film-industry pros who were party members and hence much more likely to knuckle under to his demands. But Hitler was convinced he'd made the right choice. "Abandoning my resistance," Riefenstahl writes, "I ventured to make one last request: 'I'll try it. But I can do it only if I can be free after completing this project and do not have to make any more films to order. That must be my reward.' " Hitler promised that after the 1934 party-rally film—Triumph of the Will—she could do anything she wanted.

In the end, he was as good as his word. Although Goebbels contrived obstacles to Triumph and later to Olympia, both films were enormous successes; Triumph won not only Germany's National Film Prize in 1935 but also the Gold Medal at the 1936 Venice Biennale and the International Grand Prize at the 1937 Paris World Exposition. Olympia won at Venice, too, in 1938; its closest competition was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Meanwhile, Hitler acted as a buffer between Riefenstahl and Goebbels; he placed her under the supervision of his deputy Rudolf Hess, making her the only filmmaker in Germany who didn't have to answer to Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry. Riefenstahl responded by pursuing her own dreamy projects, Penthesilea, which fell apart when the war broke out, and Tiefland, whose production she managed to extend throughout the fighting. "My suspicion," says her sometime cameraman Henry Jaworsky, "was that she managed to make Tiefland take so long so that she wouldn't have to direct documentaries during the war."

Of the filmmakers who remained in Germany after Hitler's rise to power, Riefenstahl was certainly the most talented, and there's no doubt that she could have found work elsewhere. I ask her now if she regrets staying, and, perhaps surprisingly, she answers with a vigorous nod. "Yes," she says, "very much. Because it was too hard, my life after the war. My love for my work is so strong that if you take it away I can't be happy anymore. It's like a fish. You take him out of the water and you put him on the sand. So he struggles: he can't die, he has to live, but he can't swim more. So naturally I regret—very, very much. Because I have had so many ideas for films and I still have so many scripts and interesting ideas, but I couldn't do them."

For a moment she looks disconsolate, but then she grasps my hand again. "I have a guardian angel," she says. "I believe this. Because even when things were bad, always I received ideas. After the war, when everybody was boycotting me and I could make no more films, I had two very important experiences that helped me get over my destiny. One was finding the Nuba, and the second was the underwater world, because for me this made me close to nature, and nature is my religion."

There is something devotional about the striking underwater photos she's now published in three volumes. In fact, all her work shares a kind of sacramental awe, somewhere between the religious and the voyeuristic, as though Riefenstahl had pulled back a curtain allowing the viewer to peek at something esoteric and miraculous and strange. Even a ceremony as hideously secular as a Nazi Party rally becomes a kind of Black Sabbath in her hands. I tell her that Triumph of the Will reminds me of a ritual, with the god Hitler descending from the clouds and the light forming halos around his head, and she bursts into laughter. "Really!" she says. "I never thought of this. I never for one minute had the idea to make Hitler big or great, not a little bit."

But that's impossible, I tell her. Even if you weren't a party member, you were certainly enthralled with Hitler; you used low-angle shots to make him look taller and more magnificent; you put tracks around him so that your cameramen could move slowly past, making him seem monumental and immobile, like a statue. She laughs again. "No, no, no, my dear," she says, and her mirth appears genuine. "I only thought, What can I do with this material? My only idea was how can we make it interesting—not boring. If it is Hitler or if it was another person, it doesn't matter, only to make the camerawork interesting. For me it's not beautiful; for me it's just a document." Devoid of aesthetic quality? "I had no chance to be aesthetic. Hitler doesn't look beautiful, he can't look beautiful, he is not beautiful. In Olympia, where is the beautiful? It is only a document. People told me, 'Why do you make the Olympia people so beautiful?' Tell me, how could I make athletes beautiful? How could I make the Nuba beautiful? I am not God. They are beautiful."

This is sophistry, of course. Riefenstahl is dodging bullets that I haven't even fired yet; what she's trying to say is that Olympia and Triumph of the Will are disinterested records of events, beholden to no one and propaganda-free.

Of course, Olympia is anything but disinterested. Rapt and dramatic and sometimes rather corny, it's a virtual dictionary of filmmaking technique, a mother lode that other documentarians have never fully mined. Still, critics who have tried to find propaganda or ideology in it have never made a convincing case; the movie's American champions are lauded as forcefully as its Germans, and if the film has a star, it's not some Aryan paragon but the black American athlete Jesse Owens.

Triumph of the Will, however, is another matter. The movie is not only propaganda but propaganda of the most powerful sort: gorgeously composed, edited with a surging momentum previously matched only by Eisenstein, arranged and lit with an unerring eye for majesty and dynamism, appallingly inventive.

In short, Triumph is a masterpiece, but a strangely superficial masterpiece—it's all form and no content. Stripped of the associations we bring to it—the instant reactions we have to the sight of swastikas and stiff-armed salutes and the Fiihrer's mustache—Triumph has a potency that's somewhat generic; even we who are revolted by what it celebrates can find ourselves caught up in its mood. That mood —part cultic, part military, part summer camp—may be characteristic of Nazism, but it cannot itself be called Nazi. Triumph doesn't traffic in racial caricatures or anti-Semitic polemics or odes to German expansionism; most of the speechmaking in it is dully inspirational (Hitler does make mention of having "the best blood," and a snippet from the notorious Julius Streicher refers to racial issues, but only obliquely). And though the shots of boyish approval and joy among the young party members certainly mark the film as pro-Nazi, they could as easily have been marshaled in support of, say, the United States Marine Corps. Triumph is visually expressive without being ideologically expressive. The only clear idea in it is the unity of the Reich behind Riefenstahl's deified patron. Hitler needed to purvey that image of unity because he had just destroyed his rivals for the party leadership in a bloody purge. Riefenstahl, meanwhile, needed a Hitler who was absolutely in command; only he could guarantee her autonomy. If Riefenstahl was selling anything in Triumph, it was not Nazism but the face and form of Adolf Hitler. And behind Hitler, Reifenstahl was selling herself, the heroic artist, the power behind the power, the genius who could capture and command not only these marching, grinning masses but also the very man who controlled them. The more she transfigured Hitler, the more she transfigured herself.

In fact, the party leaders never wanted the film she decided to make: she cut out almost all their speeches; she skipped certain hallowed events completely; she gave the army itself such short shrift that, under pressure, she made up for it the next year with a short called Day of Freedom—Our Army, whose only purpose was to show off the Wehrmacht's specialized skills. Could Riefenstahl ever have brought herself to make a Triumph of the Will that wasn't horrifically stirring, that didn't turn dull, sweaty crowds into so much burnished machinery, that didn't transform murk into mystery and chaos into drama and demagogues into gods? As Jaworsky puts it, "In 1932, there was a conflict in Germany between the Communists and the Nazis, and the Nazis won. But if the Communists had won, Riefenstahl would have made films for Stalin. No doubt about it."

All of which brings us back to the old questions. The year is 1933 or '35 or '39: what do we ask of Leni Riefenstahl? That at the very least she protest against Hitler's racist policies? This she claims she did. That she try to help those of her friends who were victimized? This she definitely did, though probably not to the degree she might have. And what else? Do we ask that she endeavor to learn more than what the Nazis chose to publicize? This she certainly did not do. Do we ask that she fulminate against the government, demonstrate, write editorials, organize protests? Perhaps, but those were options for a hero, and Riefenstahl was no hero.

Of course, many other directors and actors and writers and cinematographers left Germany entirely. For them, the decision was almost obvious: under Goebbels's thumb they were unemployable, or subject to severe censorship, or forced to undertake projects they had no interest in, or, finally, in mortal danger. For Riefenstahl, however, leaving Germany would have been an act of almost unparalleled moral heroism. After all, she wasn't Jewish, wasn't poor, wasn't Communist, wasn't finding it hard to get work. On the contrary, she was the only artist in the Reich who enjoyed such independence, and, moreover, an artist whose work was peculiarly in keeping with the spirit of mystic aspiration that had driven Hitler since his youth—and which now drove all of Germany.

"I never thought to leave," Riefenstahl has said. Of course not. Her mother lived in Germany, and so did her brother (who would die on the front lines); by the time of the war she had fallen in love with her future husband, who was fighting in Murmansk; she certainly wasn't going to abandon him. Besides, Riefenstahl's only thought was for her own personal apotheosis. To give up the Germany that seemed to be furthering that apotheosis for parts unknown would have required a degree of conscience she never aspired to—and certainly never had.

Does that make her morally deficient? Probably we would all like to think that in similar circumstances we would have been more selfless, more sensitive, more heroic. But does it make her a Nazi? No. Even during the Gotterdammerung of the Third Reich, the final days of the war, when Hitler's inner circle were in their bunker and the world they had created was crumbling around them—even then, Riefenstahl was pursuing her art, desperately filming her melodramatic trifle Tiefland, virtually ignoring the apocalypse that was swallowing her sponsors alive. In those days, real Nazis were weeping and gnashing their teeth, pretending to themselves that victory was still possible, turning into instant Resistance fighters, committing suicide. Leni was just being Leni.

Now she wants me to accompany her downstairs, to where her film-editing equipment is, and her slide collections, and the new video gizmos that Akio Mori ta, the head of Sony, gave her free of charge. Here, too, are her famous archives. We're talking about art, about aesthetics, really, and I sense her wariness: she can smell the question about Fascist aesthetics a mile away. So I ask her something simpler: what makes her want to take a picture? "Something excites me," she replies. "Even underwater, when I see a little sea-slug branch, I say, 'Horst, I want to get that.' And when I get home, I'm very excited, and I want to look, I want to see that picture. Not for publication, or fame or money—I'm interested for myself." As she talks, I hear in her voice the same excited hush one senses in her films and photographs, the sensation of the curtain being drawn back to reveal something privileged and thrilling.

"I think a photo is good when it has a very calm background," she says, "and not normal light, special light: you see some shadow, maybe only in the eyes or something. And there must be a good spatial relationship of the objects to the frame—a good composition. The composition is the most important. I want it always balanced; I want harmony. There's no rule, no laws; it is just coming in me. I often have the feeling that something is guiding me, inside—I don't know what, but I get ideas. Look! Look! These are my archives."

Suddenly, the extent of her obsession becomes hilariously clear: every shard and remnant of her career has been carefully preserved, categorized, labeled, and stored on shelf upon shelf, in box upon box. "The gray box is for German correspondence," she explains. "Red is America and foreign countries, and my private is white. The blue is special projects. And here, these five books, this is copyright problems. This yellow is press clips for my films and books. Here, this is all the documents I worked from when I made my memoirs—on this I worked for five years. And here are the denazification documents. And here, the black..." The black? "The black is all the court cases." By now she's breathless with excitement.

We look at slides, slides of Nuba wrestlers, slides of gaudy fish, slides of naked Japanese yakuza with tattoos all over their bodies—"Look, even the penis is tattooed," she whispers. "See how painful this must be, but something about it is very artistic. It's very beautiful." And now I see an opening: does she, I ask, want to take pictures only of beautiful things? She stops for a moment and stares at me. And her answer, when it finally comes, is lucid and even a little frightening.

"At first, when I heard about this Fascist aesthetics," she says, "I never in my life had thought about this. I read this, and I didn't know what they meant. But if I take pictures of you, some of my photos will be better than other ones, and the one where I think I see your character, maybe that one is the best. And so it is with everything I see. What is more beautiful is what I prefer to show, because it makes me happy. It gives me the strength to live. So if I see underwater fishes—if I see a red fish, a blue fish, a gray fish, I prefer the red and the blue fish, and not the gray fish."

Which gives me pause. A society that treasures the red and blue fish but eliminates the gray fish is a Fascist society. And when a man who thinks of himself as an artist, as Hitler did, tries to create a society that is a perfect work of art, as Hitler did, the result is an unfathomable horror. But when I look at Riefenstahl's slides, it occurs to me that perhaps, like many a first-rate artist, she doesn't really know what she's doing; she knows only how to do it. An art that eliminates the gray is not just Fascist art, it's kitsch: sentimental, anodyne, ignorant of real experience. Here, in Riefenstahl's photos of dusty Nuba men clambering naked in the dirt, or proud, scarred women ecstatically choosing their mates, here there are enough shades of gray to plunge any viewer into the authentic mysteries, of earth and sex and passion and community and survival.

I glance over at Riefenstahl; her face looks young and rapt. She is staring at her own photos, and her expression has become lascivious, almost demonic. It's not as though the slides are her art; it's as though they are her prey. Then she notices my gaze, straightens, and shoots me a merry look. She's about to dazzle me.

"So," she says. "So I am like this. Ninety-nine percent of my life is being an artist. Even when I was a dance student, I was going in the streets like so, so—" And suddenly she begins dancing in her tights, kicking her legs high in the air, and making orchestra-conducting swoops with her arms. "I lived only for that," she giggles. "I was only—" She kicks and kicks, and then stops, letting her shoulders droop, a huge grin on her face.

"Same when I was beginning with Fanck," she says, panting a little, "and he told me how to see what a good photo was, and from then on, whenever I went anywhere, I would be in a room and all I would be thinking was, What is there in this room that would make a good photo. So now, I'm only happy when I am here in my cutting room, seeing my underwater videos."

Her voice drops; it's almost a whisper. "It is so exciting," she says. "I am not hungry. I don't eat. I don't drink. I want to see, that's all. This is my life. I want to see."