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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On February 17, 1936, Time ran a cover story about the Fourth Winter Olympics, which Adolf Hitler had inaugurated earlier that month in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a German ski resort near the Austrian border. The summer games, Olympiad XI, were to open on August 1st in Berlin, and the Fuhrer had given Leni Riefenstahl virtual carte blanche to film them. Her debut as a director, with "The Blue Light" (1932), a fairy tale set in the Dolomites, had excited his admiration. So had her dishevelled beauty: she had cast herself in the starring role of Junta, a mountain nymph and outcast doomed by her purity. Riefenstahl had subsequently proved to be an epic propagandist with "Triumph of the Will," a celebration of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, and she had gone to Garmisch in part to observe an Olympic documentary being made by Carl Junghans, in preparation for her own "Olympia." But she was also there to bask in the sunshine of celebrity.
At thirty-three, Riefenstahl was a strikingly attractive if hectic figure, with dark hair, chiselled features, and an obsidian gaze intensified by eyes set slightly too close together. Their look of adoration in the Fuhrer's presence, and (as her rivals saw it) his indulgence of her every whim, fuelled rumors of a Valhallan romance, which heightened curiosity about her in Germany and abroad. Time might have devoted its cover to a Winter Olympian like Sonja Henie, the Norwegian figure-skating champion, but the building controversy over the August games, which represented a windfall of legitimacy for the Reich, decided the editors on a more electric candidate: "Hitler's Leni Riefenstahl." The sensational portrait that they chose, a departure from the usual head shot of a statesman or grande dame, is reproduced in a first-rate new biography of Riefenstahl, by Steven Bach, "Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl" (Knopf; $30), though without mention of the photographer, Martin Munkacsi.
Munkacsi (1896-1963) was a Hungarian Jew who is widely credited with inventing modern photojournalism and with reinventing fashion photography in the same dynamic mold. (A show of his work runs through April at the International Center of Photography.) Like Riefenstahl, he was a consummate stylist obsessed with bodies in motion, particularly those of dancers and athletes, and in 1930, some thirty years before Riefenstahl "discovered" the comely and artistic Sudanese people she called "my Nuba," Munkacsi returned from an assignment in Africa with a picture--of three naked boys running into the water--that became iconic, particularly to his disciple Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Nazi superstar and the Jewish emigre met at least once before the race laws precipitated his departure for New York, in 1934, and they had much in common, including international prestige and a penchant for self-mythologizing. But the source of rapture in Munkacsi's pictures is freedom. In Riefenstahl's, it is idol worship.
One of Riefenstahl's most cherished ambitions, ironically, was a Hollywood career like that of Munkacsi's fellow-emigree Marlene Dietrich, and she clung to this fantasy tenaciously even after the Kristallnacht pogrom, in November, 1938, which derailed what was supposed to have been a triumphal cross-country American publicity tour with "Olympia." Upon docking in New York and hearing the news, she refused to believe it, and dismissed the hostility that greeted her at nearly every stop as a plot fomented, she told an interviewer on her return, "by the Jewish moneymen."
After the war, Riefenstahl was vehement that not only had she "thrown no atomic bombs"; she had never "spoken an anti-Semitic word." She lamented the fate of her Jewish friends in the film industry while claiming, on the one hand, that she had been ignorant of the Reich's racial policies and, on the other, that she had protested them personally to the Fuhrer. Bach offers considerable evidence to the contrary, as does Jurgen Trimborn, the author of "Leni Riefenstahl: A Life" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux;...
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