“Wherever you may run, you cannot escape him”: Leni Riefenstahl's
Self-Reflection and Romantic Transcendence of Nazism in Tiefland

by Robert von Dassanowsky

This article was originally published in Camera Obscura 35 (1995/96). It appears here on the German-Hollywood Connection Web site with the permission of the author.

The discussion over the always-provocative topic of Leni Riefenstahl, tainted genius, has become topical to cinematic and cultural study yet again with the publication of Riefenstahl's autobiography in German in 1987 and the subsequent release of the English translation. Additionally, a new documentary on the auteur by Ray Müller, Die Macht der Bilder Leni Riefenstahls known as The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl¹ in the English-speaking world, premiered in the US at the New York Film Festival in 1993. The other recent effort to reassess Riefenstahl for popular consumption is the interview by Stephen Schiff in Vanity Fair, which presents her as a reborn diva, despite hefty critique of her association with Hitler as Nazi Germany's prime filmmaker.² Schiff's suggestion that she was a highly talented and opportunistic aesthete, whose long life and contributions to the art will come to overshadow her political naiveté in aiding Nazism may seem like a revisionist stance on the filmmaker which buys into her own claims, but it is hardly that. Most of the widely diverse reportage on Riefenstahl manages to suggest this point. Attempts, however, at cogent analysis of her work are still scarce: David Hinton and Renata Berg-Pan's comprehensive reviews of Riefenstahl's career;³ B. Ruby Rich's investigation of the relevance of German Romantic painting to Riefenstahl's visions;⁴ Cooper C. Graham's Olympia study;⁵ Martin Loiperdinger's Triumph des Willens study;⁶ Gisela von Wysocki and Eric Rentschler's Bergfilm and Das blaue Licht examinations;⁷ Linda Schulte-Sasse's semiotic tracing of Das blaue Licht and Tiefland to German bourgeois tragedy;⁸ Thomas Elsaesser's article on Riefenstahl and art cinema; ⁹ Helma Sanders-Brahms's essay, “Tyrannenmord.”¹⁰

Ray Müller's documentary, arriving as feminists are ever more vociferously arguing about Riefenstahl's place as a major female artist,¹¹ offers little that is new, but it does stress the question that has been an undercurrent of many recent discussions on the filmmaker: what does the fact that Riefenstahl is a woman have to do with her continuous and overwhelming image as unrepentant Nazi agent? Richard Corliss, writing a review of the Müller documentary in Time magazine, pointedly makes this the center of his critique, asking more directly than others have in the past, why can Riefenstahl not escape her Nazi legend?¹² Certainly Riefenstahl's political taint is not unique. Other artists tolerated or supported European fascism and continued their stardom in the postwar era: Céline, Roberto Rossellini, Salvador Dali, G.W. Pabst, Douglas Sirk, Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, and Gustaf Gründgens, among others. Even Veit Harlan, the director of the anti-Semitic Jud Süss, who worked closely with Propaganda Minister Goebbels and whose films were “more in tune with the political interests of the Nazi government“¹³ than most, was able to revive his career in the 1950s. Fritz Hippler, creator of the most vicious Nazi propaganda film, Der ewige Jude, was apparently “denazified” in 1951 and employed by the US Army as a translator.¹⁴

The absence of women in this list is glaringly obvious. It is a fact that cannot be denied in even the most contrived arguments on talent, fame, and political favoritism that male directors, actors, and writers continued to work in postwar Germany and Europe, whereas the end of the Reich was also the career fade-out for many female cinema artists of equal popularity: the director Riefenstahl, but also such popular German-language icons as Zarah Leander, Lilian Harvey, Marika Rökk, Lil Dagover, and Veit Harlan's wife, Kristina Söderbaum.¹⁵ David Gunston's 1960 article,¹⁶ Michel Delahaye's 1965 Cahiers du Cinema interview,¹⁷ and Kevin Brownlow's 1966 discussion¹⁸ were the first to acknowledge the value of Riefenstahl's work, her opportunism in the service of her artistic vision, and most importantly, her unusual success in a mate dominated field made all the more hostile to women in a fascist order. Corliss is even more blunt: “There are several reasons for [Riefenstahl's] punishment: One is that Triumph is too good a movie. ...Another is that her visual style—heroic, sensuous, attuned to the mists and myths of nature--was never in critical fashion. Finally, she was a woman, a beautiful woman.”¹⁹

Despite the photographs of Riefenstahl with Hitler and Goebbels which intentionally impart the most odious patriarchal image of woman as man's possession, as man's servant, the filmmaker has maintained her rejection of the Nazi regime once it curtailed her personal and artistic freedoms. Her refusal to give the media what it would like from her, a repentant figure who damns her art and blames a femme fatale hubris, has helped solidify the image of her as Budd Schulberg's "Nazi pinup-girl"²⁰ and Hitler's symbolic mistress, but repentance would hardly have reestablished her cinematic career.

Given the ease with which male artists associated with fascism or Stalinism have reinvented themselves, such apologia would play into the patriarchal understanding that Riefenstahl is nothing but a dangerous aberration, that women have no place in artistic creation, and worse, that evil fosters female ambition to beget more evil.

Considering the ongoing interest in Riefenstahl and the most recent attempts by academics to find something in her work that would satisfy her critics or release her from cinematic exile, it is inexplicable that Riefenstahl's final dramatic film, Tiefland21 (completed in 1953) has only received direct attention in Berg-Pan's early plot analysis, Schulte-Sasse's semiotic matrix, and in the eloquent essay by feminist filmmaker Sanders-Brahms who asks: “wie kommt es, daß fünfzig Jahre später die Berührungsangst vor diesem Film immer noch so groß ist, daß die Weigerung, ihn überhaupt nur anzusehen, bei deutschen Intellektuellen zum guten Ton gehört?” (How is it possible that after fifty years the fear of dealing with this film is still so great that just the refusal to view it is considered a correct attitude for German intellectuals?)22 Certainly here is a film feminists ought to examine in discussing Riefenstahl's eventual consideration of the female and the female artist in patriarchal society. It is the only dramatic film of Riefenstahl's career other than Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light),23 and the only one made during the Third Reich. As a project which Riefenstahl has defended as an attempt to escape making a propaganda or war film,24 it should be considered as much a work of “Inner emigration” as that of the writers who remained in Nazi Germany and who came to reject the Reich.

I will attempt to elaborate here on Sanders-Brahms's brief essay, which hints that Tiefland is Riefenstahl's cinematic rejection of Hitler: “ein Film über eine Rebellion. Ein Film über den Tyrannenmord” (A film about a rebellion. A film about the murder of a tyrant). I will examine what directly influenced Riefenstahl to make Tiefland, exactly how the self-reflexive and anti-authoritarian elements of the film are presented, and why this film opposes previous notions of Riefenstahl's alleged fascist aesthetic. No new approach toward, or rehabilitation of, Riefenstahl's well-discussed pre-Tiefland films is intended. Rather, I am interested in Riefenstahl's ability to change as other male fascist-era artists have, to reflect, to confront, and to distance herself from the ideology that rooted her earlier work. From the self-conscious role of Riefenstahl as gypsy-dancer seduced by a powerfully evil nobleman, to the pre-feminist re-vision of the heroic man, Riefenstahl's Tiefland reenacts her association with Hitler and also her rejection of him. Like Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will),25 which captured National Socialism placing itself into German history as instant dogma, so Riefenstahl, aware of her inescapable role as Nazi insider, scripts in Tiefland a desired resolution far from

Riefenstahl originally considered Tiefland a likely follow-up to her first directorial effort, Das blaue Licht (1932), but Sieg des Glaubens (1933 ),26 Triumph des Willens (1935), and Olympia (1938 )27 delayed this possible project. The film adaptation of the Eugen d'Albert (1864-1932) opera, Tiefland,28 with libretto by Rudolph Lothar (based on the 1896 Spanish play Terra Baixa by Angel Guimera) was reconsidered in 1939 when her highly stylized adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's drama, Penthesilea (1808) was deemed too costly a project.30 would only take a few months to film, it became her new project. Nevertheless, since Tiefland was not considered valuable for propaganda purposes it was given none of the financial support Riefenstahl requested. The antagonism between Goebbels and Riefenstahl, apparently begun during the filming of Triumph des Willens, had only increased. Resenting Riefenstahl's easy access to Hitler and her independent film company, which was not completely under the Propaganda Ministry control, he had continually interfered with her 1936 Berlin Olympics project, Olympia.31

The most compelling reason for Riefenstahl to make Tiefland was as a form of escape. Following the success of Triumph des Willens, Riefenstahl found that she had become useful to Hitler's personal propaganda notions and would have to remain available with her cinematic services. Since Triumph ignored the Wehrmacht, Hitler insisted that additional footage be shot. Riefenstahl compromised with a separate fifteen-minute short, Tag der Freiheit.32 The subsequent difficulty of maintaining her vision in the Olympia film made Riefenstahl realize that she would have little control over her own projects despite Hitler's promises. Her open break with Goebbels and the National Socialist ideology came in the form of her obsession with Jesse Owens, her highlighting of the individual efforts (decathlon, marathon race, equestrians, etc.) over celebration of the masses or mass athletic events, and her showcasing of “successful male and female athletes of all races, nations, and colors ... in a Germany which was then singularly undemocratic.”33 Additionally, she delayed the editing of the film to keep Goebbels from using it as propaganda and destroying her multicultural vision.34 Thomas Elsaesser maintains that the director's work never fit into the concepts of Nazi cinema,35 a claim supported by the contradictory messages of Riefenstahl's post-Triumph work. Even the planned Penthesilea film, which initially seems to present heroic themes appropriate to the style of Nazi “Blood and Soil” literature and art, ultimately does not celebrate the warrior image but condemns it. The strong female figure, the importance of human emotion and love, and the disaster brought about by warrior codes in this Kleist drama could never be used to extol phallocratic militarism. Yet although Riefenstahl may have soured on Nazism, she still could not include its very embodiment in her rejection as late as 1940—“I admire Hitler, but he is surrounded by a bunch of criminals and we are going to lose the war.”36

Sent to the Polish front to film newsreels, Riefenstahl witnessed Nazi brutality against Polish civilians firsthand in the village of Konsky. Riefenstahl claims that her protests were answered with pointed guns by the German soldiers responsible for the massacre of thirty Polish prisoners.37 Protesting this action first to General Walther von Reichenau and then to Hitler, Riefenstahl filmed no war footage and quietly resigned her position as war correspondent. Amazingly, she admits in her biography that although she rejected the war, it was not until 1944 that she “cooled” on Hitler as a person.38 That year brought the Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler's life and the death of Riefenstahl's brother, who had been sent to the Russian Front after having criticized the war effort and having bought meat on the black market. The film she had been making shows that Riefenstahl had mistrusted Hitler and the fascist regime for more complex reasons and for a much longer time.

Tiefland became Riefenstahl's “inner emigration” from the hostility of the Nazi inner circle, the shock of the war, and her slow disillusionment with Hitler. She first welcomed the project as a brief respite from current events and as an alternative to the assignment of a propaganda film or war coverage. Only as the project became increasingly protracted, with endless filming in Spain, the Austrian Alps, the Dolomites, and at the Barrandov Studios in Prague, did she use the film as a permanent refuge from Nazi Germany, until production was finally ended in 1944. Tiefland was subsequently confiscated by the French government and returned, with footage missing, to Riefenstahl after her several years in detention camps and her final clearance by French courts.

The 1954 German premiere of Tiefland received little attention from the public but some critics applauded its artistic and technical quality.39 Jean Cocteau, president of the Cannes Film Festival jury at the time, was so impressed by the film he requested the West German government enter it in the Festival, a request immediately declined by Bonn. Cocteau nevertheless screened the film at Cannes to much interest and appreciation. Riefenstahl was unhappy with the final cutting of the film, and blaming the missing footage for the film's abrupt ending, she quickly withdrew the work from circulation.40 Tiefland has since either been ignored completely in discussions of Riefenstahl's oeuvre, or else it has been attacked as an example of Riefenstahl's anachronistic41 or egocentric42 filmmaking at its worst. Much of this criticism is aimed at Riefenstahl's starring role, the result of her apparent inability to find a suitable actress to portray Martha.43 Riefenstahl has also criticized what she sees as her own stilted acting in the film as being without guidance and the result of her personal hardships and depression during the filming.44 The sole interest in Tiefland today appears to be the lingering controversy generated by a German magazine, Revue, in 1949, which claimed that Riefenstahl used Gypsy inmates from concentration camps as extras and mistreated them during the filming. A Munich court found Riefenstahl innocent of the charges that same year, but she has had to repeatedly defend herself against renewed charges based on the original libelous assertion.

With the discussions arising from Riefenstahl's recent autobiography, it is amazing that Tiefland is still considered a “melodramatic trifle.”45 Even more surprising is the fact that those feminists who now embrace Riefenstahl as a significant female artist, one that had the misfortune of founding her creative birth in the service of a genocidal phallocracy, have also continued to ignore Riefenstahl's most personal film.46 Tiefland offers not only the filmmaker's examination of her own culpability vis-à-vis Nazism but expresses a pre-feminist consciousness that places her acceptance of fascist militarism and male dominance in Triumph des Willens in a new and revealing perspective.

Even as Riefenstahl's promotion of Hitler in Triumph generates a palette of fascist imagery, her Romanticism, like her appreciation of the body cult cannot be used to reduce her entire output to an example of a specific fascist aesthetic. Essentially a Bergfilm (mountain film) maker and a nature-mystic, Riefenstahl gave Hitler's set pieces the needed emotional association with German tradition and culture. As B. Ruby Rich, who finds German Romantic painting influential in Triumph, understands: “the principles of Romanticism [were] subjugated to the Nazi ideology by means of specifically Romantic pictorial devices.”47 The concept of the nature-bound outsider as prophet, so prevalent in Riefenstahl's work, is also to be found throughout the German Romantic literary canon, in the works of Novalis, Tieck, Goethe, von Eichendorff, and Hölderlin, where it is anything but reactionary or authoritarian. Furthermore, Eric Rentschler has shown that the celebration of mountain purity in Arnold Fanck's Alpine epics of the 1920s and 1930s, and in Das blaue Licht, does not after all, aim to provide “proto-Nazi sentiments” of “Führer-worship.”48 The Romantic Bergfilm genre has been reworked and adapted in popular German cinema from its birth in the early Weimar Republic through the West-German Heimatfilm (homeland film). 49 Renschler also believes that Das blaue Licht “crosses borders and defies fixities” 50 in its ideological and technical adaptation of the Bergfilm. I feel that Tiefland, in turn, should be seen to cross and defy the filmmaker's previous concepts and conventions, most importantly in the use of her established Romantic vocabulary to subvert and counter a paradigmatic authoritarian order.

Despite their similar function as erotic stimulus to the male characters, the social outsiders portrayed by Riefenstahl in Das blaue Licht and Tiefland are distinctly different from each other. The mountain girl Junta in Licht is destroyed by the materialism of the villagers and is a male fantasy image, a martyr, a "mythical essence."51 Her mimosa-like nature, her aesthetic-spiritual understanding of the blue crystals, and her final transformation into an icon, denotes a vague messianic image. The character of Martha in Tiefland is first a very human opportunist with no lofty qualities or notions. Her eventual desire to help those oppressed by her "Führer" speaks of sympathy and humanism not martyrdom or utopianism. Similarly, Tiefland's concept of transcendence is a simplistic and personal one, not the occult manifesto of Das blaue Licht. Indeed, Renata Berg-Pan finds Tiefland to be weak because "Riefenstahl no longer had the same relationship to the topic which had compelled her to take it up in 1934. She had outgrown the emotional bonds attaching her to the theme."52 In his 1972 BBC interview with Riefenstahl, Keith Dewhurst dispels Riefenstahl's early mysticism with Tiefland, marking it as "the first time in one of her films [that] she tells a story with a social message-poor peasants against a rich landlord."53 What Riefenstahl presents of herself and, her art in Hitler's Germany via Tiefland ultimately makes it as important as any film of her career.

Tiefland opens with a visual/musical poem of the beauty of nature and the tranquillity of the mountains. The long shots emphasize space and freedom, a nature-worship more reminiscent of Fanck's early Bergfilm, than of the mountain images in Das blaue Licht, where filtered daylight suggests a haunted twilight setting. Here, the view is clear and bright, offered without sophisticated technical manipulation. The isolated human inhabitant of Tiefland's mountains is Pedro the shepherd (Franz Eichberger), whose hut we enter. The camera lingers on his sleeping face and body. Riefenstahl's appreciation of the male form has repeatedly been integrated by critics into an overall fascist aesthetic in Triumph and Olympia because of the Nazi body cult.54 But given the gentle nature of Pedro who fights only to protect the weak and is shy of both men and women, this idolization of the male body can hardly be considered an element of fascist warrior aesthetics;55 it is exactly the opposite. Riefenstahl here eroticizes the gentle and innocent man as antidote to the Nazi's fierce, elitist, and patriarchal ideal.56 Indeed, Tiefland is Riefenstahl's summary of her particular dualist cinematic scopophilia since she incorporates not only female desire for the male form but also her ability to offer the “woman as image, man as bearer of the look.”57

Pedro is awakened by his dog warning him of a wolf threatening the sheep. Berg-Pan has commented on this symbolism of innocence versus violence in the confrontation between wolf and sheep: "One wonders how the director and the Nazi authorities reconciled such action with Germany's own attacks on largely defenseless neighbors."58 Riefenstahl's understanding of what transpired in Konsky must have had an effect in the planning of this scene; its emphasis is unambiguous and it foreshadows the climax of the film. The director also considered the war and the Reich lost, and perhaps believed that there would be no need to show a completed version to the Nazi authorities. It would indeed be impossible to interpret the sheep as "good Germans" attacked by evil, since National Socialist propaganda would have no use for an image of a weak and docile Volk. Pedro fights the wolf with his bare hands as they roll down the hill in mortal struggle. Having strangled the wolf, Pedro washes his wounds in the river and gently bathes the injured paw of his dog.

Like Junta in Das blaue Licht and the torch-bearer from Mount Olympus in the prologue to Olympia, Pedro descends the mountain as the pure, nature-bound, and mystically empowered force. He passes through arid fields where tired peasants beg the Marquez's representative to let the river, undammed by the Marquez, flow back to their drought-stricken land. The overseer rejects their plea and informs them that the Marquez needs the water for his bulls. In the village, Pedro passes a covered gypsy wagon in which Martha (Riefenstahl) ties her shoes in preparation for her dance. She is, as Berg-Pan understands her, a symbol for the “mediation between the corruption of the plains and the innocence of the mountains.”59 Following Romantic tenets, the village or “valley” of Tiefland, like the town in Das blaue Licht, represents the corruption of civilization set in contrast to the purity of nature and the mountains. The film replays the basic "narrative" pattern of Riefenstahl's other previous work as well: urban Nuremberg is made orderly and joyous by a Hitler descending from the clouds in Triumph; the Babel of nations unites in peaceful order as the flame is passed from the gods to Hitler's stadium in Olympia. But in Tiefland, the director shifts the symbolism of her character types and the "plot" resolution. Here the established authoritarian leader and his order are negated by a nature-bound outsider, one who wants no part in the society, to bring about freedom and possible prosperity.

Although Sanders-Brahms believes that Riefenstahl understood the opera to echo her own situation, she does not mention that Riefenstahl increased the self-reflexive quality of the film by altering the original opera plot to preseat Martha as succumbing willingly to seduction by the evil Marquez.60 Nor does she detail Martha's opportunism in order to become an admired and respected lady. Berg-Pan originally sets up the basis for such autobiographical analysis but does not pursue this line of inquiry. She is convinced that the scene in which the Marquez (Bernhard Minetti) enters the inn to witness Martha's dancing has fascist overtones: “the master Don Sebastian peremptorily stomps into the inn, is immediately greeted by the peasants with bowed heads and other forms of self-humiliation, and as the master, is welcomed by a woman who can entertain him. He has the power to take her, and she submits without question.”61 In presenting Martha and her dance to the observant Marquez, director Riefenstahl assumes the mate gaze to objectify and eroticize her own image, prompting one male critic to comment on the film's “undulating bosoms.”62 But the gaze is from the point of view of the boorish male peasants who paw her and of the Marquez Don Sebastian, the powerful, abusive leader. Despite Riefenstahl's awareness of her own photogenic beauty, she would be, by the filming of Tiefland, more conscious of the subservient female role in Nazi society and her own problems as female artist in Nazi political circles than earlier in her career. Oppressive male dominance is one of the guiding themes of the film, therefore Riefenstahl must connect the traditional male figures with an objectifying male gaze. She later subverts this gaze by the actions of Martha and with the non-traditional male figure of Pedro.

The erotic tension between the Marquez and Martha is undeniable, but Martha is attracted to him not because of his “viciousness,”63 but rather because she misunderstands him to be both powerful and kind; when he discovers she has been beaten by her gypsy companion, he promises no one will hurt her again. The Marquez throws the gypsy out onto the street along with a bag of coins and returns to dress Martha as a noblewoman. Martha accepts this as Riefenstahl accepted Hitler, naively avoiding the obvious or wishing only to see the self-serving aspect she desires to see—a powerful man who will give her an important and protected existence. Indeed, Riefenstahl's opportunism on behalf of her art and fame governed her early life. She has stated that she would have replaced Hitler with Stalin but for her preference of working in German and in Germany. This is camouflaged reasoning given her outspoken admiration for the German leader. Yet without any sense of irony, the director claims she considered Goebbels a “Mephisto” figure and “[ein] gefährlicher Mann” (a dangerous man) because he would have served Stalin if the situation had allowed it.64 As Martha dances for the Marquez (and his guitar accompaniment) to become his pampered mistress, so Riefenstahl filmed for Hitler (and his ideology) to become a renowned artist. Berg-Pan separates the “innocent” Martha from Riefenstahl as her dream alter-ego, but Martha is hardly innocent, and the director/actress's identification with Martha, the talented opportunist dancer is sad and self-critical rather than ideal or dreamlike. (Continued...)

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