Austria was the last country to be liberated from National Socialism. The advance of the western Allies did not begin there until late April 1945. In Innsbruck, a surprisingly enthusiastic reception awaited the Americans: the streets were decorated in red, white, and blue, and the masses hailed their arrival. Leni Riefenstahl was on the run at this time. At some point in the previous few weeks, she had realized that things were not looking good. Although she continued to work on Lowlands around the clock, she was finding it more and more difficult to retreat into the world of art.
Albert Speer had taken Riefenstahl’s mother along from Berlin on one of his trips to Obersalzberg, a Bavarian mountain retreat for the Nazi top brass. Bertha Riefenstahl had been living with her daughter since February. Wilma Schaub, the wife of Hitler’s oldest adjutant, SS-Obergruppenführer Julius Schaub, had also fled to Kitzbühel. She had a direct telephone line to the Reich chancellery, and supplied Riefenstahl with food, medicine, and news. There were reports of superweapons, damage from bombs, and the punishments awaiting them if the Allies were actually to win. Frau Schaub had arranged for the original negatives of the party rally films to be brought to safety with a car coming from the “Brown House” (national headquarters of the National Socialist Party) in Munich to Bolzano.1 When the report of the capitulation of Hamburg leaked out, it was said that Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide. Swastika flags and Hitler portraits had vanished. Riefenstahl made a quick exit and headed to Mayrhofen, a small village in Tyrol.
Confusion reigned in Tyrol. The German soldiers who had been defeated on the Italian front were trying to get to Germany, and the Italian forced laborers were rushing back home. No one cared about Riefenstahl. She took a room in a small hotel in the village, and it was there that she learned about the death of Hitler. “What we had been expecting for a long time had finally come to pass. I cannot describe what I felt at that moment. A chaos of emotions raged in me—I threw myself on my bed and wept throughout the night.”2 She was crying only for herself. Without her Führer, she would not be able to proceed with the projects she had described to Speer the previous year. Her ability to run things her way had come to an end.
Her depiction of the postwar era, which was unvarying over the course of decades, reveals Riefenstahl’s shocking degree of egomania. Right down to the end of her long life, she never tired of claiming that she had been the victim of a grave injustice.3 Since no one in Mayrhofen was willing to help her out, she started to make her way back to her mother, and she and other civilians were arrested by American soldiers and brought to a prisoners’ camp. Because the camp was poorly guarded, she was able to escape, only to be recaptured. This pattern of capture and escape occurred a total of three times. Riefenstahl ignored the fact that arrests and identity checks of minions of the National Socialist regime were a routine matter at this time. She regarded her “captivities” as a personal affront.
Once she arrived in Seebichl, she found that her house had been seized by the Americans. Still, the American officer who met her at the door was courteous, and he even spoke German.4 The Americans were looking for what was left of Hitler and his inner circle. Riefenstahl was questioned by Captain Wallenberg and Captain Langendorf, who had trouble reconciling their image of the plucky, attractive actress of the mountain films with the ailing, despondent woman sitting across from them. Riefenstahl’s greatest source of anguish was that she could not continue her work on Lowlands. She figured that the project had come to a halt, as had everything in Germany. Then she affirmed that she had never curried favor with high-ranking National Socialists. After all, she had already been somebody before 1933. Riefenstahl, who was regularly handed one hundred thousand reichsmarks from the Goebbels ministry, claimed that if she, like many other colleagues, had only been working for the money, she could have been a millionaire by now. She trumpeted her artistic independence: “Had I ever had the impression that my freedom as creative artist would be limited, I would have gone abroad. . . . This I have kept until the last day of my work.” Many party members made life difficult for her, and she even thought they were out to kill her. She hated Goebbels, and she now described Bormann as “such a primitive man.” Riefenstahl recommended that those who had once been in Hitler’s inner circle commit suicide. “And I cannot grasp how any of the people who shared Hitler’s political ideas have the courage to continue living. I would have committed suicide, had I felt that I shared the responsibility for these crimes.” By contrast, she was patting herself on the back for having known Jews (von Sternberg) and supported them (Ernst Jäger’s wife). She had been terribly upset about the pogroms in November 1938, and was only able to calm down when she was assured that the responsible parties would be punished. The American officers did not regard her as a fanatical National Socialist, and found her open and sincere. Perhaps, they concluded, she truly did not know what had been going on in Hitler’s state. In their eyes, Riefenstahl’s moral corruption was a typical product of National Socialism. Hitler had held his protective hand over her and ensured that she could go on living undisturbed in her dream world. “If her statements are sincere, she has never grasped, and still does not grasp, the fact that she, by dedicating her life to art, has given expression to a gruesome regime and contributed to its glorification.”5
Riefenstahl’s husband and mother were now staying at Hörlahof, then in possession of the Ribbentrop family. She was also brought there by the American soldiers. But the joy of their reunion was short-lived, because Riefenstahl was again arrested and interrogated. She was shown photographs of concentration camps, and she had to put up with painful questions. Because she had been neither a member of the party nor Hitler’s lover, she did not understand what was wanted of her. Then, on June 3, she was released, surprisingly quickly. The Americans gave her a document stating that there were no charges against her. Riefenstahl went back to Kitzbühel and assumed that the issues about her dealings with Hitler had been resolved. She returned to her daily routine and planned to finish up her work on Lowlands. It did not even occur to her that people might not want to see her films anymore. Riefenstahl did not feel compelled to reflect or make a fresh start. She merely noted that the end of the war had disrupted her work, but she was unfazed, all set to pick up where she had left off. In early May the Allies negotiated a change in the occupying power in North Tyrol. The French, who were intent on being considered a great power, insisted on an active role in implementing peace and rebuilding Europe. The removal of the American troops in North Tyrol and Vorarlberg began on July 5 and was completed five days later. This changeover had repercussions for Riefenstahl’s life. The Americans regarded the Austrians just like the Germans, as a defeated nation. The French, by contrast, described themselves as an occupying power in a friendly country, which is why they had plaques mounted at the national border that read Ici L’Autriche, pays ami. The French policy can be summarized with three d’s: disannexation, detoxification, and democratization. Austria would be separated from Germany (désannexion), National Socialist propaganda would be removed (désintoxication), and the Austrians would be provided democratic political and cultural ideas (démocratisation). It is easy to see that Riefenstahl and her art were not compatible with this endeavor. Her clearance certificate that had been issued by the Americans was declared invalid because the French rejected the denazification process conducted by the Americans on the grounds that it had been too perfunctory and superficial. She was arrested and interrogated all over again, this time by the French military, and was ordered to leave Tyrol. It should be noted that this order was not some malicious act directed at her personally. The “Ostmark” no longer existed; all “ethnic Germans” were now considered foreigners and had to leave the country as quickly as possible.6 According to her descriptions, she was subjected to gratuitous harassment by the French. After a stay in the hospital of the Innsbruck Women’s Prison, she claimed to have been so demoralized that she wanted to die. Eventually her expulsion was withdrawn, and she was allowed to return to Seebichl House.
There she had a visit from Budd Schulberg. Schulberg was part of the old Hollywood upper crust. His father, B. P. Schulberg, had been the production chief of Paramount Pictures; Budd grew up with silent-film stars and knew quite a lot about the business. He had been one of the initiators of a boycott against Riefenstahl when she visited Hollywood in 1938. After the end of World War II, he was looking around Europe for movies and movie stills that could be of use in the war-crimes trials in Nuremberg on behalf of the American government. Triumph of the Will had already been confiscated and put to good use: “Its first use there was as a psychological experiment to try to break through Hess’s ‘amnesia.’ ”7 Victory of Faith and Day of Freedom, which they wanted to show in Nuremberg to serve as a “memory refresher,” still needed to be located. Schulberg went in search of Leni Riefenstahl, hoping to find these films. Reading the secret service files in Salzburg, he saw a reference to her last known whereabouts: “Last seen in Salzburg with Hitler’s entourage early ’43.” He was referred to a Mr. Kahn, a member of the Rainbow Division, which had occupied the area around Salzburg. Kahn had been the first to interrogate Riefenstahl. He reported that she was able to supply a great deal of information about Hitler and explained that he would have liked to keep her incarcerated even longer. Because she was a VIP, however, she was turned over to the Seventh Army, which soon classified her as denazified and released her. Schulberg’s quest then led him to Kitzbühel, where he asked the French officer in command where he might find her. Major Guyonnet did not think much of Madame Riefenstahl, and called her “a third-rate movie actress.” Although he had interrogated her, he did not come away with much information and sent her back home.
Eventually Schulberg made his way to Seebichl House, an impressively large, beautiful building with a view of the snowcapped peaks of the Kitzbühel Alps. A short, nervous, exaggeratedly polite man with a stiff smile opened the door. This man was Peter Jacob, Riefenstahl’s husband. He assured Schulberg that Riefenstahl was delighted at the prospect of his visit and asked him to come into the study. Schulberg found himself in a luxurious, oak-paneled room with a great many bookcases. He noticed quite a few classics of German literature, biographies of artists, film books, and leather-bound screenplays of Riefenstahl’s movies, with the exception of Victory of Faith, Triumph of the Will, and Day of Freedom. She kept him waiting for half an hour, then made an appearance. Riefenstahl was wearing yellow, velvety corduroy slacks and a golden-brown leather jacket, which went perfectly with her tanned face. “She held out her hand to me, prima-donna fashion, and smiled grandly. She reminded me of I don’t know how many actresses of her age I had met before, fading beauties who try to compensate in grooming, make-up and animation for what they begin to lack in physical appeal.” He noticed how nervous she was. She asked him why he wanted to speak to her, and hastily pulled a piece of paper out of her pants pocket and held it up to him. Here, she said, take a look for yourself. She had been cleared, and was above reproach. When he replied that he was not from the Counter Intelligence Corps, but from the National Film Archives, and was looking for her films, her face relaxed. Riefenstahl took his hand and pressed it with gratitude. She sent her husband to the kitchen to have the cook bring them tea and cake. She was overjoyed to learn that someone had come to her from Berlin on account of her films. She happily repeated the movie titles as he listed them, but when he got to Triumph of the Will, she clammed up. She pulled her hand away, and her eyes, which had looked at him warmly until then, took on a wary aspect. It was only when he assured her that Triumph of the Will was a great documentary film that she calmed down again. “ ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘That’s the way I meant it. Not propaganda, but—well, after all, a party congress in Nuremberg was something important happening, whether you were for it or not.’ ” Then she sent her husband off to get the certificate of the prize she had been awarded by the French government in 1937 for Triumph of the Will. When Schulberg asked about the two other films of party rallies, she had no desire to elaborate. Victory of Faith was short and uninteresting, she stated, and Day of Freedom an insignificant and pathetic effort, a mere concession to the Wehrmacht. She was more interested in discussing the certificate from Paris that Jacob brought her. “In Paris I was given an ovation. They treated me marvelously in London too. That’s the way art should be—international.” Schulberg tried to get her to talk about Hitler and his crimes. She actually claimed that Hitler had a very artistic and sensitive nature, but must have had a demon hidden inside him that no one could see. Her relationship with him was purely artistic. She had not heard a thing about the concentration camps until the Americans interrogated her. Then she turned to the subject of Goebbels, and claimed that she had feared that he would have her brought to a concentration camp. “ ‘But why should you be afraid of concentration camps?’ I said. ‘After all, you hadn’t heard of them.’ ‘Oh, I knew there were some,’ Leni said. ‘But I had no idea what they were really like, how terrible they were.’ ” After she had again ordered tea from her husband, she asked in a saccharine tone if he knew whether her name was on the black list. He did not know, but he assumed so. Then she asked whether he believed that her new, absolutely unpolitical film was likely to be boycotted in America. Schulberg said yes, and she confessed to him that she no longer knew what to do. Then why not try her new movie in Germany? “ ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘I was never a Nazi, but the concentration-camp Germans will be in power.’ ” When he left, she walked him out to the front of the house. Once again, she tried to persuade him to intercede on her behalf. When Schulberg replied that he would not be able to do anything for her, any last trace of friendliness vanished for a moment. Then she gave him an odd smile, the kind that made him wonder whether she had used this same smile when requesting a favor from Hitler. She asked Schulberg for a can of gas, but he replied that it was against the rules for him to do so. After this second rebuff, her face took on a hard, self-pitying aspect. “As I drove down the hill,” Schulberg wrote at the conclusion of his essay, “I saw her walking slowly back into her big house, back to her well-trained Mr. Jacob, her well-trained servants, and the stubborn ghosts of the third Reich who insisted on being part of the family.”8
In this piece, Schulberg captured Riefenstahl’s forlornness and factitiousness. She loved to speak about her successes as a great artist, and still dreamed of glitzy premieres and bursts of applause. Twenty-six years after Schulberg’s visit, she would still go into a rage if his name came up. “No, no, don’t mention Schulberg. Keine [sic] Mensch—Schwein!”9 In 1971, she told her interviewer, Gordon Hitchens, that if she had been free and not so poor, she would have sued Schulberg. She had an odd concept of the law. What could she possibly sue him for? Right down to the end of her very long life, Riefenstahl would balk at the idea that she was in no position to play the injured party and adjudge right and wrong. The world lay in ruins, and she still thought she had every right to be the center of attention.
For Janet Flanner, two sights in Germany provided dramatic proof that the Allies had won the war. One was the devastation evident in any German city, and the other was “the small tableau of the Nazi-filled prisoners’ box, beneath the floodlights, in the war-crimes courtroom in Nuremberg.”10 Riefenstahl, who knew most of the defendants personally, had only the vaguest notion of the proceedings. She was so caught up in thoughts of what would happen to her personally that she was “almost like a sleepwalker” and incapable of making out the realities of the courtroom.11 She would not admit to herself that she—like these men in the dock in Nuremberg—was one of the losers. Riefenstahl regarded the end of National Socialism as the beginning of tyranny. On April 15, 1946, she was ordered to leave Austria.12 Her husband, her mother, and three members of her crew went with her. Every Reichsdeutscher—she had not been singled out, contrary to her description of the incident—was allowed to carry along only 30 kilos of luggage in this deportation.13 They were free to move to a German city in the French zone. Riefenstahl chose Freiburg, where she was hoping for help from Dr. Fanck, but he wanted nothing to do with her.
They eventually found a place to stay in the small town of Breisach, and then in the Black Forest village of Königsfeld. Her plans for a comeback—she already had a young woman at her side whom she intended to train as a film editor—were thwarted by the confiscation of her bank assets and her film equipment, including the footage itself.
Riefenstahl’s marriage was in bad shape as well. Jacob, who could no longer escape to the battlefield, had to stay with her. He was a soldier whose war had been lost. Riefenstahl was plagued by her usual stomach ailments and craved her fame, or at least the prospect of attaining it. The two of them often fought. The thought that she might never be able to shoot a film again was devastating. She had actually assumed that the French would consider themselves lucky to have her in their zone. She must have wondered why they were not making her any movie offers, or bringing her to Paris to exchange ideas with the top French filmmakers.
She was ill-tempered, and living in close quarters with her husband and mother only made matters worse. Apart from the years she spent with Schneeberger, Riefenstahl had never lived with a man for long. The way she saw it, the victors in the war were to blame for the catastrophic state of her husband and her marriage: “My illness and the repeated arrests put a strain on him, especially since after almost five years of at the front, he deserved a better life after the war.”14 This can only mean that a German victory would have been the fair outcome. By the time a year had passed since the end of the war, Riefenstahl knew that she would have to gather all her strength to get back on her feet. She decided to separate from Jacob, who was constantly cheating on her. She would get along better without him. Riefenstahl reduced her family to a minimum: she lived with her mother, whose absolute admiration and support she could count on. Marriage, by contrast, consumed her energy and thus inhibited artistic development. Her divorce was finalized in the summer of 1947.
For her first denazification hearing in July 1948, she wrote up a chronology of her life. A key strategy in getting herself exonerated of the charge of shooting movies with National Socialist ideology was emphasizing the international recognition these films had brought her. To substantiate this point, she attached press reviews from fascist Italy and Nazi-occupied France. In addition, she asked many of her former crew members for affidavits. The overwhelming consensus was that she selected her crew solely on the basis of their technical and artistic merits. Personal adjutants of Hitler also affirmed that Riefenstahl had never been Hitler’s lover. On November 9, 1948, the verdict was handed down: Riefenstahl was found “not in violation of the law.” The explanation for this decision was a virtually verbatim restatement of Riefenstahl’s own argument: Riefenstahl, the daughter of a respectable family in Berlin who overcame considerable obstacles to become an artist, denied any connection to National Socialism. She had enjoyed international renown even before 1933. When Hitler came to power, the film industry was nationalized and fell under Goebbels’s authority, and her difficult struggle for artistic autonomy commenced. Because she was treated so badly and her movies were not authorized (Mademoiselle Docteur was cited as an example), she even left the country and went to Spain. Once she was back in Germany, she was forced to make a documentary about the Nuremberg Rally in 1934. She had repeated serious conflicts with Goebbels, who tried to compromise her in public and to disparage her accomplishments. Contrary to popular belief, Goebbels did not back her; he persecuted and impeded her. The fact-finding commission determined “unequivocally” that Riefenstahl had nothing in common with either the party’s or Hitler’s ideas.
The assumption among the general public that Leni Riefenstahl must be regarded as a beneficiary of the Third Reich because of her high income level and financial holdings is not correct. We do know that she made 7 films prior to 1933, she did not receive a penny from the propaganda ministry, and the last 2 films, including Lowlands, have yet to be completed because nearly all of her film products and materials have been seized and removed from her possession. Frau Riefenstahl is a poor woman today. Her home in Berlin is destroyed, as is the one in Kitzbühel, and the only livable property has been impounded by the occupying power, so she has no rental revenue.15
At the hearing on July 6, 1949, Riefenstahl essentially stuck to her story from the previous year. Since the Goebbels diaries were still undiscovered at this time (they were in storage in Moscow), she could get away with outright lies. Riefenstahl claimed that she had never been invited to the homes of Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Bormann or other high-ranking National Socialists. The formal decision came down that there was no presumption of guilt in Riefenstahl’s case and that she was not a beneficiary of National Socialism. On December 6, 1949, the Baden State Commission for Political Purgation ordered a new scrutiny of the case, and on December 16, Riefenstahl was classified as a Mitläuferin (usually translated as “fellow traveler,” it essentially means “active sympathizer”). However, the statement justifying this classification reads more like a vindication. Several pages from the document classifying her as “not in violation of the law” are quoted, and at the end, there is no more than a brief mention of the fact that her non-member status in the party, associations, and so forth was not a sufficient reason to dismiss her political liability. Riefenstahl’s work on the party rally and Olympic films, which were used for National Socialist propaganda, sufficed to regard her as a Mitläuferin. She was not charged, nor was she banned from her profession. There were no sanctions or prohibitions.
After this decision, which enabled her to work again, she packed up, left Königsfeld, and moved to Munich. She knew exactly what to do: she would pick up where she had left off, which meant that she would complete Lowlands. This restart to her career had only one catch: Lowlands was still in the hands of the French. To play up the artistic and political importance of the film, she later claimed in her memoirs that bitter disputes had broken out among various political groups in Paris about whether to return the film.16
Many other artists hailed the heady combination of chaos and freedom they experienced after 1945, but not Leni Riefenstahl. She lacked their curiosity about the aesthetic trends from which Germany had been cut off for so long, and saw no need for a personal or professional reassessment or an artistic new beginning. Driven out of her paradise, she was offended that she was not being welcomed as a key figure in the artistic world. Once she had been officially denazified, she could litigate—the courtroom offered her a new stage for performances that would earn her press coverage. A suit she brought against the publisher, Olympiaverlag, inaugurated a virtual orgy of court cases—fifty in all. Wochenend magazine had published excerpts of the supposed diary of Eva Braun, and Luis Trenker, of all people, claimed that Braun had given him this diary. Riefenstahl appears in the diary as “the rival,” and she is said to have danced in front of Hitler and received monetary gifts. In September 1948, Riefenstahl won her suit in the Munich district court. Photographs of the trial show her sitting among her lawyers, sometimes wiping away her tears or shouting indignantly, always sporting a jaunty hat and elegant suit with a white blouse in the style of Dior’s New Look. She knew how to plant herself in the limelight. People rightly wondered how a lady like this could possibly qualify for legal aid, which was how she financed these cases. One year later Riefenstahl brought a private suit against the publisher Helmut Kindler. On May 1, 1949, Revue magazine, of which Kindler was the editor in chief, had published a long illustrated article bearing the title “The Uncompleted Film by Leni Riefenstahl. What will become of Lowlands?” The article claimed that shooting this film had already cost seven million marks, and that for Riefenstahl, money was no object. She had selected Gypsies in concentration camps who had been mistreated to act as extras. Riefenstahl was suing Kindler for libel and defamation. In this trial as well, she was granted legal aid.
The usual suspects were summoned as witnesses; they swore that the subject of concentration camps had never come up and that the atmosphere on the set was upbeat, even jolly. The court did not buy the witness’s story cited in the Revue and determined that because the witness was herself a Gypsy, her “subjective feelings were tarnished.”17 An additional key exonerating witness for Riefenstahl was the former SS-Sturmbannführer who had overseen the construction of the Maxglan camp. He was listed as an “expert in matters pertaining to Gypsies.” In his statement, which ran on for several pages, he pointed out that Gypsies were criminal and abhorrent. The camp had been set up because there had been many robberies in the area, and this was a way of keeping better watch over the Gypsies. In Maxglan, they lived in a supervised environment behind barbed wire. To pay for these costs, the Gypsies were lent out, in this case to Frau Riefenstahl, who pampered them so extremely that he had to remind her to comply with the rules.
Alfred Polgar, a prominent drama critic, fiction writer, and essayist, attended this trial, and reported that although the topic was a horrifying one (“concentration camp inmates as film extras”), the atmosphere in the courtroom was exuberant. Everyone—including the judge and the opposing counsel—was charming to Riefenstahl, and her “birdlike profile” lost a little of its sharpness. The spectators hung on every word of her reports about meetings with the Führer, who was so understanding, and Goebbels, who was evil. “But even in these buoyant moments, the coldness never left Frau Riefenstahl’s eyes and expression. Earlier in her life, she had been heavily involved in movies about glaciers, and maybe the frostiness in her face was a holdover from that time.”18
Riefenstahl did not deny that she had worked with Gypsies, “but she emphasized that these people had been happy to have escaped the concentration camp for a few weeks.”19 She insisted that she had not brought the suit against Kindler of her own volition, but had been compelled to do so by the Allied authorities and the denazification tribunal in order to respond to accusations that had been made against her in court. There is no evidence to back up this assertion. She used this propitious moment to announce that her pockets were full of foreign film contracts. The crowning achievement came when Riefenstahl’s lawyer belted out to the courtroom: “The nation can be proud of Leni Riefenstahl!” In the end, Kindler was fined six hundred marks and Riefenstahl emerged from this trial on stronger footing. She had been able to foil an ethical publisher and opponent of the National Socialists whose publications supported a new, democratic Germany.
In 1950, she bought a three-room apartment in Munich. Riefenstahl claimed to have gotten the money for it from Friedrich Mainz, the former head of Tobis Cinema. This was not just any apartment building. Ady Vogel, known as “the salt baron,” was a friend of hers and had the idea of building an apartment house that combined the advantages of a hotel and a rental building. Concierge, chambermaids, telephone switchboard, restaurant, hairdresser, and cleaning service were available to the residents. This luxurious lifestyle was new in Germany. The stately and elegant staircase at Tengstrasse 20 in Schwabing revealed the kind of setting Riefenstahl considered fitting for herself. Her new domicile was not some little hole in the wall in shabby welfare housing at the edge of town; this was a lavish apartment building right in the center of Munich’s arts district. Her dark days appeared to be over. When Peter Viertel, son of the screenwriter Salka Viertel, was stationed in Munich as an American soldier, he observed Riefenstahl holding court with friends at the elegant hotel bar of the Bayerischer Hof.20 She also profited from the currency reform and the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany. However, she was unable to gain a foothold in the film business. This had nothing to do with a “work ban,” as she maintained. People associated her name with Nazi propaganda films, and no one was drawn to those kinds of movies now. She had never made sparkling entertainment films, and her tepid reputation as an actress did not inspire people to look forward to her return to the screen. Unlike Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose return to the conductor’s stand was supported by renowned soloists and distinguished politicians from around the globe, and whose artistic reputation trumped any accusations of political and moral guilt, Riefenstahl lacked any political or artistic backing.
German film in the immediate postwar period was what Fritz Göttler has called a “transit space,” wedged between the old and the new. The first postwar films—entertaining flashes in the pan and highbrow social-problem films—were produced almost entirely by people who had previously worked at Ufa. These films lacked boldness, dynamism, ambition, and self-confidence. Film production was now centered in Munich and Hamburg; Berlin had been relegated to the background. Riefenstahl picked Munich as her new base and met up again with Harry Sokal, who had returned to Germany from the United States. Her memoirs have only snide remarks about him, but her old cameraman, Heinz von Jaworsky, reported that in 1948 he ran into Riefenstahl and Sokal arm in arm, enjoying a friendly chat in a Munich film studio. Riefenstahl pictured them producing films together, but Sokal no longer had as much money as before the war and would be unable to finance the completion of Lowlands. She would have to seek new investors.
The postwar films made it painfully clear that the Germans were in no position to summon up any real interest in their current era. Filmmaking was taking a very different path in Italy. Defeated and deprived, Italy was still able to achieve international recognition with its cinematic art. Thanks to Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica, Rome was soon regarded as the center of European film. Riefenstahl was invited to Rome in 1950 and later recalled: “I was in a state of euphoria. The blue sky, the warm air, the laughing people helped me to forget the grayness that I had left behind in Germany. They had found an elegant apartment for me, and next to the flowers there was an envelope with a large sum of money in lira bills.”21 At long last, she was being treated as a diva and revered once again. In the evenings she was taken out and there was great interest in her ideas for future projects.
Riefenstahl kept up with the times as far as her appearance was concerned. She dyed her hair titian red and wore an eye-catching green raincoat. With big hoop earrings, short curly hair, and chic summer dresses, she hobnobbed with the likes of Gina Lollobrigida in Cinecittà. She was still strikingly attractive and left no stone unturned in her quest to regain a distinguished place in society.
She continued to regard her films as classic masterpieces. Since she had also filmed on location, she mingled with the neorealists, conveniently overlooking the fact that the Italian neorealist directors knew how to tell a good story and she did not. Simple, powerfully expressive images told the unrecorded story of mankind. Italian directors such as Rossellini and Visconti drew on the great artistic tradition of their country using “genetic material” adopted from Giotto’s medieval frescoes and Renaissance painters, while Riefenstahl rambled about Dürer, Kollwitz, and Van Gogh. Italian filmmakers created a reality that was deeply rooted in the history and geography of their country. This distinctive symbiosis of everyday people and film made cinema the gauge of the cultural and social development of postwar Italy. Riefenstahl, like her former benefactor, Hitler, had only idealized images of people in her head. Whether she was in Sarntal, at the Nuremberg party rallies, or in the Maxglan camp, she looked for extras who could play the role of regular people. Riefenstahl’s films show no trace of having discovered the realism that infused the Italian cinema with new images.
People with political clout interceded to get the Lowlands footage back to her. It was the same old story: her valuable, irreplaceable film had been damaged, or even destroyed, by idiots. She spent days and nights at the editing table wrestling to restore the film. Lowlands premiered on February 11, 1954. After many glamorous premieres at the Ufa Palace in Berlin, Riefenstahl was now consigned to the boondocks. The distributor Allianz-Verleih arranged for a showing in Stuttgart. Although some reviews were scathing, others offered words of praise. Still, the outcome was clear: the movie that had sapped so much of her strength was a flop. The style and subject matter of this melodrama set in an unreal nowhere were behind the times. Riefenstahl had the sinking feeling that she had been “miscast” and was unable to breathe life into the role of Marta.22 No one accepted her as the young Gypsy—least of all herself. A curse seemed to hang over Lowlands. For the cinema, 1954 was the year of Fellini’s La Strada and Visconti’s Senso—not Lowlands. Riefenstahl withdrew the movie from theaters after only a few showings. She had spent nearly a decade working on a doomed project.