Leni Riefenstahl (original) (raw)
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April 8, 2007
To the Editor:
I admired Clive James’s review (March 25) of the new Leni Riefenstahl biographies very much, but I wondered why James, almost throughout the essay, referred to Riefenstahl by her first name. The men he discusses — Hitler, Goebbels, Julius Streicher, Jesse Owens — are all called by their last names, but Riefenstahl is “Leni.” This often happens with female artists, and it always carries a note of condescension. (Would I, in this letter, speak of James as “Clive”?) The curious thing is that in his recent book, “Cultural Amnesia,” James nowhere places himself on a first-name basis with his female subjects. Why the reversion to the double standard with Riefenstahl? And do the editors of the Book Review think it’s O.K. to treat men and women differently in this regard?
Joan Acocella
New York
To the Editor:
Clive James reports that new biographies of the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl reaffirm that she was personally close to Adolf Hitler, Julius Streicher and other top Nazis; knowingly glamorized Nazism through her films; falsely claimed she did not know of the Nazis’ atrocities against the Jews and even personally witnessed a mass execution of Jews in German-occupied Poland; and used Gypsy slave laborers as extras in one of her films.
Yet these facts were also well known in the spring of 2004 and, inexplicably, did not deter the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from including Riefenstahl in its annual tribute to recently deceased film-industry figures. A leading propagandist for the most evil regime in human history was eulogized alongside Gregory Peck, Bob Hope and John Ritter.
Nor, it seems, has Hollywood finished honoring Riefenstahl. Jodie Foster has said she will direct and star in a forthcoming film about Riefenstahl. “People are afraid of how complicated she was,” Foster said in 2005. “There’s no clear answer to her story.” In another interview, Foster claimed that Riefensthal was “libeled so many times. She was not a member of the Nazi Party, and she was not Hitler’s girlfriend — that’s just stupid. But she’s a complex morality tale.” One can only hope that the new biographies of Riefenstahl will help Foster untangle those complexities.
Rafael Medoff
Washington
The writer is the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
To the Editor:
Heaping opprobrium on someone well known for fraternizing with some of the most repugnant characters the 20th century had to offer is hardly worth the time. What Clive James is really up against is not Leni Riefenstahl, but the disconnect between the moral content of art and the artifice, the craft, involved in its creation. We admire Camus, both the man and his work, but to say that the odious Céline did not also create powerful, moving fiction is simply untrue. Keats to the contrary, beauty is frequently an illusion and the truth, as in Riefenstahl’s case, often ugly.
It is ironic that James triumphantly cites Budd Schulberg’s interview as convicting Riefenstahl of what any reasonable person would readily surmise, namely that she was well aware of the concentration camps and of their general purposes. The more interesting part of her admission is its suggestion that, along with boundless ego and rampant careerism, her complicity with the Nazi state involved another unfortunate human attribute, fear. Riefenstahl seems to have lacked moral courage and perhaps any need for ethical coherence in her life — but however unpleasant that may be, it cannot legitimately be construed as meaning she lacked cinematic originality or creative power.
Geoffrey Brown
Sugar Grove, Ohio
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