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Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 791.430233092
EAN: 9780375404009
ISBN: 0375404007
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: March 13, 2007
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: March 13, 2007
Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Review:The definitive biography of Leni Riefenstahl, the woman best known as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the twentieth century. It is the story of huge talent and huger ambition, one that probes the sometimes blurred borders dividing art and beauty from truth and humanity. Two of Riefenstahl’s films, Olympia and Triumph of the Will, are universally regarded as the greatest and most innovative documentaries ever made, but they are also insidious glorifications of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, in this masterful new biography, Steven Bach reveals the truths and lies behind this gifted woman’s lifelong self-vindication as an apolitical artist who claimed she knew nothing of the Holocaust and denied her complicity with the criminal regime she both used and sanctified. The facts and her actions, many unknown until now, bear chilling witness: her passionate enthusiasm for Hitler from her first reading of Mein Kampf; her involvements with Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and Julius Streicher, who advanced her career, and with Hitler, who personally helped finance it; her role as silent eyewitness to wartime atrocities against Jews; and her use of slave labor in the form of concentration camp Gypsies destined for Auschwitz. We see her after the war trying to sell footage to Hollywood under an alias, manipulating a sham “discovery” of the Nuba tribes of Sudan into a career comeback, fighting to disinherit her closest living relatives, and—to the end—unable to express remorse for the millions murdered by the Nazi regime made mythic by her work.Relying on new sources—including interviews with her colleagues and intimate friends, as well as on previously unknown recordings of Riefenstahl herself—Bach gives us an exceptional work of historical investigation that untangles the past and is also an objective but unsparing appraisal of a woman of spectacular gifts corrupted by ruthless personal ambition.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Shame
There have been many attemps to stain Riefenstahl's image along the years, and this one is not the most successful at all. It serves little purpose to the academic bunch. It ashames those that search for objectivity. It ashames those that perceive that Bach has waited for Leni's death (102 years old) to publish this piece of propaganda.
Bach fails on piercing the German mindset that prevailed in the pre-Shoah years. From Triumph of the Will (1935) to the final solution (1942) there are ... Read More
Rating:  - Good Intro to Leni
After reading Jurgen Trimborn's admirable but somewhat inaccessible biography of Riefenstahl, I sought out this book in hopes that it would be friendlier to a Riefenstahl novice such as me. It certainly is an easier read and a much better starting place.
Steven Bach, of Final Cut fame, writes from the standpoint of a motion picture enthusiast. He also has a POV where Riefenstahl's Nazi associations are concerned and he doesn't hide it. For Bach Riefenstahl is the living version of Klaus ... Read More
Rating: - Brilliant But Petty and Cruel -- Oh, Wait, That's The Author!
Not since Albert Goldman's ELVIS has a dense, full length biography of a sexy, glamorous larger than life legend been written with such sadistic relish, such delicious malicious bitchery and pure venomous guile.
There's no question that Leni Riefenstahl, the stunningly beautiful German woman who made hypnotic propaganda films for the Nazis, was guilty of moral cowardice and hypocrisy, if not during the war, then certainly afterwards. She persisted to the end of her life in wanting to have ... Read More
Rating:  - Double standard
Most of the facts and "facts" in this book cannot be disputed. Only one comment - there were many other people who "cooperated" with the Nazis, but who escape any oprobrium, Richard Strauss name comes to mind. In 1938 he composed "Festliches Praeludium" for the occassion of NSDAP Parteitag, he was the president of Reichsmusikkammer, directly working for Goebbels, he never lifted a finger to help his Jewish friends, etc. etc. Maybe Richard Strauss could be another topic for Steven Bach to delve into.
Rating: - Good book but, a little too long
This was a very good book but, I think Bach gives us too much detail on Leni's life after WWII. I thought the book could have ended much sooner than it did. After all, did we really have to hear about Leni's search for a particular tribe in Africa? It would have suited me fine to hear about her various means of defending herself from various charges as a result of her association with Hitler and the Nazis. I don't see what benefit the inclusion of the African tribe info was to the reader. Still an interesting ... Read More
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