Читаем Berlin полностью

According to Riefenstahl’s own account, Hitler invited her to the Chancellery early in 1933, told her how much he liked her films, and offered to put her “in charge of the artistic aspects of the German cinema,” working at the side of Goebbels. She claims to have begged off, pleading lack of experience. In August 1933, she relates, Hitler called her in again, this time to discuss her progress on a documentary film about the Party rally in Nuremberg, scheduled for September. Flabbergasted, she replied that she knew of no such project, whereupon Hitler explained that he had given express orders to Goebbels to recruit her for the film. Although Riefenstahl tried again to say no, pleading that she was not even a Party member, Hitler ordered her to go to Nuremberg and start working on the film. Only a few days in the making, the resulting work, Victory of the Faith, was not a success. Goebbels, she says, put all sorts of obstacles in her way despite Hitler’s instructions to help her. (It should be noted that Goebbels’s diaries, a more reliable source, say nothing about any opposition on his part to Riefenstahl’s work.)

The failure of Riefenstahl’s first propagandistic venture did not deter Hitler from asking her to direct the filming of the following year’s Nuremberg Party rally (1934), for which she was to have much more preparation and a large budget. With a crew of 120 and a battery of thirty-two cameras, Riefenstahl was able to produce one of the most impressive propaganda films of all time, The Triumph of the Will. To get the right effects, she used innovative techniques like mobile cameras moving on rails above the action. “I discovered that I had a definite talent for documentaries,” Riefenstahl writes. “I experienced the pleasure of a film-maker who gives cinematic shape to actual events without falsifying them.”

Without falsifying them, perhaps, but certainly not without glorifying them. Riefenstahl has always maintained that she lacked any commitment to Nazi ideology, but Triumph of the Will does not convey an impression of disinterest on the part of its director. It is a veritable hymn to the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, portraying the Party cadres as a tight-knit family, alternately frolicsome and serious, like Boy Scouts high on Wagner. It records only one moment of slight unease, when Hitler, in his speech to the SA and SS, refers briefly to the recent decimation of the Brown-shirt leadership.

Triumph of the Will premiered in Berlin at the UFA-Palast on March 28, 1935, with Hitler in the audience. “The end of the film,” Riefenstahl recalls, “was greeted by long, almost endless applause.” Hitler handed her a lilac bouquet. Soon he would also hand her the keys to Berlin as the director of a film on the Nazi capital’s greatest show, the 1936 Olympic Games.

Leni Riefenstahl directing The Triumph of the Will

Berlin’s painters and sculptors, like its filmmakers, were expected to deploy their talents as a “cultural sword” for the ideals of National Socialist Germany. As a Nazi functionary declared: “Only when the artist has become an indispensable contributor to the creative processes of the nation can one call his position a healthy one.” An early purge of the visual arts section of the Prussian Academy of Arts resulted in the expulsion of Oskar Kokoschka and Max Pechstein; on their own initiative (but under pressure), Otto Dix, Ernst Barlach, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, and Max Liebermann resigned from the Academy. Then the exodus began in earnest, the flight into exile from the once-favored city of Germany’s progressive visual artists. Kirchner went to Switzerland, Max Beckmann to Holland, Kokoschka and John Heartfield to London. Harry Kessler, that great patron of modern art, took refuge in France. Max Liebermann might have left as well had he not been too old and sick; he died in Berlin in 1935.

Rather than fleeing, Käthe Kollwitz went into inner emigration in her Berlin studio. She continued to produce lithographs and small sculptures. In 1936 the regime imposed an unofficial ban on public exhibitions of her work and removed her contributions from that year’s Academy exhibit of “Berlin Sculptors from Schlüter to the Present.” Nazi pundits occasionally subjected her work to their brand of art criticism. The Völkischer Beobachter, for example, complained that “no German mother looks like Kollwitz paints her.” But in general the regime left her alone, and she was even able to turn her studio into a clandestine refuge for a circle of young sculptors who produced works that were brilliantly “unhealthy” by Nazi lights.