Metropolis : Part 2

Leni; The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
by Steven Bach

(Page 2 of 3)

Wedding was poor but not without altruism and aspiration. Its mean streets offered shelter to the homeless in a spartan doss-house, and there was a small pond for ice-skating. Someone in 1905 rented out part of a courtyard shed as a photographer's studio, and it wasn't long before one-reel movies were being shot there. In 1912, Wedding established Berlin's first crematorium to compensate for the scarcity and cost of open burial ground. Children played in courtyards; geraniums grew on windowsills; music and love got made; and by 1918, nearly 40 percent of all Berliners lived in tenement districts like it. We see their faces in the etchings and prints of Käthe Kollwitz; their bawdy, earthy pleasures titillate still in the sketches of Heinrich Zille, the poetic folk satirist and painter who knew them best and once observed that you can kill a man with his lodgings as well as you can with an ax.

"I hated the class system," Leni Riefenstahl confided to a friend. She was turning ninety then, living in a sheltered lakeside villa in Bavaria, distant enough in every way from Wedding to give perspective on her birthplace, a basic tenement flat in the two-block-long Prinz-Eugen-Strasse. The rooms were first lodgings for first-time parents who were almost newlyweds, married in a civil ceremony on April 5, 1902, nearly five months before their daughter saw first light in August.

Leni's father, Alfred Theodor Paul Riefenstahl, was not yet twenty-four when she was born. He was one of three boys and a girl born to Gustav and Amalie (née Lehmann) Riefenstahl in 1878 in the rural Brandenburg district surrounding Berlin. His father had been a blacksmith like his father before him, but Alfred-blond and burly and wearing an upturned Kaiser Wilhelm mustache-had been drawn to Berlin by economic opportunity. He styled himself "salesman" on documents, but in fact he was a plumber. He would in time build his own sanitation and ventilation business as domestic plumbing became standard: niceties turned into necessities, and a plumber into an entrepreneur.

Leni's mother, Bertha Ida Scherlach Riefenstahl, was almost twenty-two when her daughter was born. Bertha was a willowy beauty with dark eyes, curly dark hair, and a determined jawline, all of which she passed on to her only daughter, who was born cross-eyed. Bertha herself was the eighteenth child of a mother who died giving birth to her in Wloclawek (now in Poland) on October 9, 1880. Shortly after Bertha's mother died, her father-Leni's carpenter grandfather-married his children's nanny and fathered three more children, for a total of twenty-one.

There is a mystery here, one that might amount only to a niggling biographical puzzle were it not a hint of the shifting images of the past that Leni would manipulate as times changed and perspectives with them. Her background unavoidably aroused curiosity in the 1930s among powerful figures of the Third Reich as she rose to prominence among them. Rumors that she was Jewish-or partly so-gained currency in this period and traced an alleged line of Jewish descent through Bertha. Once aired, the rumors gained wide circulation in the European and American press during the early years of the Third Reich, though the allegations were never proved and were officially repudiated by the ultimate Third Reich authority, the Führer himself. Leni brushed the subject aside then and later as the poisoned residue of a malicious campaign orchestrated against her by Nazi propaganda minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

While some of the rumors were almost certainly inspired by Goebbels or others jealous of her position and privileges in the 1930s, not all of them were. Some of Leni's closest friends and colleagues, including Dr. Arnold Fanck, the film director credited with Leni's discovery, believed that Bertha was Jewish. As Leni's onetime mentor and lover-and later a Nazi Party member-Fanck's objectivity and veracity are not beyond challenge. Less equivocal is the testimony of art director Isabella Ploberger, who worked and lived with Leni and Bertha during World War II and took for granted that Bertha-"a lovely person, a fine person"-was Jewish. Ploberger believed that Goebbels knew, which accounted for his animosity.

There are documents, to be sure. Chief among them is Leni's "Proof of Descent" ("Abstammungs-Nachweis"), the genealogical record of ancestry she prepared and submitted to the Reich's film office in 1933 to validate Aryan descent, necessary to work in the German film industry. This document has long been available but never fully scrutinized, not even by the Nazis for whom it was prepared. Bertha is inscribed there as the child of the carpenter Karl Ludwig Friedrich Scherlach (born 1842) and Ottilie Auguste Scherlach (née Boia), born out of wedlock on January 24, 1863, to Friederika Boia and an unknown father. Though Ottilie Boia and Karl Scherlach are said to have married in the Silesian town of Woldenburg (Dobiegniew in modern Poland), no record of the marriage is known to exist, and their union may have been by common law. But what has gone unnoticed and unremarked is that Ottilie Boia could not possibly have been Bertha's mother. Born in 1863, she could not have given birth to seventeen children before delivering Bertha in 1880. Ottilie was almost certainly the nanny that Leni's carpenter grandfather married after his first wife died in delivering Bertha, the birth mother who became a nonperson in the genealogy Leni tendered to the Third Reich. As for Ottilie, she lived out her days as Bertha's stepmother and Leni's stepgrandmother in a modest flat in Charlottenburg, the comfortable Berlin suburb where the adolescent Leni ran to her for strudel and sympathy when Alfred Riefenstahl's strict discipline became intolerable.

Copyright © 2007 by Steven Bach.

About the Author

Steven Bach was a theatrical and film producer before heading worldwide production at United Artists, where he was involved in such films as Raging Bull, Manhattan, The French Lieutenant's Woman, La Cage aux Folles, and Heaven's Gate, about which he wrote the brilliant best-seller Final Cut. He is also the author of Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend. He teaches at Columbia University and Bennington College and divides his time between Europe and the United States.