Metropolis : Part 3

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

(Page 3 of 3)

Third Reich genealogies required declaration of religion as well as race, and Leni's states that her forebears were Protestant. They appear not to have been devout. Since 1850, every birth, including Leni's, was recorded at a registry office rather than at a church after a christening (though Leni was confirmed as Protestant in a Berlin church at fifteen).

The city and culture in which Leni grew up were famously cosmopolitan; Jewish conversion to Christianity and cultural assimilation were commonplace, though racial identity, rather than religious, would be the Nazis' standard when theirs became the only one that mattered. No known documents fill the gap in Leni's ancestry, but the substitution of Bertha's stepmother for her birth mother on a Third Reich genealogical document is hard to fathom without considering a motive touching on race, since defining race was the point of the exercise. What is not speculative is Leni's ability to define and redefine her past as circumstance or occasion required. As for Bertha, Leni "loved her to distraction" until she died in 1965 at the age of eighty-four.

Alfred Riefenstahl inspired different emotions. He was a striver: rigid, efficient, conservative, and Leni's rival for Bertha's attention. His business depended on Berlin, though he felt ill at ease there with his provincial background and views of family life, especially after Leni's only sibling, a brother named Heinz, was born on March 5, 1906. Alfred's burgeoning business allowed him to move the family to a larger flat in Berlin-Neukölln just before Heinz was born and Leni began school. The old neighborhood and the new were similar (both would be centers of Communist agitation after 1918), so it came as a relief when the family could afford weekend excursions to a lakeside village about an hour southwest of Berlin by suburban rail.

Zeuthen was idyllic, green, and distanced Leni and little Heinz from the city's dangers. It was tranquil enough for hiking, swimming, and languidly watching clouds roll by. The cottage the family rented-and would eventually acquire-was a short walk through the woods to the railway line to Berlin and just across the lake from the Gasthaus run by Bertha's older sister Olga, who had alerted them to the area in the first place.

As a child, Leni was contentedly solitary except for her brother, perhaps a trait acquired because the family moved so often. After the apartments in Wedding and Neukölln and the weekend cottage at Zeuthen, there would be other flats in Berlin in the Goltzstrasse and in the Yorckstrasse, nearer the center of the city and her father's business. But she may have been solitary by choice because she saw herself as special and precocious and needed no supporting cast but Heinz and no audience but the indulgent Bertha, "always my best friend."

She began reading at an early age, she tells us, and started writing poetry and plays at the age of five after an excursion to the theater to see a performance of Snow White. Though Alfred preferred bowling or hunting with friends, he now and then treated his family to a show, stoutly impervious to the stage magic that would become a "driving force" for his impressionable daughter and remained one for his wife.

Bertha had dreamed as a girl of going on the stage and may actually have done so. A photograph taken before her marriage shows her dressed in the kind of dashing finery a Floradora girl might have worn: a short-sleeved, knee-length dress trimmed in garlands of flowers repeated in her hat and on the open fan in her right hand, cocked saucily on her hip. She told Leni that she had prayed while carrying her, "Dear God, give me a beautiful daughter who will become a famous actress." The seed planted, grew. What young girl could resist thinking herself the answer to a prayer?

"I dreamed my dreams," Leni said, creating meadowland theatrics in which she played the leading role and the obliging Heinz became her willing prop. Like her poems and daily life, her plays excluded companionship and outsiders. "I allowed no people into my verses, only trees, birds and even insects."

As she entered adolescence, she fantasized becoming a nun, but the cloister sounded confining and self-denial dreary. News reports of aviation exploits during the Great War excited images of adventure and daring. They also inspired her to imagine an entire airline industry on paper, scheduling flights between European cities and even calculating the price of tickets, as if emulating Alfred's administration of his plumbing business. "There was in me some organizational talent struggling to emerge," she remembered later, an aptitude that would prove indispensable when competing in the real world as a woman in a man's universe.

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.