The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

It is a pity that Susan Sontag’s attempt to deal critically with the work of Leni Riefenstahl [NYR, February 6] is so marred with factual and historical errors. But unfortunately, these errors are so great that they call into question her critical conclusions. Ms. Sontag presents her article as an attempt to establish “the facts of the case,” and disprove the “misinformation that Riefenstahl has been dispensing for the last twenty years.” In doing so, Ms. Sontag manages to discuss a film that Riefenstahl never made, and to quote a completely nonexistent statement from Riefenstahl’s 1935 book.

First, to discuss the film that Riefenstahl never made. This falsehood has been constantly surfacing ever since it was first printed in a 1965 issue of Film Comment. In that issue, James Manilla gave a brief review of a film that he claimed was made by Riefenstahl entitled Berchtesgaden über Salzburg. Before going to such lavish extremes to describe a film she could never have seen (“a fifty minute lyric portrait of the Führer against the rugged mountain scenery of his new retreat”), Ms. Sontag would have been better off using her time for a little scholarly research. If she had, she would have found that in the Summer 1972 issue of Film Library Quarterly, Manilla concedes his mistake in having identified Riefenstahl as the director of the film.

Even more astonishing, however, is Ms. Sontag’s use of a purported quote from Riefenstahl’s 1935 book, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag Films. Sontag uses the quote in an attempt to use Riefenstahl’s own words to disprove some of her later statements. The quote, as it appears on page 25 of the article, is “[the Nuremberg Rally] was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting, but as a spectacular propaganda film…. The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras.” Although she cites the book as the source of the quote, Ms. Sontag gives no specific page reference. It is in fact impossible for Ms. Sontag to give a page reference, because the statement does not appear anywhere in the book. I can personally attest to having studied the book from cover to cover in a vain attempt to find this statement. The quote was familiar, however, and I finally did find it, though not in Riefenstahl’s book. In his famous book, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer makes this statement (his own, quoting no one): “The Convention was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting, but as spectacular film propaganda” (Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Princeton University Press, p. 301). From the similarity of these two phrasings, it is safe to conclude that rather than quoting Riefenstahl, Sontag is merely quoting the subjective criticism of Kracauer. For a person who accuses Riefenstahl of deliberately distorting facts, Ms. Sontag is herself walking on extremely thin ice.

But regardless of who made the above statement, the statement itself is open to serious question. First, a careful reading of the book, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag Films, gives the exact opposite impression of a Rally meticulously planned with the film in mind. The book is full of references to the difficulties in making the film, difficulties which would never have arisen with careful advance planning. For example, it was difficult for speeches in the hall to be recorded since only one row was made available for the sound equipment (p. 20). Other references are made to film towers that were not completed until halfway through the rally (p. 24). For overhead shots, cameramen had to balance themselves on the rooftops of the old houses of Nuremberg. Riefenstahl has stated in later interviews that planning for the film did not commence until she arrived in Nuremberg a week before the Rally started. The book’s description of the making of the film supports Riefenstahl’s later statements.

But a still further question must be asked: is it possible to presume that the Rally, and the architecture designed for it, would have been any different without the presence of Riefenstahl and her filming crew? A study of the history of the Nuremberg rallies indicates that, even though a filmic value was later appreciated, the rallies were the central event of the Nazi Party and were staged for the benefit of those hundreds of thousands actually in attendance. The film could only attempt to approximate the fanaticism that was evident at the Rally; that Riefenstahl was able to capture these feelings on film as effectively as she did is a credit to her abilities as a documentary filmmaker. (Riefenstahl’s innovative use of telescopic lenses to record unnoticed the reactions of members of the crowd is further testimony to the documentary, rather than staged, nature of the film.)

Nor is it logical to presume that the architect of the Rallies, Albert Speer, would have altered his architectural plans for the one-shot benefit of Riefenstahl and her film crew. Riefenstahl filmed just one Rally in entirety; the buildings were designed to stand for centuries. As can be seen in Speer’s memoirs or in any objective appraisal of Nazi art and architecture, the raison d’être of that architecture existed quite independently of its cinematic possibilities. Seen in this view, Kracauer’s damnation of the film seems to be based on trivial grounds. Obviously some concessions were made to facilitate the filming, as is true for any modern event since the invention of recording equipment. But these concessions were minor and unworthy of the importance Kracauer attaches to them.

Another astonishing example of Ms. Sontag’s undocumented “statement of facts” is her statement on page 24 that “there was never any struggle between the filmmaker and the German Minister of Propaganda.” She further states “Riefenstahl was a close friend and companion of Hitler’s—long before 1932. She was a friend, not just an acquaintance, of Goebbels, too. No evidence supports Riefenstahl’s persistent claim since the 1950s that Goebbels hated her.” It would seem that the burden of proof in this instance is Sontag’s, although again, she prefers incorrect and unsupported statements to documented proof. First, the facts show that Leni did not know Hitler “long before 1932,” but rather met him for the first time in 1932 after Hitler had seen her film, Das Blaue Licht. For proof of this, Ms. Sontag can consult the memoirs of Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, an early Nazi and friend of Hitler. She will find in the memoirs (Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler—The Missing Years, London, 1956) a complete description of Riefenstahl’s first introduction to Hitler in 1932.

Furthermore, the evidence certainly does support Riefenstahl’s claim that Goebbels hated her. To cite just one source, there is the rather unequivocal statement by Henry Jaworsky, one of her cameramen for Olympia and for the past twenty years a resident of New York (and who hasn’t seen Riefenstahl since 1948), made in an interview in the Spring 1973 issue of Film Culture. “They hated each other, that’s a fact. Goebbels tried to get rid of her very hard. Goebbels hated her guts…. He tried hard, Goebbels, to sabotage her work, everybody knew that. She hated him and he hated her” (Film Culture, Spring 1973, p. 143).

Goebbels’s own statements give his feelings toward women and their place in society. Given his extremist sexist attitudes, it is not hard to imagine, nor should it be difficult for Ms. Sontag, why he would resent Riefenstahl, her access to Hitler, and her freedom to work outside the confines of Goebbels’s Reichsfilmkammer.

To close with one more, though hardly final, example of Ms. Sontag’s incorrect citing of history, there is her statement on page 23, referring to Riefenstahl’s documentary short, Tag der Freiheit. “Her third film, Day of Freedom: Our Army (Tag der Freiheit: Unser Wehrmacht, 1933, released in 1935) was made for the army, and depicts the beauty of soldiers and soldiering for the Führer.” The film was not made in 1933, but in 1935, a year after Triumph of the Will. It is a short film made to appease the Wehrmacht generals who were annoyed with the absence of footage showing the Wehrmacht in the 1934 Triumph of the Will. Riefenstahl had shot a small amount of footage of the Wehrmacht for Triumph, but it rained and the footage was unusable. So Riefenstahl returned the following year and made the short, Tag der Freiheit, in one day with six cameramen. It is not an important work of Riefenstahl’s, and had been lost until two years ago. The statement that the film depicted the “beauty of soldiering for the Führer” is a purely subjective statement on Ms. Sontag’s part. Anyone who has seen what remains of the film today could legitimately argue with that assertion, since the bulk of the film is merely an uninspiring filming of some very monotonous war exercises.

I would like to write a criticism of Ms. Sontag’s criticism, but that attempt would require an article of the length of Ms. Sontag’s rather than a letter to the editors. The important thing at the moment is to correct Ms. Sontag’s grossly incorrect historical “statements of fact” before they are repeated as fact by others. I hope that in the future, Ms. Sontag will exercise far more responsibility in her research before she starts writing.

David B. Hinton

Lecturer in Film, Schiller College

Heidelberg, Germany

Susan Sontag replies:

Mr. Hinton’s concern about whether a film was made in 1933 or 1935 is not simply the professional zeal of a Lecturer in Film at Heidelberg. All Leni Riefenstahl’s partisans are interested in obfuscating the central issues raised by her films and by The Last of the Nuba. And those issues were the subject of my essay—not, as Mr. Hinton claims, the boldly re-edited version of her career and intentions that she has managed, with enormous success, to get into circulation. An altogether secondary and rather easy target, that. Several days of reading in the standard sources turned up dozens of lies and misstatements of fact dispensed by Riefenstahl and her defenders which Mr. Hinton does not contest. Three mistakes did creep in, however.

(1) My source for the description of Berchtesgaden über Salzburg was the Histoire du Cinéma Nazi by Francis Courtade and Pierre Cadars (Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1972). Checking back, I see that their source is indeed an article by James Manilla in Film Comment. Berchtesgaden über Salzburg is also described in David Stewart Hull’s Film in the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) and Richard D. Mandell’s The Nazi Olympics (New York: Macmillan, 1971)—the Manilla trap again.

(2) The quote from Hinter den Kulissen comes from Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 176, and Mr. Vogel has ruefully confirmed the inauthenticity of just those two sentences—part of a long, and otherwise correct, quotation from Hinter den Kulissen given in his book. Mr. Vogel has been kind enough to supply me with a photocopy of Hinter den Kulissen—published in Munich by the Nazi Party Press in 1935—and a translation into English. Following Mr. Hinton’s example, I too can now “personally attest to having studied the book from cover to cover”—all twenty-eight pages followed by seventy-four pages of photographs.