ZGram - 9/13/2003 - "Leni"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

September 13, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This one will never be forgotten!  When our world returns to sanity, 
as sooner or later it must, the autographed photo she sent to Ernst 
Zundel only months before she died will hang in the Zundel Museum, 
depicting those virtues she lived by, those values that should matter 
most:  A love for beauty, diligence, self-discipline, courage, 
community responsibility, not living on one's knees - to name just a 
handful of many;

[START]

Hitler's Propaganda Filmmaker Dies at 101
Leni Riefenstahl, Renowned and Despised Filmmaker Who Depicted Hitler 
Rally, Dies at 101

The Associated Press

BERLIN Sept. 9 -

Leni Riefenstahl, whose hypnotic depiction of Hitler's Nuremberg 
rally, "Triumph of the Will," was renowned and despised as the best 
propaganda film ever made, has died. She was 101.

Riefenstahl died Monday night at her home in the Bavarian lakeside 
town of Poecking, mayor Rainer Schnitzler said.

Riefenstahl's companion Horst Kettner said she died in her sleep.

"Her heart simply stopped," Kettner told the online version of the 
German celebrity magazine Bunte.

A tireless innovator of film and photographic techniques, 
Riefenstahl's career centered on a quest for adventure and portraying 
physical beauty.

Even as she turned 100 last year, she strapped on scuba gear to 
photograph sharks in turquoise waters. She had begun to complain 
recently that injuries sustained in accidents over the years, 
including a helicopter crash in Sudan in 2000, had taken their toll 
and caused her constant pain.

Despite critical acclaim for her later photographs of the African 
Nuba people and of undersea flora and fauna, she spent more than half 
her life trying to live down the films she made for Hitler and for 
having admired the tyrant who devastated Europe and all but 
eliminated its Jews.

Even as late as 2002, Riefenstahl was investigated for Holocaust 
denial after she said she did not know that Gypsies taken from 
concentration camps to be used as extras in one of her wartime films 
later died in the camps. Authorities eventually dropped the case, 
saying her comments did not rise to a prosecutable level.

Speaking to The Associated Press just before her 100th birthday on 
Aug. 22, 2002, Riefenstahl dramatically said she has "apologized for 
ever being born" but that she should not be criticized for her 
masterful films.

"I don't know what I should apologize for," she said. "I cannot 
apologize, for example, for having made the film 'Triumph of the 
Will' it won the top prize. All my films won prizes."

Biographer Juergen Trimborn, who wrote "Riefenstahl: A German 
Career," said she could not apologize because the Nazi films were the 
centerpieces of her career.

"One can't speak about Leni Riefenstahl without looking at her entire 
career in the Third Reich," Trimborn said. "Her most important films 
were made during the Third Reich 'Triumph of the Will,' 'Olympia,' 
that's what's she's known for."

The former president of the Goethe Institute honored Riefenstahl as 
an aesthetic model for many directors around the world.

"Now that she is dead, we can distinguish between the aesthetic Leni 
Riefenstahl and her political entanglements," said Hilmar Hoffman.

But Germany's Culture Minister Christina Weiss said Riefenstahl's 
life tragically demonstrated that "art is never unpolitical, and that 
form and content cannot be separated from one another."

Riefenstahl said she had always been guided by the search for beauty, 
whether it was in her images of the 1934 Nuremberg rallies with 
thousands of goose-stepping soldiers and enraptured civilians fawning 
for their Fuehrer, in her dazzling portrayal of the 1936 Olympic 
athletes in Berlin, or in her still photographs of the sculpted Nuba 
men.

"I always see more of the good and the beautiful than the ugly and 
sick," Riefenstahl said. "Through my optimism I naturally prefer and 
capture the beauty in life."

Born Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl in Berlin on Aug. 22, 1902, she 
was the first child of Alfred Riefenstahl, the owner of a heating and 
ventilation firm, and his wife, Bertha Scherlach.

Riefenstahl's artistic career began as a creative dancer until a knee 
injury led her to switch to movies.

After she saw one of Arnold Fanck's silent films set in the 
mountains, Riefenstahl presented herself to him as his new star, and 
he accepted, as much for her blue-eyed, high-cheekboned beauty as her 
daredevil spirit.

She climbed rocks barefoot for the camera and was buried in an 
avalanche for the death scene in the 1926 film "Mountain of Destiny." 
Soon, she was making her own films, fairy tales such as "The Blue 
Light" celebrating Germany's Alpine mystique, in which she was star, 
screenwriter and director.

She heard Hitler speak for the first time at a 1932 rally and wrote 
to him again offering her talents. In her memoirs, Riefenstahl 
describes her first impression of Hitler's charisma.

"It seemed as if the earth's surface were spreading out in front of 
me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, 
spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the 
sky and shook the earth. I felt quite paralyzed."

Though she said she knew nothing of Hitler's "Final Solution" and 
learned of concentration camps only after the war, Riefenstahl said 
she confronted the Fuehrer about his anti-Semitism, one of many 
apparent contradictions in her claims of total ignorance of the Nazi 
mission.

Likewise, she defended "Triumph of the Will" as a documentary that 
contained "not one single anti-Semitic word," while avoiding any talk 
about filming Nazi official Julius Streicher haranguing the crowd 
about "racial purity" laws.

Many suspected Riefenstahl of being Hitler's lover, which she also 
denied. Nonetheless, as his filmmaker, Riefenstahl was the only woman 
to help shape the rise of the Third Reich.

She made four films for Hitler, the best known of which were "Triumph 
of the Will" and "Olympia," a meditation on muscle and movement at 
the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

She married once, in 1944 to army Maj. Peter Jacob, but the couple 
split three years later. She had no children, and her only sibling, 
Heinz, was killed on the eastern front during World War II.

Riefenstahl spent three years under allied arrest after the war, some 
of the time in a mental hospital. War tribunals ultimately cleared 
her of any wrongdoing but suspicion of being a Nazi collaborator 
stuck. She was boycotted as a film director and sank into poverty, 
living with her mother in a one-room apartment.

She reclaimed her career in the 1960s when she lived with and 
photographed the Nuba.

"I've never laughed so much as I did when living with the Nuba. I 
became reconciled with myself," she said.

She next turned to underwater photography, diving in the Maldives, 
the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and off Papua New Guinea. She learned 
to dive when she was 72, lying about her age by 20 years to gain 
admittance to a class.

Around this time, she met Kettner, a fellow photographer half her age 
who became her live-in assistant and companion.

At age 100, she released a new film based on her dives, "Impressions 
Under Water."

She said she hoped she would be remembered as "an industrious woman 
who has worked very hard her whole life and has received much 
acknowledgment."

A funeral was planned for Friday in Munich.


[END]

( SOURCE:  http://abcnews.go.com/wire/world/ap20030909_1133.html  )