Theater of Cruelty by Ian Buruma Read Free Book Online

was inspired by the spectacular black-and-white pictures of them taken by the British photographer George Rodger in 1951. When Riefenstahl offered to pay him for useful introductions, he replied: “Dear madam, knowing your background and mine I don’t really have anything to say to you at all.”
    Rodger was with the British troops as a photographer for
Life
magazine when they liberated Bergen-Belsen. He was shocked to find himself “subconsciously arranging groups and bodies on the groundinto artistic compositions in the viewfinder.” This is quite a good description of Riefenstahl’s way of looking at the world, even though she never applied it to emaciated victims of torture and murder. As she said in an interview with
Cahiers du Cinéma
, quoted by Sontag: “I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony. When harmony is produced I am happy.” 7 She meant: Jesse Owens, Nazi storm troopers, the Nuba.
    Does this make her a lifelong fascist aesthete? Are her pictures of the Nuba infected by the same venom as the footage of SA men stamping to the sounds of the “Horst Wessel Song”? It is hard to maintain that they are. To be sure, the culture of the Nuba that interested Riefenstahl was not intellectually reflective, pacific, pluralist, or much associated with anything one would call liberal. But it is a stretch to see the tribal ceremonies of a people in the Sudan as a continuum of Hitler’s rallies in Nuremberg. Nor is it fair to describe a viewer’s enjoyment of Riefenstahl’s color photographs of wrestlers and naked youths as politically suspect. The Nuba are what they are, or, more accurately, were what they were when Riefenstahl got to them. Their appeal to her was certainly of a piece with her views on urban civilization. Like the characters she portrayed in Fanck’s mountain movies, she saw them as nature’s children: this was condescending perhaps, Romantic absolutely, but hardly fascism.
    Riefenstahl went on working almost to her dying day in September 2003. She sustained injuries from various crashes. Her morbid attempts to defy her age—the thick streaks of makeup, the straw-blond wigs, the hormone injections and facial surgery—gave her the appearance of an old man in drag. But there she was, celebrating her centennial in the company of Siegfried and Roy, from Las Vegas, and Reinhold Messner, the mountaineer, a week after the premiere ontelevision of her last work, entitled
Underwater Impressions
. As the oldest scuba diver in the world, she had spent the last two decades of her life photographing coral reefs and marine life with her much younger lover Horst Kettner.
    The endless images of tropical fish and brightly colored sea anemones were not particularly well received. One reviewer, quoted by Bach, called
Underwater Impressions
“the world’s most beautiful screen saver.” Another spoke of “Triumph of the Gill.” But Riefenstahl felt at home underwater capturing the silent beauty of a yet unblemished natural world. In her own words, it had sheltered her “from the outside world, removing all problems and worries.” Perhaps best of all, it was a world entirely devoid of anything remotely human.
    1
Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
(Knopf, 2007).
    2
Under the Sign of Saturn
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972).
    3 Quoted in
The Guardian
, April 16, 2007.
    4 Translated from the German by Edna McCown (Faber and Faber, 2008).
    5 Bach relates how in 1933 Riefenstahl was partying with a group of men in the sauna of a Swiss hotel when she took a phone call from Göring, who informed her that Hitler had become chancellor of the Reich.
    6 The camp was in the fields near Schloss Leopoldskron, which had belonged before the Anschluss to Max Reinhardt, the theater director, and was later used as a location for
The Sound of Music
.
    7
Under the Sign of Saturn
, p. 85.

3
WERNER HERZOG AND HIS HEROES
    IN HER MEMOIR about Bruce Chatwin, Susannah Clapp