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Title details for Leni by Steven Bach - Available

Leni

The Life & Work of Leni Riefenstahl

by Steven Bach
Henrietta Tiefenthaler
Audiobook
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Leni Reifenstahl, "Hitler's filmmaker," remains one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. Susan Sontag, one of her severest critics, said that Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Leni's most noted films, "may be the two greatest documentaries ever made." Others see her story as an object lesson about opportunism: the story of an ambitious narcissist and unrepentant Nazi sympathizer whose glorification of Hitler and the Third Reich helped pave the way to the horrors of World Was II and the Holocaust. Bach lets the facts speak for themselves-including many newly uncovered-and the facts are rarely kind to Reifenstahl. We see Reifenstahl at the age 100 as someone who could face the cameras to announce that, as a member of Greenpeace, she mourned the fates of sea creatures that die in transport from their native habitats to the aquariums of the world, but who could not express remorse for the millions of Jews, gypsies, and others murdered by the Third Reich and the Fuhrer she elevated to myth. Even if she were still alive, with the publication of this books the armor of the lie would have protected her no longer.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 15, 2007

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • File size: 439207 KB
      • Duration: 15:15:00

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 30, 2007
      Tiefenthaler, an actress and writer of Austrian descent, was raised and educated in England, but her reading of Bach's biography of the famed and reviled Nazi filmmaker betrays a puzzling lack of familiarity with the rhythms of the English language. Her fruity accent notwithstanding, Tiefenthaler delivers a halting performance, pausing in the middle of linked phrases, or unexpectedly extending a sentence, as if she had not realized that further work remained to be done. The reading of an audiobook should be fluid, as if the reader was the composer of the book, intimately familiar with each and every word. Tiefenthaler evokes images of a reader squinting at a piece of paper, attempting to suss out the words on the fly, and the results cannot help detracting from Bach's solid work. Available as a Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 29).

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 29, 2007
      Hitler's favorite filmmaker prettified her own story almost as much as she glorified the ugly reality of the Third Reich, which makes her a natural for biographers with a taste for dish and debunkery. Bach (Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend
      ) excavates, somewhat more fluently, many of the low points covered in Jürgen Trimborn's recent Leni Riefenstahl: A Life
      : her courting of Nazi sponsorship and admiration for Hitler, her witnessing—later denied—of a massacre of Polish Jews, her deployment of Gypsy slave laborers as extras (many of them died at Auschwitz) and her postwar efforts, through lawsuits and misleading memoirs, to downplay or suppress these facts. Bach also fleshes out more of Riefenstahl's private life, with details about a parade of lovers (one of them, an American decathlonist, apparently tore off Riefenstahl's blouse and kissed her breasts in front of 100,000 spectators at the 1936 Berlin Olympics) and her attempts to get her hands on the inheritance of her niece and nephew. He intersperses perceptive commentary on her masterful propaganda films, while noting that her art "lulls and deceives" instead of awakening and illuminating. The result is a lively, incisive look at a compelling and somewhat appalling figure who demonstrated that beauty isn't always truth. Photos.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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