 POECKING, Germany (Reuters) - Adolf Hitler's filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl,
the last of Germany's famous Nazi-era figures, has died just weeks after
turning 101, her assistant said on Tuesday.
-
- "She died on Monday night," Gisela Jahn told
reporters outside Riefenstahl's house near the Starnberger lake south of
Munich, at the foot of the Alps. "She fell asleep peacefully."
-
- Through a first floor window of her home, a large photo
of her as a young woman could be seen hanging on the wall.
-
- Riefenstahl made powerful films for Hitler and spent
the rest of her long and active life protesting she should not be condemned
for work inspired by art, not politics.
-
- Riefenstahl won awards at the Venice and Paris film festivals
in the 1930s for her "Triumph of the Will," a documentary highlighting
the meticulously choreographed, eerie grandeur of the Nazi
 Party's 1934 Nuremberg Rally.
-
- She was then commissioned to make the official film of
the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
-
- "Olympia," which recorded the grandeur of an
event that Hitler hijacked to showcase National Socialism, is still recognized
by cinematographers as a groundbreaking film.
-
- It pioneered techniques such as mounting the camera on
electric cars on rails to follow races.
-
- HAUNTED BY PAST
-
- Since the war, those films have haunted her, and she
remained a villain to many for declining to apologize for them.
-
- The German government reacted to her death with criticism.
-
- "Leni Riefenstahl symbolizes a German artist's fate
in the 20th century," Culture Minister Christina Weiss said in a statement.
-
- "Leni Riefenstahl's artistic work was tainted by
her closeness to National Socialism, especially because after the war,
she never dealt with the problem of how easily her work served an inhuman
Nazi propaganda, and how close she really was to the Hitler Regime."
-
- Riefenstahl always denied political involvement with
the Nazi party or any romantic link with Hitler, although she admitted
admiring him and seeking him out for a meeting in 1932.
-
- "Hitler saw me as an artist -- as an artist, not,
as some have written, as a lover or something," she told Reuters in
an interview in 2000.
-
- Born in Berlin on August 22, 1902, Riefenstahl's first
love was ballet and she became a professional dancer, but turned to film
acting in the mid-1920s.
-
- After the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, Riefenstahl
was jailed by French occupation authorities for almost four years.
-
- Blacklisted as a filmmaker, she turned to still photography
even though West German magazines boycotted her work for years.
-
 As time passed and many of her critics
died off, she worked to redeem her reputation with photographic studies
of Nuba tribesmen in southern Sudan. At the age of 72 she took up scuba
diving, gaining renown for adventurous underwater studies.
-
- Striking as a young woman, Riefenstahl remained proud
of her looks into her old age, dying her hair blond and wearing heavy make-up.
Still active into her late 90s, she returned in 1999 to Sudan to revisit
the Nuba tribe she first photographed in 1956.
-
- She narrowly escaped death on her return when her helicopter
crashed in Sudan.
-
- "She created images and films that nurtured the
Nazi cult and helped it win supporters," said Elke Froehlich, a Munich
historian.
-
- "She refused to acknowledge this. So many people
involved with the Nazis learned their lesson after the war, she never did.
(Propaganda Minister Joseph) Goebbels wrote of her in his diary, 'She's
the only one who understands us."'
-
- "But her work is appreciated by cinema lovers, it
won't die with her."
-
- Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited
without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable
for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance
thereon.
|
