LENI RIEFENSTAHL (utgåvan 1995)

Leni Riefenstahl died in 2003, when she was 101 years old, the last surviving member of Hitler's inner circle. How much of her life after 1945 was an attempt to cover up and mislead history is not clarified by this memoir. But what is there is a stunning record of how Riefenstahl came of age and entered the German film industry when it was at its height, making Mountain Films and developing a production technique that would come to full fruition in her documentaries, Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Her filmic transitioning remains an art form in and of itself; her work flows, moves, and isolates its subjects against natural and epic backgrounds. Individuals become expressions of natural will and order. So, in many ways, she does reflect the ideology of the political movement that made her rise possible in the first place.

The details of Riefenstahl's life mesmerize the reader. And it also demonstrates one of the quirks of National Socialist Germany. That is, not only the survival but the flourishing of certain types of women in Hitler's Third Reich. Riefenstahl, like the aviatrix Hanna Reitsch, was something of a bohemian working outside the traditional social roles assigned to women. She became a force, a power to be reckoned with in Germany during a time when sexism operated as a secondary sort of racism. Clearly, this was not the ideological goal of Nazism but it was an aspect of the Nazi elites that that they saw something of themselves, outsiders, perhaps, in figures like Riefenstahl, Reitsch, and Hitler's personal secretaries.

Riefenstahl's death and her memoirs effectively closed the book on the passing of a certain era in history. Hitler and his regime now belong to a past whose living memory no longer exists. You can still find some hints of it in Riefenstahl's writings, but you will need to read between the lines to determine the ultimate truth. ( )

Las confesiones, en primera persona, de una de las mujeres más controvertidas del siglo XX.
Leni Riefenstahl es una de las personalidades más controvertidas del siglo XX. Admirada y odiada por igual, se le considera una de las cineastas más innovadoras de su tiempo, gracias, principalmente, a los documentales que rodó para Hitler.
Tras muchos años de descrédito por su cercanía al Führer, en 1987 Leni Riefenstahl decidió contar su versión de los hechos en unas memorias fascinantes, que constituyen en sí mismas un viaje por un siglo atroz. En un tono franco y desafiante, la mujer cuenta sus inicios como bailarina, sus tormentosas relaciones sentimentales, sus deseos de ser actriz, posteriormente frustrados por su entrega a la dirección cinematográfica, arte que revolucionaría con obras como El triunfo de la voluntad, sobre un congreso del partido nazi, y Olympia, el documental sobre los juegos olímpicos celebrados en Berlín en 1936.
La directora revela sin tapujos su admiración por la personalidad de Hitler, sus sonados enfrentamientos con Goebbels o su amistad con Albert Speer y Josef von Sternberg, recordando el esplendor y la gloria que vivió en los años treinta y luego la larga travesía por el desierto de la postguerra, que terminó con su carrera y con sus sueños.
Polémicas y absorbentes, tensas en todo momento, estas memorias, que vuelven a las librerías a los diez años de la muerte de su autora, conforman el autorretrato de una mujer de excepcional talento cuyas afinidades electivas ensombrecieron para siempre su vida y su obra.