Germans View Photographer Riefenstahl’s Work
Photographs by Leni Riefenstahl, the woman whose notorious Nazi-era films are considered masterpieces of propaganda, are finally being exhibited in her native Germany.
The exhibit of 50 photographs by Riefenstahl, whose controversial past made German galleries and museums wary of showing her works, is drawing large crowds to the private gallery of Andreas Schlueter - and protests from those who say her pictures glorify the Nazis.
Riefenstahl, who turns 95 on Friday, has long irked critics with her continuing admiration of Adolf Hitler, whom she met after a 1932 Nazi rally.
Hitler had “incredible charisma,” though he also was an “unimaginably evil person, with this horrible hate of Jews,” she told the news weekly Der Spiegel.
The show features pictures from the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin - where Riefenstahl made one of her most famous Nazi-era films - as well as postwar photos she shot while living with the Nuba tribe in Sudan. There are also underwater shots made after she discovered a passion for scuba diving in her 70s.
Her works at the exhibit celebrate muscular, glistening bodies. Riefenstahl says she makes no distinction between Nazi Germany’s Olympic athletes - supposedly examples of Hitler’s master race - and the African tribespeople she photographed years later.
“I want to portray that which is beautiful so people can see it,” she told Der Spiegel.
But the German Auschwitz Committee, a group representing victims of the Nazis, condemned the show for failing to present the photos in a political context.
“Leni Riefenstahl’s artistic work is inextricably linked with her role in German fascism,” the group said, calling her “the most imaginative propagandist” for the Nazis.
Riefenstahl did not attend the exhibit’s opening Saturday, saying her doctor had advised against it.
While the show has given her a bit of the recognition as an artist she has craved in her homeland, it has also set off protests.
A law office sharing a building with the gallery hung a banner outside saying: “Propaganda in 1936 - Making money in 1997.”
“We find this event distasteful,” the Renate Eckoldt law office said in a statement.