HAMBURG (dpa) – Leni Riefenstahl says it is “dreadful” that she has lived so long, insisting she should have died the day World War II broke out, according to an extraordinary interview on German television to mark her 100th birthday this month.
Adolf Hitler’s favourite director, the oldest woman filmmaker, indeed the oldest filmmaker still making films, has often thought of ending it all.But, uncharacteristically for a self-confessed impulsive- compulsive personality, she never screwed up the courage to commit suicide.“It’s dreadful,” she told a celebrity interviewer for ZDF television when asked how it felt to be turning 100. “Bad,” she added, shaking her head. “Sad. It’s sad to have been tarred with the brush of Nazism for most of my life.“To be called a Nazi sympathiser, a fellow traveller and all the other things I have been branded as being by so many, when my own view of myself is so utterly contrary to of all that.”She knows when she should have died. The exact day and hour.“I should have died the day war broke out,” she said. “I remember I’d been out hiking and had just climbed a peak and was coming down when the ranger ran up to me and shouted, ‘Leni, we’re at war!’ That’s when I should have died. At my artistic peak.“It has all been downhill ever since, literally on that day and tragically so for me since that day.”Her broadcast remarks coincided with a court ruling involving her Nazi past and, in characteristic contrast, also with the announcement by a botanist that an orchid in Bolivia has been named in her honour.She was born August 22, 1902.Her 100th birthday present to herself – a new film – premiered on European television amid renewed controversy over allegations of concentration camp slave labour involving one of her Nazi-era productions.Entitled “Undersea Impressions”, the short documentary details her undersea photographic expeditions in the Indian Ocean over a 25-year period. The 45-minute-documentary is based on shooting and photography carried out in the Indian Ocean and off the Maldives between 1974 and 2000 when, despite her advanced years, Riefenstahl made more than 2,000 dives operating from her Papua base.Ironically, hours after the film premiered, a German court slapped Riefenstahl with a restraining order in connection with one of her Nazi-era film productions. The Roma Civil Rights Association had claimed that gypsy concentration camp inmates were forced to work on her production of “Tiefland” in 1940 and 1942.At issue was a claim by Riefenstahl last April in an interview with Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper stating, “Nothing ever happened to a single one of them afterward.” She also allegedly claimed she had “seen all the gypsies after the war who had been involved” with the production, a screen drama based on Eugen D’Albert’s 1903 opera “Der Tiefland”.A court in Cologne ordered her to refrain from repeating those claims.Clearly more to Riefenstahl’s liking is the announcement that a delicate mountain orchid with brilliantly yellow blossoms has been dubbed Zygostates riefenstahliae in her honour.It was that image – the rare golden mountain flower – which she sought to convey during her television interview at her chalet home on the shores of Lake Starnberger, the Bavarian Alps rising majestically in the background.Even her brassy-yellow-dyed hair fitted the image as she sat in her sunny Bauhaus-style office, its walls lined with photographs of the Nuba tribe and with stuffed lions and tigers – gifts from her Las Vegas celebrity chums Siegfried and Roy.Looking preternaturally youthful – taut skin, tapered lilac- varnished nails, 1930s-style pencilled eyebrows, and wearing a snappy pastel pantsuit – she was alert and articulate as she countered every thrust-and-parry fencing move of her TV interviewer.“You wrote in your 900-page memoirs that Hitler wanted to kiss you. What made him fall in love with you?” asked interviewer Sandra Maischberger, notorious in Germany for her hard-driving questions.“He asked if he could kiss me,” Riefenstahl shot back, eyes glaring. “That doesn’t mean he was in love with me.”“Did you find him sexually attractive?”“No,” came the answer, quick as a flash. “Not the least bit attractive. He was absolutely, positively and incontrovertibly not my type. We had a very brief working relationship. I did those two films for him and then got a promise out of him not to make me do any more. That was the only relationship I had with him.”Those two films were “Triumph Of The Will” about the Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies and “Olympia” a stunning, award-winning documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics.As she has done consistently, Riefenstahl denied in the latest interview that she intended “Triumph” to be a pro-Nazi propaganda film. It is banned in Germany to this day as being too controversial for viewing, either theatrically or on video.“I’m an artist, a craftsman if you will,” she insisted. “I’m like a shoemaker who has his work cut out for him and hammers and sews it together to the best of his ability with no thought as to the use his shoes will be put to.“I happen to be a diligent and thorough filmmaker who settles for nothing second-rate. That is my talent. It has been my undoing.”Asked if “Triumph” nonetheless lent style to Nazi ideology, she retorted, “I made ‘Olympia’ in identically the same artistic style and nobody has ever called it a propaganda film.”Be that as it may, “Olympia” premiered at Berlin’s UFA Palast am Zoo cinema on Hitler’s birthday, April 20, 1938, and Riefenstahl concedes she was enamoured of the Nazi dictator early on.“I was fascinated by the spell he cast over people,” she recalled. “I was at the Sportpalast when he made one of his most famous speeches in 1932 and I was swept up in the crowd’s ecstatic enthusiasm. I wanted to see what sort of man that was.”The Nazi leader admired her work, particularly her pioneering, atmospheric 1932 directorial debut “Das Blaue Licht” (The Blue Light) in which she starred as a mute outcast who alone knows the secret of a lofty crystalline grotto in a craggy peak visible to her eyes once every blue moon.Hitler made her his chief filmmaker, granting her full artistic license in making “Triumph” and later “Olympia”.“But Hitler didn’t make me famous,” she insisted. “I was famous beforehand thanks to ‘Das Blaue Licht’. I had offers from Hollywood. Hitler didn’t make me famous. He just appreciated my capabilities.”Pressed on the issue by her interviewer, Riefenstahl stood firm. “I didn’t know ‘Triumph’ would be a hit. I made it to the best of my ability. I used every trick in the book. Every innovative technique I could envision. But I would have done the same for Stalin. It’s just the way I work. I make the best film I possibly can.”“Is it fair to say, though, that you were possibly so egocentric and so ambitious and so obsessed with your own talent that you didn’t care what the political message was in those films?” the interviewer asked in a final thrust.“Yes, perhaps you could say that,” Riefenstahl said in a final parry. Pausing, and then smiling, she concluded, “You just may be right about that.”
