Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman’s lifelong crusade against Hitler’s favourite film-maker

Dec 17, 2021 21:15

Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman’s lifelong crusade against Hitler’s favourite film-maker

Nina Gladitz dedicated her life to proving the Triumph of the Will director’s complicity with the horrors of Nazism. In the end, she succeeded - but at a cost.

film, film history, nina gladitz, theguardian, leni riefenstahl

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fpbarbieri January 11 2022, 07:30:36 UTC
Riefenstahl was hardly the only artist of considerable quality to support and cooperate with evil. Nobody in Italy now (except for the Fascists) wants to remember that Luigi Pirandello was a coal-black Fascist who accepted the presidency of the Academy of Italy (Mussolini's creation) from Mussolini. Dozens of the greatest musicians, from Prokoviev to Webern, from Furtwaengler to Victor de Sabata, from Orff to Cortot to Mengelberg, lined up to support Nazism, Fascism, Communism. And I am certain that there would have been even more, had not certain groups been excluded by law. The Nobel Prizewinner Gottfried Benn was all for Hitler, till he realized that being Jewish was not a very good idea in the new Germany. Arnold Schoenberg was not a Hitlerite, but he certainly was a Pan-German nationalist of the harshest stripe, of the kind identified with the great poet Stephan George (another fringe Fascist who despised both Hitler and democracy), until persecution made him rediscover his Jewish roots. And if we start with the artistic ( ... )

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