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Leni, March 2007
Hardcover
The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
Knopf
March 2007
On Sale: March 13, 2007
Featuring: Leni Riefenstahl
400 pages ISBN: 0375404007 EAN: 9780375404009 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
The definitive biography of Leni Riefenstahl, the woman best
known as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” one of the most fascinating
and controversial personalities of the twentieth century. It
is the story of huge talent and huger ambition, one that
probes the sometimes blurred borders dividing art and beauty
from truth and humanity. Two of Riefenstahl’s films, Olympia and Triumph of the Will,
are universally regarded as the greatest and most innovative
documentaries ever made, but they are also insidious
glorifications of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, in
this masterful new biography, Steven Bach reveals the truths
and lies behind this gifted woman’s lifelong
self-vindication as an apolitical artist who claimed she
knew nothing of the Holocaust and denied her complicity with
the criminal regime she both used and sanctified. The facts and her actions, many unknown until now, bear
chilling witness: her passionate enthusiasm for Hitler from
her first reading of Mein Kampf; her involvements with Nazi
leaders Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and
Julius Streicher, who advanced her career, and with Hitler,
who personally helped finance it; her role as silent
eyewitness to wartime atrocities against Jews; and her use
of slave labor in the form of concentration camp Gypsies
destined for Auschwitz. We see her after the war trying to
sell footage to Hollywood under an alias, manipulating a
sham “discovery” of the Nuba tribes of Sudan into a career
comeback, fighting to disinherit her closest living
relatives, and—to the end—unable to express remorse for the
millions murdered by the Nazi regime made mythic by her work. Relying on new sources—including interviews with her
colleagues and intimate friends, as well as on previously
unknown recordings of Riefenstahl herself—Bach gives us an
exceptional work of historical investigation that untangles
the past and is also an objective but unsparing appraisal of
a woman of spectacular gifts corrupted by ruthless personal
ambition.
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