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Old
Wicked
Songs

October 9-November 4, 2007

rillen i31 Jon Marans • ii )irecfed by: Evelyn Orbach
Featuring: Tony Award nominee Max Wright and Daniel Kahn

This fascinating story takes place in Vienna in the studio of a feisty old vocal
coach who searches for passion in the songs that he is teaching his
questioning American student. Memories of World War II and untold secrets
remain to be uncovered

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Get Your Tickets Today! 24(e 788.290()

Leni Riefenstahl in 2000 at age 98, on her last safari, as she returned to
war-torn Sudan with a camera crew and director in search of "her" Nuba.

THEATR = NSEMBLE

at Meadow Brook Theatre

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24C

HERLOCK HOLMES

THE FINAL ADVENTURE

October 18 • 2007

BY STEVEN DIETZ

JN

Blind Ambition

Author profiles Hitler's filmmaker in
a new biography of the woman who
gave the Nazis their glamour.

Alex Kershaw
Featurewell.com

D

wring her last decades, the
German film director Leni
Riefenstahl (1902-2003)
used lawyers and lies to perpetuate
the romance that she was a tragi-
cally misunderstood artist, ignorant
of the Nazi evils that had surrounded
her. She claimed not to have sold her
soul to glorify mass murderers, nota-
bly through Triumph of the Will and
Olympiad, arguably the greatest propa-
ganda films ever made. She had merely
been fascinated by fascism.
To the very end, she also protested
with nauseating self-pity that she was
the victim of slander and the fictions
of jilted lovers and paranoid Holocaust
survivors. Since Riefenstahrs death, the
truth has finally won out. Following
on the heels of Danish author Jurgen
Trimborn's expose is Steven Bach's Leni
(Knopf; $30).
Like Trimborn, Bach paints
Riefenstahl as a gifted sociopath and

liar. But he also carefully traces the
true nature of her relationship with
the Third Reich's most powerful men
and her supreme patron, Adolf Hitler,
with whom she had much in common.
Both were soulless narcissists who
when young dreamed of becoming
artists; both came to prominence dur-
ing the turbulent years of the Weimar
Republic, Hitler as a ranting crowd-
pleaser,"Leni" as an erstwhile dancer
who used her physical assets and guile
to become the star of several silent
movies set in the Alps.
Derided as an actress as the "nation's
glacial crevasse,' Riefenstahl made her
debut as a director in early 1932 and
soon after saw Hitler speak in public.
Instantly mesmerized, "she was so
`deeply affected' by what she heard, that
she found herself 'unable to hail a cab:"
The admiration was mutual. "Once
we come to power;' Hitler told her, "you
must make my films!' Contrary to her
later claims, Riefenstahl did not have to
be persuaded. Her first advert for the
Nazis was Victory of Faith (1933), an