Riefenstahl Was a Talented Woman Whose Major Works

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In the light of this statement, assess Leni Riefenstahl’s contribution to the development of German cultural life under Nazism. In order to examine Leni Riefenstahl’s role in the development of culture in Germany, it is first necessary to examine whether her films amount to culture at all, or topropaganda, or to a combination of both. The question of Riefenstahl’s films being propaganda plagued her carrer from the late 1930s until her death, as is evident by a fifty year lapse in her filmography records. At the time, her film Triumph des Willens was condemned by the United States and the European allies as a propaganda film, not, as Riefenstahl later claimed, as a documentary of a propaganda event. The part of the given statement to which many historians take particular issue with is that “…[Riefenstahl] intended to glorify the Nazis”. The Hull2 school contends that the Nazi cinema was an ideological free trade zone - as long as films were popular and stayed away from overtly political topics - thereby labelling Riefenstahl an artist only. Popular opinion labels Riefenstahl a propagandist. In 1947 the French classified her as a Fellow Traveller – A Nazi sympathiser. More recent schools of thought such as that expressed by Linda Schulte-Sasse3 suggest that filmmakers including Riefenstahl were indeed propagandists, but that this is justifiable in context, therefore that they also ought to be praised for their contribution to culture. The popular school of thought suggests that those viewing Riefenstahl’s films as masterpieces are viewing them “in a vacuum”, without any reference to the context of the time. In Triumph des Willens, for example, Hitler, it is suggested, is deified. Seemingly endless marching scenes are said to glorify the militarisation (against the Treaty of Versailles) of Germany. The content of one of the speeches can be seen to

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