Riefenstahl screened : an anthology of new criticism

289 Pages·2008·1.44 MB·English

by  Neil Christian Pages

Riefenstahl Screened
This page intentionally left blank
Riefenstahl Screened
An Anthology of New Criticism
edited by
Neil Christian Pages, Mary Rhiel, and
Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey
2008
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2008 by Neil Christian Pages, Mary Rhiel, and Ingeborg
Majer-O’Sickey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the
publishers.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riefenstahl screened : an anthology of new criticism / edited by Neil Christian
Pages, Mary Rhiel, and Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-2800-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8264-2800-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-2801-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8264-2801-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Riefenstahl, Leni—Criticism and
interpretation. I. Pages, Neil Christian. II. Rhiel, Mary, 1949- III. Majer O’Sickey,
Ingeborg, 1944- IV. Title.
PN1998.3.R54R54 2008
791.4302’33092—dc22
2008004189
Contents
Acknowledgments .............................................................................. vii
Contributors ........................................................................................ ix
Introduction: Screening Riefenstahl—Riefenstahl Screened ......... 1
Part One: Aesthetics ............................................................................ 9
1 Blood and Glamour
Georg Seesslen; Translated by Neil Christian Pages......................... 11
2 Riefenstahl and the Face of Fascism
Carsten Strathausen........................................................................... 30
3 0–1: Riefenstahl and the Beauty of Soccer
Lutz Koepnick..................................................................................... 52
Part Two: Afterlife .............................................................................. 71
4 The Afterlife of Triumph of the Will: The First Twenty-five Years
David Bathrick................................................................................... 73
5 Wonderful, Horrible Lies: Riefenstahl Memory and Riefenstahl
History in Germany
Wulf Kansteiner................................................................................. 98
6 Reading Rammstein, Remembering Riefenstahl: “Fascist
Aesthetics” and German Popular Culture
Valerie Weinstein............................................................................... 130
Part Three:Continuities ........................................................................ 149
7 A Founding Myth and a Master Text: The Blue Light (1932)
Eric Rentschler.................................................................................... 151
8 To Be or Not to Be Wagnerian: Music in Riefenstahl’s
Nazi-era Films
Celia Applegate................................................................................... 179
9 The Ups and Downs of Leni Riefenstahl: Rereading the Rhythms
of the Memoirs
Mary Rhiel.......................................................................................... 202
v
vi Contents
Part Four: “Riefen-Star” ...................................................................... 217
10 Control and Consumption: The Photographs of
Leni Riefenstahl
Guinevere Narraway.......................................................................... 219
11 Representing the Body in Cyberspace: Riefenstahl’s Self-staging
(Notes on Leni Riefenstahl’s Web Page)
Martina Thiele; Translated by Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey and Neil
Christian Pages................................................................................... 234
12 In the Rearview Mirror: Curating Riefenstahl, Filmmuseum
Potsdam, 1999
Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey................................................................... 251
INDEX ................................................................................................... 273
Acknowledgments
The essays in this volume do not represent a unified critical voice. Instead, they
are evidence of diverse reflections on the theoretical, historical, and aesthetic
problems raised by the figure and films of Leni Riefenstahl. The editors thank
the contributors for creating what we hope will be a continued dialogue on the
issues invoked in this book. Our thanks go to Bärbel Dalichow, Georg Seesslen,
and Martina Thiele for the cooperation and permissions that assisted us in
presenting their work here for the first time in English translation. The rights
for some of the texts and images were provided by Seemann Henschel GmbH
& Co. KG of Leipzig and by the Filmmuseum Potsdam. We received support
for the preparation of the volume from Binghamton University, State Univer-
sity of New York. We are immensely grateful to David Barker, Katie Gallof,
and Gabriella Page-Fort at Continuum for their enthusiasm, advice, and pa-
tience. Finally, we would like to thank our families for their support as we spent
hours with one another in virtual and physical work environments: Mike
Arnold, Vincent Greiber, Emily Rhiel, and Patrick Clary, the last of whom
served as poet-in-residence and personal chef for the project.
vii
This page intentionally left blank
Contributors
Celia Applegate is Associate Professor of History at the University of
Rochester. Her books include A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of
Heimat (1990) and Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival
of the St. Matthew Passion (2005). She edited (with musicologist Pamela Potter)
the anthology Music and German National Identity (2002). Applegate’s re-
search focuses on the political culture of modern Germany and the history of
German nationalism and national identity. She is now at work on a study of
musical culture in Germany from the eighteenth century to the present.
David Bathrick is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German and
Theater at Cornell University. His is author of The Dialectic and the Early
Brecht (1976), Modernity and the Text: Re-Visions of German Modernism
(1989, co-edited with Andreas Huyssen), and The Powers of Speech: The Politics
of Culture in the GDR (1995), which was awarded the 1996 DAAD/GSA Book
of the Year Prize. He has also written numerous articles on twentieth-century
European culture. Bathrick is also co-founder and co-editor of the journal New
German Critique. His forthcoming book, Rescreening the Holocaust, addresses
the visual culture of the Nazi period.
Wulf Kansteiner is Associate Professor of History at Binghamton Univer-
sity SUNY. His work as a cultural-intellectual historian of twentieth-century
Europe focuses on media history and comparative genocide studies in Ger-
many. In addition to many articles on the intersections of history, memory,
and politics, Kansteiner is the author of In Pursuit of German Memory: History,
Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (2005) and co-editor of The Politics of
Memory in Postwar Europe (2006).
Lutz Koepnick is Professor of German, Film, and Media Studies at Wash-
ington University in St. Louis. He has published widely on German literature,
film, media, and visual culture, and is author of Framing Attention: Windows
on Modern German Culture (2007), The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between
Hitler and Hollywood (2002), and Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of
Power (1999). His co-edited anthologies include The Cosmopolitan Screen:
German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present (2007), and
Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004). His
current book project explores strategies of deceleration in media of twentieth-
and twentieth-first-century artistic practice.
Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey is Associate Professor of German and Faculty
Director of Women’s Studies at Binghamton University SUNY. Her scholarly
ix