Notes on Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’‘
“[Hitler] wanted a film showing the Congress through a non-expert eye, selecting just what was most artistically satisfying – in terms of spectacle…. He wanted a film which would move, appeal to, impress an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics.”
• Leni Riefenstahl
Hitler: “What you fink? Not too camp?”
Goebbels: “Nah! Not the way YOU do it!”
• Harry Enfield and Chums
IN MOST SCENES, the 32-year-old director, producer, co-writer and editor of Triumph of the Will (1935), is the only woman present – in this documentary about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, with a cast of hundreds of thousands.
Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) herself is never seen because she is always behind the camera. She is the camera. Capturing the handsomest young men. She has a good eye. One might even say ‘gay’ eye. But let’s call it what it is: the Leni Gaze.
The Leni Gaze is the main reason a two-hour film about a party rally is much less tedious than it should be. And why, as propaganda, it is much more effective. Much more seductive. More than anyone else, Riefenstahl was responsible for making Nazism look beautiful. To paraphrase Stendhal, what is beauty if it is not a promise of happiness? Even if it turns out to be a horrible, nightmarish lie.
It was precisely because she wasn’t a proper Nazi, just a ‘camp follower’, that Riefenstahl was so useful in aestheticizing National Socialism. Riefenstahl’s passionate, wannabe subjectivity suffuses the film. Those lingering, intimate close-ups on young SS men’s faces, shot adoringly from below, panning over their arms and hands linked in each other’s belts, impassively holding back the rapturous crowd desperate to glimpse their Fuhrer. Turning their heads on Hitler’s nod so we can better appreciate their strong jawlines, profiles, pouty lips – and the swastika on the side of their helmet.
Impressively, almost none of the masses of men in this documentary look into the camera. This is 1935, movie cameras are big and noisy, and everyone is fascinated by them. Either the firing squad was promised for anyone who so much as grazed the fourth wall, or LR ruthlessly cut any footage where the men she was gazing at gazed back. (She personally condensed 61 hours of footage into just two hours.)
Likewise, none of the male multitudes in this movie speak individually, save the Nazi leaders (briefly – and mostly about Hitler’s amazingness), and of course Hitler himself (less briefly – and mostly about Hitler’s amazingness). The men are objects, not subjects. The soundtrack by Herbert Windt, of martial music and Wagnerian mood-music, guides their – and our – emotions. The mute multitudes speak, deafeningly, with their shining eyes, their thunderous, rolling-roiling shouts – “SEIG HEIL! HEIL HITLER!” – and their massed-ranks singing of songs about heroic sacrifice.
The effect of this is that we feel that we have descended with Hitler (who arrives at Nuremberg by plane), from the clouds to witness, unobserved and voyeuristically, these dreamlike events, full of dreamlike people.
All of which are staged in this ‘documentary’ – and were sometimes rehearsed as many as fifty times. As Susan Sontag noted, ‘The Rally was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting, but as a spectacular propaganda film.’ Politics and ideology rendered completely aesthetically.
Which reminds me: goosestepping is horribly dusty.
And goosestepping while giving the Nazi salute at the same time as eyes right to the Fuhrer is terribly tricky. Chinless SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his signature round bins reflecting the sunlight, seems about to fall over doing it. I wonder how many times LR ordered him to redo that march-past before she was satisfied?
Being Fuhrer wasn’t all fun. Having to give the ‘Roman’ fascist salute all day to cheering crowds must have been murder on Adolf’s shoulder. In fact, Hitler’s salute is ostentatiously different, more relaxed, than everyone else’s – after all, he’s acknowledging everyone else’s salute of him. There’s only one Fuhrer. Though the Fuhrer does seem to have two salutes – his most common: elbow bent, hand thrown back. And a more formal, dramatic, extended arm salute: parallel with the ground instead of vulgarly erect in the way that everyone else is in his presence.
The Leni Gaze makes a study of the latter, zooming in on the Fuhrer’s arm and the slightly bent wrist, fingers curved upwards, thumb pointing down. And that theatrical way he has of ending it, snapping his hand towards his chest while closing his hand into a fist.
Close shots of Hitler from behind while he returns the salutes of the crowd, standing in his open top Mercedes as it glides through Nuremberg, give us a glimpse of what it’s like to be the Fuhrer; sometimes it looks as if Hitler is levitating on their adoration. Or is on castors.
The morning after the excitement of the first day, the camera shows us a bird’s eye view of row upon row of identical, neatly pitched tents. The drums and trumpets of the Hitler Youth awaken hordes of shirtless, trouser-less young soldiers or stormtroopers sleeping in those tents, on hay. Homobucolic. In a sequence that goes on for a remarkable length of time and detail, the Leni Gaze gives us long, lingering ablutions: shaving, careful combing of each other’s hair, getting the side-parting sharp (there are no mirrors – just the reflection of your comrades’ eyes); soaping each other’s backs. All grins and smiles.
A hearty communal breakfast cooked by the SA kitchens is followed by exuberant horseplay. Wrestling. Group piggyback fights. Dubbed giggling. Lots of extreme close-ups of blond boys grinning with joy. Gay, innocent laughter in the purifying Aryan sunshine.
This is the kind of subject the Leni Gaze is most interested in. And it delivers cleverly-staged naturalness (many of those extreme close-ups seem to have been shot in a studio) – and thoroughly-rehearsed spontaneous beauty, with a hint of homoerotics. Its influence can of course be found in Abercrombie & Fitch advertising, and Hollywood movies of the 1980s.
Sometimes the effect is inadvertently comical. A rally of the Reich Labour Service features 52,000 young men with shovels carried on their shoulder like rifles, engaged in synchronised quasi-military drills: soldiers of the soil, mobilised for the Fatherland. Again, only the pretty ones get close-ups. Under Leni’s Gaze, there are no ugly or even slightly plain men to be seen. In Hitler’s Germany, even backbreaking toil is beautifully menacing – and impeccably well-presented.
Maybe due to the uninspiring appearance of the rest of the master race leadership, Nazi Party Deputy, Rudolf Hess, is presented as a matinee idol. Hess’ symbolic role as Hitler’s anointed heir is to be the idealised image of Hitler: Hitler as he wanted to be seen. Youthful-ish (40 to Hitler’s 45), shining-eyed, square jawed, slim. With a neck – Hitler has just a shirt collar. Famously Hitler’s cellmate in Bavaria after the failed NSDAP Munich beer hall putsch of 1923, Hess’ is Hitler’s No.1 (Platonic) Lover – in a nation of Hitler lovers.
Hence the Leni Gaze has Hess looking up at Hitler with shining eyes, warming up the crowd with his own total(itarian) devotion and submission. As he thunders after his Fuhrer has finished his speech – in the final, ominous spoken words of the film:
“The Party is Hitler! But Hitler is Germany! Just as Germany is Hitler!”
HITLER IS THE official love-object of this film. Of the Nazi Party. And so, it would have you believe, of Germany. But despite her own, possibly-probably sexual, fascination with him and his oratory in real life, it takes all of Riefenstahl’s skill to present this strange, distant, dumpy, no-neck, pointy-nosed, slightly ratty-looking 45-year-old as such.
In fact, the Leni Gaze is frequently elsewhere: she spends a lot of time proffering the hand-picked, young, ‘pure’ and physically perfect specimens of Hitler’s Party and their devotion to him instead. Look how much youthful beauty loves him! There must be something magnificent in him! This is most noticeable during the (in)famous Hitler Youth rally scene, where she employs, repeatedly, her trick of extreme close-ups of hand-picked studio-shot blond boys filmed from below, with fake sunlit skies behind, looking rapt and elated at Hitler’s repetitious ramblings.
It’s noteworthy however that Riefenstahl includes him saying:
“No matter what we create today and what we do, we will pass away, but in you Germany will live on. And when there is nothing left of us you will have to hold up the banner.”
“We” here means, as so often is the case with Mr Hitler, “me”. The Hitler Youth are not just his youth – they are Hitler’s immortality. The childless bachelor’s flattering form of mass-reproduction – by stealing millions of other people’s kids. And also, as it was to turn out, many of those kids’ future.
Perhaps because Riefenstahl really was a fan, at least at this stage of the regime, sometimes Triumph seems to a 21st Century eye like a big-budget 1930s pop promo – with Hitler as an ageing pop star going to seed, supported by hundreds of thousands of goose-stepping backing dancers. At other times, it resembles a science-fiction version of Ancient Rome – all those flags and eagles and windswept geometric vistas. Triumph is clearly influenced by the monumentalism of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). (And in turn, George Lucas’ Star Wars [1976] was heavily influenced by Triumph.)
Then again, it is impossible for us now, after the passage of time and propaganda, to see what it was about the Austrian Corporal and failed watercolourist that caused a nation (or at least, a sizeable chunk of it) to fall so madly in love with him. And it really was love. It was all about the Fuhrer. We, being much more sophisticated, mock his moustache, his Brylcreemed, undercut comb over, and most of all his spittley shouting and ‘wild’ gesticulations. Forgetting that he developed them long before he became a newsreel or film star, in unamplified public meetings and rallies of the 1920s, where this kind of oratory was common. (Interestingly, Hitler was very uneasy in front of the camera.)
Nevertheless. The arms folded or crossed over his chest in between gesticulations is reminiscent of his idol Benito Mussolini, whom he studied and imitated. There is also something of the silent movie starlet about Hitler’s gestures – the chest/heart clasping when working himself up to an ecstatic climax. (But then, as with glam rock, which also had its fashy moments, you have to pitch it at the guys at the back of the stadium.)
Slow and measured to begin with, as he warms up, Hitler gets sweatier, shinier, and more aroused. There is a decidedly sexual sheen, even release, to this public performance of a famously not very sexually active man. Towards the end of his final speech, as he shouts, “The young have pledged devotion to us with body and soul!” we see what can only be described as… Hitler’s cum face.
But it is the frenzied, deafening shouts of “SEIG HEIL! HEIL HITLER!” (‘Hail victory! Hail Hitler!’) led by Hess after Hitler finishes, which is the actual, physiological ejaculation. The Party and the German People are Hitler’s ecstatic, orgasmic, youthful body.
AN EARLIER, MORE restrained scene in Triumph shows a be-flagged SA & SS commemoration to Paul von Hindenburg, the First World War General and last President of Germany. His death the month before, had allowed Hitler to combine the Reich Chancellorship with the President’s office. He was no longer ‘Der Bundeskanzler’ (‘Chancellor of Germany’), but simply ‘Fuhrer’ (‘leader’ or ‘guide’). This then is a ceremony sanctifying Hitler’s dictatorship – and his recent, first taste of mass-murder.
There is, you see, a bloody Nazi ghost at this all-singing, all-dancing, all-Aryan banquet. A large, rotund, battle-scarred, 46-year-old homosexual one.
Part of the reason Triumph of the Will is such a well-made piece of propaganda is not just because Riefenstahl, an exceptionally talented filmmaker, also had help from Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect, who designed the famous stadium, with its red skyscraper swastika flags, as a film set – installing trenches, lifts, and railways for her thirty cameras. Or because she often reshot key speeches in the studio afterwards. But also because she had had already made the film once before. A very dressy full-dress rehearsal.
It was called The Victory of Faith and released in 1933, chronicling in similar fashion, the events of that year’s Nazi Party Congress, the first after gaining power. It heavily featured Ernst Rohm, the swaggering leader of the SA, decorated First World War Army Captain, second most powerful figure in the Nazi Party, and a close comrade of Corporal Hitler’s from the Munich Beer Hall Putsch days. Possibly the closest. Rohm was the only senior Nazi who dared to address Hitler as ‘Adolf’ or ‘Adi’ instead of ‘mein Fuhrer’.
But Rohm, along with much of the SA leadership (and many others Hitler had a grudge against, or saw as a threat), was murdered in June 1934 in the Night of the Long Knives purge that made Hitler unchallenged head of the Nazi Party – and judge and jury to the German people. Rohm and the estimated one thousand other victims were the first open, extra-judicial executions by the Nazi State.
Because Rohm had also been purged from the historical record, all copies of Victory of Faith had been ordered destroyed – though one surviving copy surfaced in East Germany in the 1980s. I’ve watched it, and it is a much less accomplished piece of propaganda filmmaking. Which is to say, it’s much more boring. Not least because it includes a lot more speechifying from the Nazi hierarchy. It is under-aestheticized.
To replace the now-banned original, Hitler had asked Riefenstahl to make another film about that year’s Nuremberg rally. Sans Ernst. Whatever you think of her collaboration with the Nazis and her degree of guilt, you could argue she didn’t have much choice in the matter now – given that Hitler had just had the second most powerful man in Germany openly killed. A man that she had met and filmed extensively the previous year.
Despite Triumph of the Will being commissioned as part of the attempt to expurgate Rohm and his filthy vice from history, the Leni Gaze oddly ends up reminding us of him – or at least of the homoeroticism the Nazis exploited. A kind of introjection of the lost love-object.
Triumph includes a torchlight sequence where Viktor Lutze, Rohm’s backstabbing replacement as head of the now largely ceremonial SA, is feted/mobbed by his troopers in a gigantic torchlight group hug that is clearly overdetermined.
Rohm and many others in the SA hierarchy were homosexual or bisexual. Rohm openly so, at least within the Party. He had also been ‘outed’ to the public by the by the liberal press, who obtained his private correspondence, which discussed his homosexuality matter-of-factly; including his assertion that his fellow Nazis would simply have to ‘get used’ to it.
The ‘immorality’ of the SA had often been attacked in the press and by the Nazis’ political enemies, but Hitler had turned a blind eye to it, sometimes even seeming to revel in the barracks rough-housing reputation of the street-brawling SA. But that was before he became Chancellor. Before he became respectable. Now Rohm and his unruly, ‘immoral’ SA thugs were both a PR and a political problem. They took the ‘Socialist’ part of ‘National Socialist’ seriously, wanting a ‘Second Revolution’ against the big bourgeoisie (who had bankrolled Hitler’s ascent), and wanted the SA to replace the Prussian officer class and the Wehrmacht that Hitler needed for his dreams of conquest.
Hitler nevertheless remained reluctant to move against the SA, numbering three million by 1934, and his old comrade – even after Mussolini told him at a summit in June 1934 that the SA’s reputation for homosexuality and violence was ruining his reputation abroad. (An intervention that was engineered by Rohm’s enemies in the German government.)
However, under increasing political pressure from the Armed Forces and conservatives and manipulated by Himmler and Goering into half-believing that Rohm was organising a coup against him, the Fuhrer, who anyway had zero interest in a ‘Second Revolution’, decided to finally rid himself of Rohm.
Armed with a pistol, and accompanied by an SS detachment, Hitler himself descended at dawn on the quiet Bavarian resort where he had ordered the SA leadership (their meek compliance not lending much credence to the ‘coup plot’ accusation). Hitler personally banged on Rohm’s bedroom door. When a groggy, confused Rohm opened it, Hitler shouted “Ernst, you are under arrest!”, before spinning on his heel and banging on the next door, belonging to Rohm’s deputy, Edmund Heines – who had forgotten to lock it, and turned out to be sharing his bed with an unnamed 18-year-old SA senior troop leader. An incandescent Hitler screamed at them, ordering both to be immediately taken outside and shot.
Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Propaganda Minister, who was by Hitler’s side that morning despite, or rather, because he was ideologically close to Rohm, made much of this in subsequent propaganda. (He was also, it must be said, as besotted with Hitler as… Riefenstahl – and was the only senior Nazi to throw himself, and his family, on the Fuhrer’s Berlin bunker funeral pyre). After the purge, persecuting homosexuals became a much higher priority for the Nazi police state. The SS and its chief Himmler were the big winners after Rohm’s elimination and the side-lining of the SA – the former chicken farmer was as hostile to homosexuality as Rohm was warmly welcoming.
Despite the unlawful slaughter, which even included some generals (and one of their wives), the purge pleased the German press, the Wehrmacht, and the Establishment. Even the Church didn’t protest. By way of heartfelt thanks, the Wehrmacht suggested the pledge of allegiance or ‘Hitler Oath’, in which members of the German Armed Forces (and later, civil servants) pledged personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler, in place of loyalty to the German constitution. Something that was to be blamed for the inability of Germans to part company with their Fuhrer after his victories stopped hailing.
In effect, after Hitler’s partnership with Rohm was ended – via a very bloody divorce – the entire German Armed Forces married Hitler. This ghastly union only ended when Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker as the Red Army closed in on the Reichstag, on April 30, 1945 – a few hours after marrying his mistress, Eva Braun. A marriage that had been put off until the very last possible moment because the Fuhrer didn’t want the Fatherland to think he was cheating on her/him.
Following Rohm’s arrest, the bodies piled up across Germany as the death squads worked their way through the lengthy list of ‘undesirables’ enthusiastically compiled for Hitler by Himmler and Goering (many of whom died shouting “Heil Hitler!”). But the now unfettered master of Germany hesitated delicately about what to do with his old comrade. After a couple of days agonising and worn down again by Himmler and Goering who both wanted their rotund rival out of the way, he finally agreed – or admitted to himself – that Rohm had to die. However, still seeking to avoid staining himself with his kameraden’s blood, he ordered that Rohm be given the option to shoot himself. A ‘privilege’ denied all other victims of the purge.
At Stadelheim Prison in Munich – where both Rohm and Hitler had been held after the failed 1920 putsch – the Kapitan was duly handed a revolver with a single round and given ten minutes alone in his cell.
After the allotted span expired, he was found insolently still alive, with his bare chest puffed out, defiantly declaring: “If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself”.
Using the Fuhrer’s first name for the last time.
Originally published on Mark Simpson’s Substack 2022
You can watch Triumph of the Will here.