Download Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl AudioBook Free
The definitive biography of Leni Riefenstahl, the girl most widely known as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the twentieth century. It's the story of huge talent and huger ambition, one which 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 thought to be the greatest and most innovative documentaries available, nevertheless 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 as yet, 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 selling footage to Hollywood under an alias, manipulating a sham “discovery” of the Nuba tribes of Sudan into a job comeback, fighting to disinherit her closest living relatives, and—to the end—struggling 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 also an objective but unsparing appraisal of a woman of spectacular gifts corrupted by ruthless personal ambition.
