Desired Bodies: Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, Aryan Masculinity and The

chapter 3 Desired Bodies: Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, Aryan Masculinity and the Classical Body

Daniel Wildmann

Leni Riefenstahl is one of Nazi Germany’s most famous film directors. She is particularly well known for her notorious propaganda films on behalf of the Nazi Party, and for her documentary on the Berlin Olympics in 1936. This chapter will look at the visual language of Riefenstahl’s film Olympia—The film of the 11th Olympic Games Berlin 1936—a film still highly acclaimed today. It will analyze how Riefenstahl “staged” Aryan masculinity and conveyed anti- Semitism in the film—alongside a specific interpretation of the role of Greek mythology and Classical Greek statues. The chapter offers a contextualized representation of the way in which the male “Aryan” body was presented as an ideal—and how this presentation circulated around an image that is invisible in the Olympia film, but which is nevertheless present in its absence: the image of the “Jewish body”.Which body was desired in the Third Reich, and which was not? How was the desired body constructed and staged?1 My investigation uses the Olympia film as a source for the National Socialist self-image between 1936 and 1938, and considers the nature of this self-image as it was presented to the contemporary German public. The chapter shows how traits that are proclaimed to be Aryan are attributed visually to the body, and further—using a circular form of argumentative logic—how this “Aryanism” is justified, and its superiority exhibited visually. The film appeals to a collective memory on two, constantly interacting synchronic levels: an older one from a bourgeois iconographical canon—Classical antiquity—and a contemporary one that is established instantaneously.The prevailing conception of race at the time enabled the German public to connect both levels, and so link “Aryan” and “Jewish” bodies. In a bipolar constellation, the “Aryan” body in the foreground implied the existence of an opposite in the background: the “Jew”.2 As the Third

1 This chapter is primarily based on material taken from my book, Wildmann (1998). 2 With regard to the Manichaean juxtaposition of “Aryan-Jewish”, see also Wiedemann’s con- tribution in this volume.

Reich excluded the Jews from its community (Volksgemeinschaft), so too does Riefenstahl exclude the Jews from her film. The film extends the ritualized staging of the games of 1936 into the cinema, and presents the public with a “Jew-free” world. My analysis focuses on the prologue of her film, since the prologue sets up the political and visual framework of meaning for the film in its entirety. I will read Riefenstahl’s filmic language in relation to the Nazi regime’s contemporary policies toward Jews, and show that the Olympia film is, both in terms of its argument and its visual rhetoric, National Socialist. Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” film was officially commissioned by the Third Reich; its purpose, as the Organizing Committee of the Berlin Olympics explained in its official report, was

to be a document, and this document was meant to furnish an account of the first large-scale representative sports event in the new Germany … It is possible that Berliners will have to wait a whole generation to experience the Olympic games again, but coming generations should still be able to enjoy and learn from the execution of the 1936 games.3

The Organizing Committee thus understood the games as a self-representation of the Third Reich; it envisioned the film as encapsulating and archiving this “representative sports event” of the “new Germany”—and serving as a paragon and cherished memory for later generations. In other words, it was meant to be something like an archive for National Socialism’s current image of itself. But what was a “sport event” in the “new Germany”, what did it represent, and what was the public supposed to “learn” from it? In considering the film as an historical source, I wish to explore what was being presented as doctrine and pleasure to the German public living its everyday life under the Nazis. Reflecting the dearth of material on contemporary reception of the film, I will not try to answer the question of whether the film’s viewers actually “learned” what they were supposed to. In a cinema, the public responds to a film by means of its sociocultural biography. If a film is to be understood by its audience, it must address this biography.The language in which the communication between film and public becomes possible can be described using the theoretical concept of “collective memory”, which was developed by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s, but which only started making its way into a wide range of histor-

3 Organisationskomitee (1937), 329.