Intellectualism cut off at the neck: The Body Politic-As-Aesthetic in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will

by Christian Crouse

Christian Crouse is a free-lance writer and artist who currently resides in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. A literature graduate of University of New Brunswick Saint John, he plans to seek a masters in post-colonial literature in the coming year.

Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934 documentary Triumph of the Will, mythologizing Nazi ritual and symbolism through the pageantry of the Nuremberg rallies of that same year, is about art and the part that art plays in shaping reality. The film, like Nazism, is political theory and theatre combined. Film proves an effective medium of transposing the mental world of Nazism onto the canvas of social consciousness. It exploits the ideology and mythology that is used to create the presence of empire, but it also reveals, underneath the pageantry, the very real human cost of creating a body for empire. Art and politics come into contact in an unexpected way with Riefenstahl’s film: Triumph of the Will uses the human body to make real the experience of Nazism as Nazism used it to make real its absolute power. With her camera, she dismembers the body according to the demands made on it by Nazi Supermen theories, ideal art and social reformation. The film itself shows how the Nazis inhabited life by taking it over from the inside out.

Triumph of the Will is a blueprint of the construction of the Third Reich, a myth built upon and told through the Body Politic-made-Aesthetic. It plays out on screen what it takes to make real an empire that is only possible in dreams. Through the surgical techniques of film, Triumph deconstructs the human body, cutting into it with its detached camera’s eye, amputating it, breaking it down into pieces through the effects of precision cuts and splicing, through montage and its fragmentary effect on spatial and temporal relations. The camera can edit as the surgeon can cut: if its discerning eye sees only a face or a hand or a leg, then the chosen appendage is the only reality, the only representation, of a human being. In film as in life, the body dismembered by art and politics is repieced onto the larger body of Nazism; bodies reconstructed give their life over to the omnipresent swastika with its four stiff legs marching in a cyclical pattern, anonymous bodies reduced to be part of an amalgamated mass, or a big black spot. They make up what Eisner refers to when she writes of the body-as-state in Fritz Lang’s 1926 Metropolis as an ‘architecturalized’ crowd (1): agglomerated bodies used as building blocks of pyramidal empire.

Like art and politics combined, the physical body has a theatre and theory that is essential in the retransformation of reality. The body is, according to Michel Foucault, endowed with political power: it has a “political economy – its forces, their utility, their docility, their distribution and their submission.” (2) The greatest irony of the part that the human body plays in the building of totalitarianism is the crucial importance the insignificant and anonymous crowd has in the total control by the elite. Even in its most submissive state, the human body has a resource of power that is necessary to be extracted; without the possession, exploitation and complete colonization of millions of individual anonymous bodies, the elite have no power base to build upon. This is the secret of the powerful/powerless relationship: masochism is needed to realize sadism as sadism validates the masochistic experience; one is not real without the other. In a totalitarian society, the body must be reduced to essential matter and melded into the very marrow of the New State, which is imbued with the personality of the Leader. Nazi Germany was a master in the art of this kill. While the human body was destroyed, the Nietzschean Superman came to life in sculpture, replacing the average citizen with art, and preparing the reduction of humanity into malleable material that could be reshaped into myth. Triumph of the Will follows this dismemberment through image: hands, legs, feet, faces, cut off from their bodies within the narrow frame of the camera’s eye, become images that hide the message of Nazism’s dual aesthetics of sadism and masochism. The happy faces, healthy bodies and active victims are lies to be believed, but are reminders of the truth of the Body Politic told by images that are not seen in the film: the death masks, the living dead and the passive corpses of the concentration camps, also captured in film footage. Nazism understood the political theory and theatre that the human body possessed. Riefenstahl’s recording of history in live performance understands it as well. In Triumph of the Will, art and politics become one as it did in 1930s Germany to capture a perfect lie and hide the ultimate evil truth.

Art-as-Propaganda

Walter Benjamin’s famous statement that the “logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics,” (3) that fascism is the aestheticization of politics, reminds one of the crucial part that art plays in the formation of fascism into something real. Lies are made into myths and myths are used to create truth. Before the state is turned into theatre, the ‘lie’ that art tells in order to create or recreate is born from the artist’s imagination. “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner,” (4) Hitler once stated. Shirer writes:

[Wagner’s] towering operas, recalling so vividly the world of Germanantiquity with its heroic myths, its fighting pagan gods and heroes, its demons and regions, its blood feuds and primitive tribal codes, its senseof destiny, of the splendor of love and life and the nobility of death … inspired the myth of modern Germany … (5)

The mythical, mystical and psychological properties of Wagner’s vision captured the imagination of the failed artist who had the talent to aestheticize his politics, his heroic mission, his sense of destiny and his bloodlust by textualizing the struggle of European history against intruding forces as ‘Mein Kampf.’ In this aspect of art and reality, politics and poetry become one. Hermann Burte elevated Hitler to politico-artistic heights in an aggrandizing speech to a gathering of poets in 1940, announcing “A book was written, not poetry in a low common sense, and yet a poem, a view of a new people in a new state! … The great statesmen of the Germans is a kind of poet …” (6)

This failed artist-turned-New Poet redefined art. For him, art had human-like properties; somewhere in his process of thinking, art and the human body became one and the same. As a true aesthete, he came to believe art determined the body. He writes in Mein Kampf that modern art has the ability to destroy the German: “… for on the day that this kind of art were actually to correspond to the general conception, one of the most severe changes of mankind would have begun; the backward development of the human brain.” (7) Anti-establishment, destroying tradition in order to recreate the past for the new present, modern art became the enemy to a mind that wanted absolute control over the human body. It was re-inscribed with words like poison, cancer, and degenerate, given the biological and physiological abilities to be a disease. In its redefinition of all things cultural, Nazi propaganda claimed modern art was as tainted by Jewishness as Germany’s genealogical bloodlines. Art and the body became symbolic of each; a piece of modern art and the Jewish body became one. The experience of hate can be expressed through art so artifice becomes the norm and illusion becomes reality. Modern art was captured, broken down, publicly displayed, hated, and ultimately destroyed in a systematic programme of Final Solution that mirrored the cultural cleansing agenda that justified the death-camps.

Just as human bodies of Nazi scapegoats would suffer under the Third Reich, so would art. In 1937, exhibitions were held that showcased pieces and works that the Nazis confiscated and called Degenerate, that is, works done by contemporary Jewish artists. In a procedure that carries a heavy sadistic undercurrent, paintings were put on display to be publicly rebuked, ridiculed, and humiliated. On March 20 th, 1939, the Degenerate Art Commission ordered over one thousand paintings and almost four thousand watercolors and drawings burned in a courtyard of a Berlin fire station, foreshadowing the ovens of death-camps. (8) In her book Selling the War, Zbynek Zeman provides pictures from Nazi art exhibitions held in occupied France: sculpted pieces of what was referred to as “typical Jewish features” – a large ear, prominent nose, full lips and bulbous eyes - are displayed to further racialize, objectify and metaphorically break the Jew down into little pieces. (9) Looking as if they have been torn from a face, each characteristic is a chilling reminder of the camps, where human bodies were mutilated and exhibited for the fascination of its destroyers.

The destruction of unwanted bodies became a pursuit for art in which sadistic doctors became aesthetes searching for new modes of destroying the human body in experiments that tortured and twisted victims in unimaginable ways. Flesh of victims became lampshades; their faces were resculpted into final distorted moments of life after suffering meaningless scientific researches; the Jewish body, deemed ugly, was stripped and murdered to make way for the more beautiful and superior nude sculptures that peopled the public gardens and the Nazi imagination. In the elaborately organized slaughter of ten children transported from the Neuengamme concentration camp to the cellar of the abandoned Bullenhuser Damm school on April 20 1945, the drugged adolescents, ropes tied around their necks, were hung, in the words of the participating SS officer Frahm, “like paintings on the wall.” (10) The art was in the kill, and the kill was the truth that Art lied about.

Hitler saw art as a method to create a whole new life. He turned it into a political tool to idealize and mythologize the German Volk into the Perfect State with the Perfect Individual. Hitler “demanded from art an ideal model. He postulated an Aryan beauty able to heal the German body and soul.” (11) What he demanded from art, however, was not truth, but illusion. The blond man promoted in artwork, the beautiful tuft-haired Hellenized body clean as the country air that is its space, told a lie, for the National Socialist überman, the leader of its heroic cult, was as brown-eyed and black-haired as the stereotypical Jewish enemy that was, as presented in propaganda, the Nordic beauty’s antithesis. Hitler’s superior race was Nazi Germany’s first greatest lies, an aestheticized vision of the Perfect State that was a mask for its theatre of death. Peter Adam writes, “One can only look at the art of the Third Reich through the lens of Auschwitz,” (12) as if to state that the horrors of the camps are in the end the most powerful aesthetic statement the Nazi-as-artist has contributed to history.

The Body is a Lie that tells a Truth

The importance of the body to fascist aesthetic is reflected in the place sculpture held in the building of myth in Nazi Germany, where it eclipsed painting as the best mode of art representation. (13) The reason for this is understandable: art and the Body find its most powerful combined aesthetic realization in sculpture. Sculpture is the best receptacle of truth for the Cult of the Leader: it can create an ideal, shaped by the impossible mythology that is as frightening and fascinating as Nazi action, and through the sculpted form of a gigantic Superman and Flawless woman, reality is redefined, truth recreated and the Political Aesthetic officialized.

Textually, the sculpted body “seemed better able to express the National Socialist obsession with race and biology.” (14) The model of the ideal Aryan – beautiful, healthy, the Nordic Superman and Greek God combined – became familiar occurrences throughout Germany, majestic, surreal and strangely absent presences. Nude bodies that personified the New Adam and Eve of Hitler’s imagination became a thing of worship. They were simultaneously pure and erotic in their superiority. However, they carried a deeper and more disturbing message that went beyond the conscious. Sculpture utilizes its space, economizing and simplifying it. It is Form encapsulated in one singular point of time. Under a ruthlessly controlled environment that uses it to be a message, sculpture goes beyond images of abstraction and objectification. It becomes a symbol of containment, subliminating the message that the individual must give complete subjection to the state. It in itself becomes a prison. The sculpted human form – captured, static, disciplined, a thing of smooth contours and hard surfaces – becomes the quintessential aesthetic symbol of absolute power.

Triumph of the Will does not bother demanding. It takes the human body and does what it wants with it. Bodies become the new fiction, living political statements. The Third Reich and its iconography of cleanliness – promising to cleanse Germany of modernism, Judaism and other cultural maladies – is expressed through initial scenes of men publicly washing one another’s bodies out in the open air, unashamed and proud of their nudity because they are, like the familiar nude sculpture, representative of everything pure and superior. Women dress as pre-industrial Volkmädchen, effectively clothing themselves in imagery. They are literal bodies of history, living texts that rewrite the present and returning the German homeland to its volkisch roots and heroic past. Barriers that separate past and present are torn down through the dressing – or undressing – of living bodies, while a whole new future based on myth becomes the new reality.

Riefenstahl’s camera, however, remains objective in its recording of history in performance. From the beginning, the Leader himself is made abstract, as if his own humanness must be removed in order to successfully transform his Personality into Cult. Hitler’s body becomes a thing to worship. Swooping down from the clouds in a plane – arriving from the heights of an Olympian dreamscape, emerging from the cloudy mists of unconsciousness – Hitler manages to transcend reality through the suggestion he can fly; he becomes the plane and the plane becomes him. His body is iconicized like the omnipresent eagle that is showcased throughout the film through occasional shots of its statuesque frame towering over the masses; he becomes the sculpted eagle and the concrete eagle becomes him. From the highest ranks to the lowest, the body is needed to create empire – and no trace of humanity must be left for the naked eye to see.

The Cult of the Body

Without the body, there is no empire. In Triumph of the Will, bodies move in unison, on parade, doubling, tripling and multiplying ad infinitum in simultaneous movement. They gel together to be one collective body. The Berlin city streets, the Nuremberg stadium and the interior halls of power become epic dimensional spaces that can hold something as monumental as Nazism. These places are filled with people, metaphorically piled atop the other, calling to mind the claustrophobic conditions of transport trucks, freight trains, work camps and gas chambers. Whether it is pageantry or butchery, power depends upon the volume of bodies put on exhibition; the more bodies, the bigger the empire. Like Lang’s Metropolis, Triumph of the Will depends upon the imagery of the architectural structure that swallows up the individual into its density of space. Eisner writes of Metropolis:

The human element is stylizes into a mechanical element … (Rudolf) Kurtz decreed that the laws of the “formation of space” apply also to the human body, for the human body imposes its dimensions on the scenic structure. (17)

Riefenstahl employs the same methods of spatial manipulation to create a vacuum existence on a massive scale. Bodies are architecture: they become the stadium courtyard and hence become the very foundation a Nation is built upon. They perform double duty as ornamentation, standing as living caryatids to the State. Without the body to create Eisner’s idea of scenic structure, nothing can be real. Riefenstahl realizes this for her film as the Nazis realizes it for their Reich. According to Siegfried Kracauer:

Leni Riefenstahl made a film that not only illustrates the Convention to the full, but succeeds in disclosing its whole significance. The cameras incessantly scan faces, uniforms, arms and again faces, and each of these close-ups offers evidence of the thoroughness with which the metamorphosis of reality was achieved. (18)

Thousands of human beings are amassed into a collection of uniformed blocks on the Nuremberg courtyard; they are a concentric stream of densely conglomerated nobodies obediently trimming the pathway of the Fuhrer’s motorcade; they are an epic gathering of millions of extended arms; they are the legs of a schoolboy in his knee-high socks standing on tiptoe to get a better view through the crush of bodies; they are hands of the Jugund beating their drums in synch with one another like perfect marionettes; they become the empty face of Youth staring straight ahead, the only presence of life hinted at by beauty. Like a Dantean vortex, the process of deconstruction breaks the symbolic body down piece-by-piece, economizing, funneling it through a procedure that gets narrower and narrower. The Face becomes the most intimate and most frighteningly absent present representation of Nazi deconstruction, made more haunting because it returns the place of recreation to the Beginning as held by Youth. Beautifully blank, chosen, and immortal, the face of youth is fictionalized through its marbleized flesh, its enameled eyes, and its effervescent blond hair to be a poem of purity. Occasionally, a smile will form upon its smooth surface, but because it is shaped by the encouraging words of its sculptor, it is lifeless. They are meant to be monuments of hope, of a heroic future that justifies the blood spilled in the present to regain past glory, but behind the art is truth, for they are chilling reminders of the fragments of sculpted facial traits displayed as ‘typical Jewish features’ in anti-Jewish art exhibitions.

In his book The Mass Ornament, Kracauer, in discussing the visual pattern of objectifying the figure of the spectator, examines this form of imagistic dismemberment in a bid to make the subject into an object. Kracauer’s ideas provide insight into the melding of subject (Nazism) with object (the human body) that Triumph of the Will watches unfold:

Although the masses give rise to the ornament … they are not involved inthinking it through. As linear as it may be, there is no line that extends from the small sections of the mass to the entire figure … The more the coherence of the figure is relinquished in favor of mere linearity, the more distant it becomes from the immanent consciousness of those constituting it. Yet this does lead to its being scrutinized by a more incisive gaze. In fact, nobody would notice the figure at all if the crowd of spectators, who have an aesthetic relation to the ornament and do not represent anyone, were not sitting in front of it … Everyone does her or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality. Like the pattern in the stadium, the organization stands above the masses, a monstrous figure whose creator withdraws it from the eyes of its bearers, and barely even observes it himself … The hand sin the factory correspond to the legs… (19)

Kracauer’s factory worker is effectively broken down – from hands to legs, etc. – and transformed into Lang’s mechanical element. The unified body is dismembered by the repetitive conveyor belt-politics of industrial-like life. The millions of bodies-as-one becomes collectivized by being transformed into equations of arithmetic as seen in Triumph of the Will: twirling in geometrical circles during tightly choreographed ceremony; lined up perfectly in state pageantry; pushed into horizontal barricades on both sides of a road to create a linear path for the vertical leader. Lang’s architecturalized crowd turns into Kracauer’s ornamentalized mass. The process of physical dismemberment, notes Kracauer, extends to “the soul as well,” (20) or mutilation of the spirit.

It also extends to the leader. Riefenstahl’s camera reveals for us in a way wrapped in ambiguity that the necessity for dehumanization must include the personality of the cult. In one of the film’s most curious shots, Hitler receives the same surgical treatment that the anonymous body does. The scene captures him standing before the masses, off-center to the right of the shot. His back is facing the camera, his entire body seen but for his head which the frame cuts off. The scene is too deliberate to be a random view on things. For this one brief moment, Riefenstahl removes the visionary from his vision and lays him atop his own self-created consciousness. The effect is surreal, out-of-joint, and postmodern: a headless man superimposed upon a faceless crowd. It is a shot of irony, for the man who rejected Dadaism and Surrealism as human diseases is made to resemble a piece of their modern art. The shot’s artistic complexity reveals the lie behind Nazi truth, for it cuts off the applied intellectualism at the neck. It captures Kracauer’s kaleidoscopic idea of the “monstrous figure” of the all-encompassing factory, “… whose creator withdraws it from the eyes of its bearers, and barely even observes it himself …” Hitler becomes an anonymous body, objectified into a line of mere verticalism in relation to the crowd’s horizontalism. The abstracted crowd that worships the abstracted leader becomes fragments of body parts submitting to a body representative. The shot’s context, content and juxtaposition of objects are unrealistic, but possible in the surreal realm of dreams, thus rendering Nazism the figment of a headless man’s imagination. Consciously or not, Riefenstahl captures the ultimate lie and truth of the Nazi experience.

A Body of History

Richard Taylor states that Triumph of the Will is “at the same time … a superb example of documentary cinema art – and a masterpiece of film propaganda.” (21) The film is the complete melding of art and politics. As a film of propaganda, it states its political message clearly. As a valid historical document, it records events as they were shaped according to Nazi imagination.

As a valuable historical study, the film provides insight into how reality is shaped by illusion. Behind the personality and pageantry is the anonymous citizen lost within the crowd. However

insignificant it seems, this faceless nobody is the most important part of making illusion real. Following Benjamin’s famous statement, the human body becomes a necessary element to aestheticize in order to politicize. The body aesthetic and body politic become one; one cannot be without the other. The film itself provides a metaphor for Nazism: without the bodies to write with, the fiction is not real. According to Taylor, Leni Riefenstahl claimed in an interview that in Triumph of the Will, “… everything is real. And there is no tendentious commentary for the simple reason that the film has no commentary at all. It is history. A purely historical film.” (22) It is its element of history that enables the viewer years after its release to grasp an understanding of how art shapes their lives, and how authoritarian power inhabits reality by inhabiting them. It is the hidden truth in Riefenstahl’s film that is the most valuable lesson for those looking underneath the surface of its perfect art: behind Triumph’s aesthetics of masochism, represented by bodies willing to submit to dismemberment, are the aesthetics of sadism, symbolized by the bodies we don’t see in the film that were forced to surrender to mutilation. Both extremes are linked by the same destruction of soul and spirit.

Ironically, it is Hitler’s own words which best explains the true value of Triumph of the Will as a film about the truth hidden in history and the timeless warning it holds for its audience. In Mein Kampf, he writes: “Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around.” (23) Riefenstahl exploits this Nazi ideology, and Nazism finds full-bodied expression in Riefenstahl’s vision; art and politics ultimately share the same modus operandi.

Notes

1 Lotte E. Eisner, The Haunted Screen. Berkeley- Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969, p. 229.

2 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977, p. 25.

3 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968, p. 243.

4 William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960, p. 101.

5 Shirer, p. 101.

6 Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992, p. 40.

7 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. London: Hutchinson, 1969, p. 354.

8 Adam, p. 127.

9 See Zbynek Zeman, Selling the War. London: Orbis Publishing, 1978, p. 22.

10 Go to the website fhh1.hamburg.de/Neuengamme/ Praesentationen/bullenhusen.en.swf for an informative tribute to the Bullenhuser massacre.

11 Adam, p. 12.

12 Adam, p. 9.

13 Adam, p. 175.

14 Adam, p. 175.

15 Adam, p. 188.

16 Adam, p. 175.

17 Eisner, Haunted Screen, p. 229.

18 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 301.

19 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament:Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y Levin. Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 77-79.

20 Kracauer, p. 79.

21 Richard Taylor. Film Propaganda. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

22 Taylor, p. 189.

23 Hitler, p. 376.

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