A plastic box filled with prints with a note on it: “Olympia SUPER original photos. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH”. A box with the inscription “75th birthday”, at the top a picture of Leni Riefenstahl and Horst Buchholz, he is holding their book “My Africa” in his hands. Box with slides: “Nuba in landscape”, “Landscape without Nuba”. A photo album from the 1920s, containing Leni Riefenstahl in portraits, Leni Riefenstahl in film stills, Leni Riefenstahl in glossy magazines, cut out and pasted.
It is only a tiny excerpt of what is in the depot of the Berlin Museum of Photography, brought up for viewing purposes, but it gives an impression of the challenging gift that the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation received in 2018: the estate of Leni Riefenstahl, transported in 700 moving boxes from her house on Lake Starnberg to Berlin, there distributed among the state library, which took over the documents, the cinema library, which received everything filmic, that Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Photography as part of the art library.
In the service of the Nazi regime
Andres Veiel’s 2024 film “Riefenstahl” showed that Riefenstahl’s intention to preserve the power of interpretation of one’s own actions after death by means of a meticulously organized and pre-sorted estate must remain unsuccessful, the result of an initial inventory accompanied by experts and based only on what was found. The psychogram, which included interviews, phone calls she recorded, letters and film recordings, would not have been in her interest. The material turned against her and her lifelong rejection of responsibility for having placed herself in the service of the Nazi regime with her films.
The project to open up the “toxic grail,” as art library director Moritz Wullen called the estate during an interim assessment of the processing on Friday, will take years and is being done in parts. The processing of the photos and film recordings of the Nuba people in the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, which brought Riefenstahl controversial fame as a photographer in her eighth decade, is already well underway. The West’s perspective on the images, which they confronted with its own projections – indigenous people as original, naive, backward people and therefore characterized by an unbiased approach to their physicality – was often heard. Susan Sontag was the first to point out the continuity from the National Socialist body ideal that Riefenstahl staged to the equally accentuated bodies of the Nuba.
When processing the “Nuba work” in the estate, the perspective of the ethnic group on which Riefenstahl had aimed her camera should be taken into account. A research project cooperated with the Pan-Nuba Council, which is concerned with the preservation of the cultural heritage of the Nuba, with Sudanese scientists and members of the Nuba. The war in Sudan made collaboration difficult, but there were also research trips to the Nuba Mountains, where people that Riefenstahl portrayed still live. The photographs were exhibited in Kampala, Uganda, where there is a Nuba diaspora community.
The Nuba have an ambivalent relationship with the photographs. They didn’t know why they were being photographed, nor did they know to what extent the older lady who kept coming had benefited, not least materially, from the pictures. For them, the photos are the property of the community, said Paola Ivanov, curator at the Ethnological Museum. At the same time, from the Nuba perspective, the images made an important contribution to safeguarding their cultural heritage. They show practices that no longer exist in this form among the ethnic group marginalized by the state. A digital archive will make the images accessible to the Nuba. The research process is documented on a website, which itself is an expression of the new form of knowledge production that, for Paola Ivanov, is groundbreaking with regard to future museum work: “away from appropriation, towards equal research and participation”.
Other questions that the estate raises are of a legal nature. Christian Mathieu from the State Library is dealing, among other things, with 17,000 letters that Riefenstahl filed – sorted alphabetically according to the names of the senders. In order to publish these digitally, the consent of the authors’ heirs is required, which is often not given. The opposite perspective on Riefenstahl results in an “imbalance,” says Mathieu. A legal sub-project is now exploring, among other things, the extent to which the writings can be made accessible for research purposes.
