The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 53: November 16

Today we had a dinner party at our small German house. We live up by the gate in what was once the gardener’s shed. The house is so snug that my work desk is in the kitchen which is also basically our bedroom. While people ate cheese and drank beer, they examined the books on my desk. “This is a beautiful edition,” said one woman of a book. “You’re reading this?” said a man (a German) of another. The book the German man picked up was Leni Riefenstahl’s memoir (called Leni Riefenstahl). Many years after her death, Riefenstahl remains, to understate matters massively, a controversial character. She was a film director (most famously of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will) and a dancer, and a first-class mountaineer. She might have ranked as one of the twentieth century’s most bad-ass humans except that she was, as bluntly articulated by one of the “Gypsy” extras Riefenstahl used in a film before sending her off to a concentration camp, “friends with Hitler” and (again, to massively understate matters), “not a good person.” For sure Riefenstahl is a curious case study of what people disallow themselves from knowing when that knowledge is incriminatory or inconvenient. I told the German I’d stopped two-thirds of the way through Riefenstahl’s memoir. Her narcissism began to grate, also the tragically comic omissions, the alternating tone of self-aggrandizement and self-pity. Theatrically flawed people are fascinating, but only to a point. For me that point was page 459.

The man told me that his company — he owns a film production company — was making a movie about Leni Riefenstahl. (His was not the first Riefenstahl biopic project, he said. A famous and reputedly “intellectual” actress had been involved in an earlier Riefenstahl project; she’d finally quit because of the script.)

“What was wrong with the script?” I asked.

What was wrong with her script, he said — and what was wrong with his script, and what made Riefenstahl a tricky character to portray — was the character’s failure to change.

“She was the same her whole life,” he said. “She was just the same person.” She only ever cared about making films. She only ever cared about her career. She was always arrogant, narcissistic, unrepentant.

Certainly I understood how this could be boring; hadn’t I stopped reading her memoirs for similar reasons? All the same, the criticism struck me as a failure of imagination. (To be fair to this man, it was less his personal failure than a failure of the audience’s or the “market’s” imagination, to which, as the owner of a production company, he is beholden.) I countered like the teacher I usually am when I’m not with my husband on his fellowship in Germany.

Wasn’t Riefenstahl’s failure to change, despite the fact that so much change was happening around her, of potentially great moral and dramatic interest? Could you argue that she might be the more fascinating and enigmatic character than the character who, predictably, changed? Thomas Mann, for example, changed. At the beginning, yes, Mann failed to behave in a terribly brave or upstanding manner; he was timid in the face of the Nazi rise. Maintaining his career meant more than speaking out on behalf of his friends and colleagues — some of whom were deported — or even supporting his children, who were actively anti-Nazi, and from whose activism he initially distanced himself. But after Mann was forced to leave Germany he made twenty-five radio broadcasts for Germans on behalf of the Allied forces, all of which began, “German listeners!” and which were scathingly anti-Nazi.

Mann’s an example of the morally understandable and also the morally reassuring character. From personal experience, I can attest that it’s uncomfortable to confront dramatic situations in which the “protagonists” are not redeemed, in which they are so self-absorbed that nothing penetrates their shell of self-interest and self-promotion, not even mass murder. But why must that make for a bad script?

On the morning of 9/11, my husband and I were charged with caring for the girlfriend of my sort-of cousin. While the towers burned and the death count, at that point, was estimated at ten thousand, she arrived at our house with a meditation candle and dessert. She worried all day about her relationship with my cousin. Did he love her enough? She just wasn’t sure if he did. She pestered us with questions about my cousin as we walked to a clinic, as we tried to give blood. What did we think? What did we know? Did we think their relationship could last? Did we think he really loved her? Her character was so inconceivable even though it was standing right in front of us. We finally left her in our apartment and went to someone else’s apartment. We had to escape her because she was so disturbingly unchanged. How could that be? How could she be? We didn’t and still can’t make sense of her. Our inability to understand makes her a regular character in our couple narratives, the ones we tell about the weirdness we’ve weathered together. We talk about the woman who, when the city was burning around her, stopped to buy dessert. Probably her life would also make for a bad script. Yet I don’t think there’s a story we’ve told more often to others than hers.