[BRIEF NOTE] Playing With Nazis

[rfmcdonald]

After reading Gitta Sereny's account of meeting brilliant Nazi-era filmmaker and post-war photographer Leni Riefenstahl in the former's book The Healing Wound, I was inspired to read up about her. I'm indebted to the author(s) of the Wikipedia article on Riefenstahl for linking to an online copy Susan Sontag's 1974 essay "Fascinating Fascism". After dissecting her collaboration with the Nazi regime and examining the aesthetics of her photography of the Nuba people of south Sudan, the late great Sontag concludes that the rehabilitation of Riefenstahl--ongoing in the 1970s, closer to achievement now in the early 21st century after her death--poses a threat to humanity's moral conscience.

Riefenstahl's current de‑Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful—as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer—do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst. Riefenstahl is hardly the usual sort of aesthete or anthropological romantic. The force of her work being precisely in the continuity of its political and aesthetic ideas, what is interesting is that this was once seen so much more clearly than it seems to be now, when people claim to be drawn to Riefenstahl's images for their beauty of composition. Without a historical perspective, such connoisseurship prepares the way for a curiously absentminded acceptance of propaganda for all sorts of destructive feelings—feelings whose implications people are refusing to take seriously. Somewhere, of course, everyone knows that more than beauty is at stake in art like Riefenstahl's. And so people hedge their bets—admiring this kind of art, for its undoubted beauty, and patronizing it, for its sanctimonious promotion of the beautiful. Backing up the solemn choosy formalist appreciations lies a larger reserve of appreciation, the sensibility of camp, which is unfettered by the scruples of high seriousness: and the modern sensibility relies on continuing trade‑offs between the formalist approach and camp taste.

In related news, three copies of Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's new book The World Hitler Never Made have arrived at work. This title is a fascinating study of Nazi-related alternate histories in fiction. Rosenfeld's thesis is that the spread of postmodernism, increasing historical distance, growing awareness of the implications of modern physics (particularly the many-worlds metaphor of quantum mechanics), and the relaxation of existential tensions produced by the end of the Cold War. He suggests that there is a trend for alternate histories to treat the implications of a Nazi victory in the Second World War--the completion of the Final Solution, the literal enslavement of central and eastern Europe, horrors likely unthought of elsewhere in the world--lightly, as material fit for light speculation and gaming. We are no longer, Rosenfeld suggests, as aware of the moral enormity of the Nazis' crimes as we were in the generation following their defeat. This gives us added perspective on other crimes, but it also (he argues) leaves us ignorant of the sheer shock.