[In the following review, Mesic criticizes Riefenstahl for ignoring the moral and ethical questions surrounding her life and work in Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir.]

It is one of the more telling ironies of Nazism that Hitler, while envisioning a master race of supermen, surrounded himself with lumpen physiques and mediocre minds. The only real superman among Hitler's favorites was a woman. Her name was Leni Riefenstahl and there was nothing she couldn't do. Beautiful, educated and clever, she demonstrated artistic brilliance as a dancer and superb physical courage as a skier and mountain climber—skills she put to use as an actress in films that established her fame in Europe while she was still in her early 20s. And yet her real talent, even genius, lay elsewhere, as a director of films.

The still vigorous Riefenstahl, now in her 90s, has recently written an autobiography, [Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir,] and it is most engrossing when it traces the filming of her breathtaking Olympia, made during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The games took place in a maelstrom of conflicting ideologies (the black American Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals, made the ubermenschen look sick); but Riefenstahl, heading a crew larger than any previously used in German filmmaking, displayed no particular favoritism toward German athletes as she created a driving epic—still exhilarating and available on videotape—of the athlete as the embodiment of the human will.

Just as accomplished but far more disturbing is her 1934 documentary Triumph of the Will. In that film, Riefenstahl put her ingenuity at the service of the Nazi party, providing a mesmerizing visual account of a historic rally held at Nuremburg, at which Hitler is shown captivating a flag waving, torch-bearing crowd of frenzied followers.

For its making, Riefenstahl had every facility Hitler could offer—18 cameramen, an elevator installed on a 140-foot flagpole so a camera could capture the scene from above; a squad trained on roller skates to maneuver smoothly around Hitler with a circling camera. The result was to bring an essentially static event—a talking head, or more accurately, a ranting one—to furious life. Riefenstahl's innovations created an appallingly effective piece of propaganda.

Leni Riefenstahl had quite a life—numerous love affairs (most reflecting the same self-absorption and disastrously poor judgment that shaped her politics), encounters with everyone from Marlene Dietrich to Mussolini and private meetings with Hitler, which gave rise, after the war's end, to rumors that she had been Hitler's mistress, which she denies. What keeps us reading this 669-page account, though, is our curiosity about her values. How could a woman so intelligent, sensitive and cultured lend her loyalties and her abilities to a cause so nauseating?

This is a question she never answers. Nor does she express regret, Riefenstahl proves once again to be a propagandist of the first order, this time on her own behalf. The image she builds up is of a young actress working 18-hour days, filming under perilous conditions on glaciers and on icebergs afloat in Arctic seas, or later, as a director, editing miles of footage taken at the Olympic games.

“Because of my huge workload I had been living inside a kind of egg, completely isolated from everyday events,” she writes. “I never listened to the radio or read any newspapers. As a result I didn't have the faintest idea that the works of [modern] artists were vanishing from museums and galleries, defamed and exhibited as ‘degenerate.’”

As another example of her political naivete, Riefenstahl recalls being shown around a French film studio before the war. Studio technicians sang the “Internationale” to protest her presence. Riefenstahl thought it was a tribute.

But the director does not always avow ignorance, saying that to the extent she noticed Hitler's racial policies she opposed them. Once, she says, she asked Hitler if he believed in God. “‘I believe in God and in a divine destiny,’ he responded. ‘And when the time is ripe, a new Messiah will come—he doesn't have to be a Christian, but he will found a new religion that will change the world.’ She claims to have retorted, ‘Only if he loves all human beings and not just the Germans.’”

Yet she willingly served Hitler and once carried a crucial message between the Fuhrer and II Duce. At the end of April 1936, Mussolini asked Riefenstahl to Rome to discuss a film project. In the course of the meeting he remarked that whatever happened, Italy would not interfere in Austria's internal politics. Recognizing this as a message, she reported the conversation to Hitler, who within a week declared the Locarno Pact to be null and void and ordered the Wehrmacht to march into the Rhineland. “A short time later,” Riefenstahl writes, “I found out that he had been encouraged to take that step by Mussolini's message. …”

After the war, Riefenstahl was excoriated for her involvement with the Third Reich. Held by the French, who confiscated her films, she spent several years in prison camps and in a mental hospital. In her book's first few hundred pages, the story flows out like a gush from a hydrant. But during her post-war period of disgrace, her story dwindles to a trickle of explanations and accusations.

For decades she struggled unsuccessfully to obtain backing for her film projects. At last, in the 1960s, she got funding for a documentary about a superbly handsome African people called the Nuba. Critics such as Susan Sontag saw in this work an obsession with dominance and physical superiority completely consistent with Triumph of the Will. But Riefenstahl argues—convincingly—that the photographs prove that Aryan superiority is not a view she espouses.

Can Riefenstahl have been as innocent as she claims? Of course not. Others, although further from the heart of power, saw not just with their eyes but with their principles and had no trouble assessing the nature of the evil around them. By insisting on her ignorance Riefenstahl makes herself sound ordinary, as common as any greedy little hausfrau, happy to wear the fur coat—no questions asked—that her husband “found” in the ghetto.

But Riefenstahl's story is a variation on that most Germanic legend, the tale of Faust's pact with the devil. To be allowed to do the work that she loved, she lost her soul. She became not one in a million, but one of the millions—self-absorbed, moved by the thrill of power and too beguiled by the Reich's benefits to herself to protest.