"Ein Pakt mit dem Teufel": Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, and the Nature of Guilt

Authors

Andrew O. Burns, Gettysburg CollegeFollow

Class Year

2019

Document Type

Student Research Paper

Date of Creation

Spring 2019

Department 1

History

Abstract

Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is rightly considered a massive technical achievement in the world of cinema and propaganda. However, this achievement was undertaken at the behest of the immoral, murderous regime of Nazi Germany, a regime that Riefenstahl was more than willing to work with and glorify in order to further her career. This thesis will argue that Riefenstahl’s onscreen deification of Hitler, visual representation of völkisch ideology, and use of the music of Richard Wagner make her later claims of ignorance as to the film’s ultimate meaning impossible to correlate with established facts.

Comments

Written for HIST 418: Senior Seminar, Nazism.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Burns, Andrew O., ""Ein Pakt mit dem Teufel": Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, and the Nature of Guilt" (2019). Student Publications. 701.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/701