The Feminazi: Feminism and fascism in Leni Riefenstahl’s Das Blaue Licht

Abstract

Leni Riefenstahl is an icon with many faces. The German female director and actress is loathed by many and admired by others. She might be called the most influential filmmaker of the Third Reich even though her name is still a taboo in Germany. Many theorists, Bell Hook, Susan Sontag, Catherine Sousslof, Linda Schulte-Sasse and Rebecca Prime, tried to deconstruct her myth by questioning: Leni Riefenstahl, a feminist pioneer or a woman of evil? In current society Leni Riefenstahl is often remembered as the female director who produced Nazi propaganda films (United States Holocaust Museum). But even before the production of these propaganda films, this fascist aesthetic is recognized and represented according to Prime, Sontag and Schulte-Sasse in her “non-Nazi” films.