Leni Riefenstahl – putting a gloss on Hitler’s lies

The Dictator’s Muse is a new novel about Leni Riefenstahl, the film director known variously as the greatest female film director of the 20th century and a Nazi propagandist. Her two 1930s films “Triumph of the Will” about the 1934 Nuremberg Rally and Olympia were highly effective in giving artistic expression to the “Hitler myth”, presenting the Nazi leader as a Wagnerian demigod. It was a celluloid portrayal of the Big Lie laid out in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Th