A sad Faustian story that features the artistic triumphs of a woman who figuratively climbed a roof at Auschwitz to get a...
A former movie producer and, subsequently, chronicler of Hollywood legends (Marlene Dietrich, 1992) and legendary fiascos (Final Cut, 1985) revisits what a documentary filmmaker once called “the wonderful, horrible life” of cinema’s most controversial figure.
This second recent biography of Riefenstahl focuses a bit more on her cinematic style than its predecessor, Jürgen Trimborn’s Leni Riefenstahl (Jan. 2007). Trimborn had the advantages (and frustrations) of interviews with Riefenstahl (who died in 2003 at 101), but Bach has an insider’s view of how films are produced. Still, the two books cover much the same ground and issue many of the same judgments. Bach begins with a snapshot of the Berlin film world of 1925, then returns to the birth and childhood of Helene Amalia Bertha Riefenstahl, born 1902. (Cross-eyed as an infant, Leni would in a metaphorical sense never lose that disability.) Young Leni desperately wanted a career in the arts. She tried dance, sustained an injury, segued smoothly into the nascent film industry, where she acted in some popular alpine films, then moved behind the camera. Her great assets were her stunning beauty, her ferocious work ethic and her ability to curry favor. In 1930s Germany, she found the most powerful patron of all, Adolf Hitler. Bach carefully reconstructs their relationship (he does not believe the two were ever sexually involved) and shows her varied relations with other Nazi notables (Goebbels, Speer, Bormann). Bach looks with a filmmaker’s eye at Riefenstahl’s great popular successes (Triumph of the Will, Olympia), as well as her lesser known and aborted films (Tiefland, Black Cargo). He skips quickly over her later years—her books of African photographs, her underwater film (he calls Underwater Impressions “soporific”). On his subject’s considerable moral failings, Bach is unrelenting. She knew she was in the presence of evil; she found it attractive—and lucrative.
A sad Faustian story that features the artistic triumphs of a woman who figuratively climbed a roof at Auschwitz to get a closer look at the clouds.Pub Date: March 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-40400-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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