Triumph of the Will

“Reflections on ‘Triumph of the Will’ and 'The Eternal Jew’,” unpublished excerpt from class journal, spring 2001

Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is a film, but, as importantly, it is a piece of dramatic staging. Triumph of the Will is also a devastating instrument of historical knowledge.

To begin, the staged quality of Triumph of the Will is revealing in what it tells us about the Nazi program and its influence over 1930s German society, in terms of its scope, ambition and resources. That Nazi party leadership produced a film of this magnitude — four hours in length with a determined, overarching aesthetic, and a technical command on par with the best filmmaking of the time — speaks forcefully to these issues.

Hitler himself appears comparatively little in the film, a fact very likely attributable to the astuteness of his much commented on, and much lamented, showmanship. The Fascist leadership in aggregate, however, claims many inches of film. But every Fascist who declaims on the dais, is tempered, it seems, by more politically innocuous counter-imagery.

As everything in the film is ultimately political, it is useful to examine this counter-imagery. No more revealing an example could be used than that of women and children and the role they play in the film, and indeed in the Nazi propaganda effort. Aside from the explicit symbolism women and children popularly and historically convey, there is a political expedient that cannot be missed: the feminization and domestication of the Nazi leader. These calculated juxtapositions become especially meaningful when Hitler is otherwise depicted in rigidly — almost comically — “masculine” settings.

A Nazi propaganda undertaking of another sort is The Eternal Jew, a film reported to have not had the intended effect upon viewers. One theory for the relative “failure” of the film to win a positive reception is that by 1940, the year of its release, German audiences had become sated by anti-Jewish propaganda. This argument seems plausible to me only if the sympathetic or humanitarian impulses of German audiences are removed from consideration. This is to say that I don’t believe that German audiences in 1940 were any less inclined to reject Nazi propaganda than they were in 1939 or 1938 or 1937.

I don’t believe that any lengthy argument need be made in proving the existence of German anti-Semitism. The fact that the systematic exclusion from professional and social life went ahead during the 1930s with little (non-Jewish) resistance on any level, institutional or otherwise; that millions were cognizant of the deportations and the death camps; that millions more offered open and often fervent support to a regime that frankly declared as one of its central imperatives the mass destruction of European Jewry; and that German people — and not faceless automatons — by the tens of thousands were involved on some level in the slaughter of six million Jews, seems more than sufficient in substantiating this claim.

There is another aspect I’d like to explore in considering the film’s relative failure. In contrast to Triumph of the Will, The Eternal Jew offers neither hope nor heroism — as distorted and perverse as those two qualities may be configured in the former. It is relentless in its negativity and overreaches in making its case.

Furthermore, in keeping with the comparison between these two films, The Eternal Jew is a pedestrian effort, and decidedly so. Lacking the visual prowess of Triumph of the Will, the camera work, the editing and mise-en-scene are clearly the subordinates of the film’s insistent didacticism; such formal considerations share an equal footing with the didactic content of Triumph of the Will.

Simply put, The Eternal Jew is a dreary bore to watch. This is not to ignore the film’s appalling content, its capacity for distortion, exaggeration and outright deception. The content, at this late stage in the anti-Semitic game, I would argue, would have been of only ancillary consequence to the German audience the film was trying to reach. In other words, if the impulse in making such a film were to rally viewers to the Nazi cause, The Eternal Jew would seem to have fallen quite flat.