REFLECTIVE ESSAY

“Fascinating Fascism”
Revisited: An Exercise in
Biographical Criticism

Carl Rollyson

O N 6 FEBRUARY 1975, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS published

“Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag’s full-scale assault on the
rehabilitation of Leni Riefenstahl, best known for her Nazi-era
documentaries Triumph of the Will, her thrilling account of Hitler’s
1934 Nuremberg rally, and The Olympiad, her innovative portrayal of
the 1936 Olympic games hosted by Germany. Disgraced after the war
for her close ties to Hitler, Riefenstahl had managed by the 1970s to
reclaim the copyrights to her work, and to resume her role as a great
artist. She became the subject of several film retrospective exhibi-
tions, and in the 1970s enjoyed a rising reputation among feminist
critics.
“Fascinating Fascism” caused a sensation because Sontag had
built her formidable standing in the 1960s as a cultural commentator
who celebrated the formal properties of works of art. That is, she ar-
gued that art ought to be experienced on its own terms and not as-
sessed on the basis of its message, themes, or the artist’s biography.
In “Against Interpretation” (1966), Sontag’s seminal work that solidi-
fied her reputation, she paid scant attention to historical context.

Carl Rollyson, “‘Fascinating Fascism’ Revisited: An Exercise in Biograph-

ical Criticism,” Journal of Historical Biography 5 (Spring 2009): 1-22,
www.ufv.ca/jhb. © Journal of Historical Biography 2009. This work is li-
censed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
 2 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

“One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But one can use the
work to interpret the life,” she declared in her essay collection, Under
the Sign of Saturn (1980).
To a biographer, Sontag’s privileging of art—putting it in a
sort of sacrosanct realm—seems suspect. Surely the life and the work
are symbiotic. When my wife, Lisa Paddock, and I researched Son-
tag’s biography for Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon (2000), it
became apparent that she was drawn to artists and writers rather like
herself. Under the Sign of Saturn, which in addition to an essay on
Riefenstahl contains Sontag’s treatment of Walter Benjamin and
Elias Canetti, two of the greatest European modernist critics, is fun-
damentally an exercise in projection. Sontag’s interpretation is inevi-
tably tied to her own personality and aesthetics.
Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon emphasized the striking
parallels between Sontag and Riefenstahl, but the consequences of
Sontag’s resistance to thinking about her own biography and about
her own place in history merits more discussion, especially of the
part that biography and history play in understanding the develop-
ment of art and artists. Both Riefenstahl and Sontag sought to deflect
attention away from their lives, insisting that their work alone de-
served debate. And yet the way that they portrayed themselves in the
world of modern art suggests a fusion of themselves and their art that
can only be revealed through a historically-centred biographical nar-
rative.

To anyone schooled in the ethos of Susan Sontag’s iconic work “On

Style,” the first five paragraphs of “Fascinating Fascism” are discon-
certing. In her earlier essay, Sontag wrote:

To call Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” and “The

Olympiad” masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propa-
ganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there.
But something else is there, too, which we reject at our loss.
 “FASCINATING FASCISM” REVISITED 3

Because they project the complex movements of intelli-

gence, grace, and sensuousness, these two films of Riefen-
stahl (unique among the works of Nazi artists) transcend the
categories of propaganda or even reportage. And we find
ourselves—to be sure rather uncomfortably—seeing “Hit-
ler” and not Hitler, the “1936 Olympics” and not the 1936
Olympics. Through Riefenstahl’s genius as a film-maker,
the “content” has—let us even assume against her inten-
tions—come to play a purely formal role.
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot—
whatever the artist’s intentions—advocate anything at all.
The greatest artists attain a sublime neutrality. Think of
Homer and Shakespeare, from whom generations of schol-
ars and critics have vainly labored to extract particular
“views” about human nature, morality, and society.”1

Is Leni Riefenstahl to be grouped with Homer and Shake-

speare, according to Susan Sontag? Apparently not, because “the
Nazi propaganda is there,” which means Riefenstahl’s films do “ad-
vocate.” And yet the films are art because they have the sensuousness
and grace that define for Sontag the autonomous work of art. Thus
Hitler is liberated from history as “Hitler,” and becomes a construct
of Riefenstahl’s film. However, this act of transcendence, Sontag ac-
knowledges, is troubling because “we” cannot so easily forget his-
tory, cannot forget the Holocaust.
The Riefenstahl passage came to haunt Sontag. And no won-
der, since her argument contradicts itself. She wants to have her art
and her history too, although history barely makes an appearance in
“On Style.” Content cannot, in the end, play a “purely formal role.”
Even though in her essay, “Against Interpretation,” Sontag quotes D.
H. Lawrence approvingly—“Never trust the teller, trust the tale”2—
the teller (Riefenstahl) becomes Sontag’s focus years later in “Fasci-
nating Fascism.” What is more, the later essay is included in Under
the Sign of Saturn, which features Sontag’s personal reactions to lit-
erary figures such as Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes. Biography
and history, the latent components of the Riefenstahl passage in “On
Style,” arouse Sontag’s ardour in “Fascinating Fascism.” Her argu-
 4 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

ment is simple and direct: if one does not understand that the jacket
copy of The Last of the Nuba (1974), a best-selling and widely
praised book of Riefenstahl’s photographs, elides the history of Nazi
Germany and Riefenstahl’s place in it, then it is not possible to take
the true measure of Riefenstahl and her work. Riefenstahl has calcu-
lated, Sontag surmises, on presenting an idealized image and narra-
tive of herself in order to promote the independence of her art.
The trouble begins with Sontag’s sardonic scrutiny of twelve
black-and-white photographs of Riefenstahl included in The Last of
the Nuba. All of them, Sontag argues, exhibit “an ideal presence, a
kind of imperishable beauty.” She then dismantles the fanciful,
euphemistic, jacket copy biography of Riefenstahl that refers to the
filmmaker’s involvement in “Germany’s blighted and momentous
1930s.” Most surprising is Sontag’s query, “Could the publisher have
let LR write the jacket copy herself?”3 An aficionado of “On Style”
might wonder what Sontag’s question has to do with Riefenstahl’s
art, and why such weight is given to jacket copy. Surely Sontag’s
speculation is unworthy of the author of “Against Interpretation.”
As a rule, Sontag did not write exposés. She disliked being
called a critic and preferred to write about her enthusiasms: “I was
filled with evangelical zeal,” she later said of her “Against Interpreta-
tion” period.4 So the animus apparent in “Fascinating Fascism” cre-
ated a stir among Sontag’s readers. Riefenstahl interpreted the essay
as a personal attack.5 And Sontag revelled in hunting down Riefen-
stahl the propagandist. To interviewer Charles Ruas, Sontag ex-
plained that “Fascinating Fascism” was “written most quickly . . .
because it is easier to write when you feel angry, self-righteous, and
you know you’re right.”6 In an interview with Amy Lippman, Sontag
added that “Fascinating Fascism” was written “with violence and in
high spirits.”7 It is as if in disparaging Riefenstahl, Sontag was reliev-
ing herself of a burden. Why the “high spirits,” the joy she usually
attained by indulging in praise, not blame?
For one aware of Sontag’s own biography, the parallels be-
tween her and Riefenstahl are rife.8 Early on, Sontag employed pho-
tography to portray “an ideal presence.” Peter Hujar and others shot
 “FASCINATING FASCISM” REVISITED 5

her like a film noir heroine, an avant garde dark lady, as critic Ben-
jamin DeMott remarked of her striking book jacket portraits.9 Later,
as Sontag aged, Annie Leibovitz continued this romantic tradition,
posing Sontag in a reclining posture for the jacket copy of The Vol-
cano Lover (1992) and then again for the thirtieth-anniversary paper-
back reprint of Against Interpretation, which featured a sixtyish
author barely wrinkled and seamed by age, her neck strategically
camouflaged with a high white collar, “a kind of imperishable
beauty” in a serene pose.
Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber tried to engage Sontag in a dis-
cussion of the nexus between her image and her writing:

A propos of this problem of authors on television, I would

like to ask you your feeling about the way in which modern
ideas are created or spread. That reminds me of a cartoon in
which a publisher said to a writer, “Well, we really like your
book but we’re not going to take it because you aren’t as
good looking as you need to be to defend it on television.”
As for yourself, I have a feeling that, when we read articles
about you, whether they’re written in the United States or in
France, finally what you say holds people’s attention, but
the fact that it’s accompanied by your personal looks and
not someone else’s counts in the impression that people get.
Isn’t that something that seems evident in your experience?

The wonder is that no interviewer had asked Sontag about this topic
before, but even more astounding was her answer: “I never think
about that. I can’t tell you really.” Never? “But people write it,” Ser-
van-Schreiber persisted. “Yes, but I don’t read what people write
about me.” Servan-Schreiber scoffed: “Really? Writers often say
that.” Sontag insisted, “No, it’s true.” Her effort at self-criticism was
not convincing: “I’m not boasting. It’s perhaps a little bit of coward-
ice on my part because it’s very embarrassing.”10 How could Sontag,
no less striking than the beautiful Leni Riefenstahl, not take her own
looks into account?
Does it matter that Sontag engaged in glamorous self-
promotion, or that she refused to acknowledge its impact? Only to the
 6 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

extent that it mattered for Riefenstahl as well. For Sontag argues in

“Fascinating Fascism” that Riefenstahl transformed herself into an
icon and apotheosized herself as an artist, so that her work has not
been merely acclaimed but revered. Only an understanding of biog-
raphy and history can situate Riefenstahl’s art in a reliable perspec-
tive, Sontag implies. Why else would Sontag write in “Fascinating
Fascism” that Triumph of the Will is a “film whose very conception
negates the possibility of the filmmaker’s having an aesthetic concep-
tion independent of propaganda.”11 This formulation undermines the
basis of Riefenstahl’s reputation; it is far more than the standard ac-
cusation that she lied about her affiliation with Nazis and Nazi ideol-
ogy. Sontag has struck at the heart of Riefenstahl’s conceit that she is
an artist.
At the same time, Sontag annihilates her own argument in “On
Style.” Hilton Kramer was perhaps the first critic to say so, although
he was mystified by Sontag’s unwillingness to acknowledge that she
had broken out of the “sealed chamber of ‘style.’”12 Kramer rightly
treated “Against Interpretation” as a widely influential text, and he
was therefore astonished that Sontag made no mention of recanting
that tome’s doctrine, and marvelled at her lack of self-awareness. The
same can be said of Riefenstahl, of course: She was not self-
reflective. While it may seem obvious that Riefenstahl was a liar,13 it
is perhaps more important to see her in terms of her own self-
identification. She is like other artists—Lillian Hellman comes to
mind—who are compelled to create a mythology of the self.14 While
it is impossible to determine whether such figures know they are ly-
ing, it is possible to demonstrate that they are invested so heavily in a
legend of their own making that telling lies becomes a behaviour they
seem unable to examine. Such was the case with Sontag, who often
told a fairytale version of how her first novel was accepted: a naïve
young writer walked into the offices of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and
simply dropped off her manuscript for the fiction editor, who later
called and offered her a contract. The rest is—shall we say?—history.
But both that editor, Robert Giroux, and publisher Roger Straus pro-
vided accounts that contradicted her fable, and described her savvy
 “FASCINATING FASCISM” REVISITED 7

careerism—another characteristic she shared with Riefenstahl. The

Giroux/Straus testimony did not inhibit Sontag from repeating her
tale15 any more than refutations of Riefenstahl’s stories prevented her
from continuing to insist on their veracity. Steven Bach’s description
of Riefenstahl applies as well to Sontag: Both confected “a romantic
image of instant stardom and spontaneous self-generation.”16
It is not unusual for mythomanes—to borrow a term from Re-
becca West, a mythomane herself—to be adept at disclosing the leg-
ends of others. Thus Sontag in good conscience set about exposing
Riefenstahl. That Sontag was calling on her own understanding of
self-mythologizing may seem apparent to others, but it may not have
occurred to Sontag. To presume otherwise is to suppose (in the ab-
sence of evidence) that Sontag saw herself as a fraud or poseur. Even
though her attempt to thwart serious inquiry into her own life story
might be deemed a cover-up, it is more likely that, to Sontag, the ef-
forts of her biographers represented a project so far removed from her
own sense of herself as to be nugatory.17
Yet in “Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag in effect functions as
Riefenstahl’s hectoring biographer, confidently disputing nearly
every detail of Riefenstahl’s self-exculpatory story. So certain is Son-
tag that Riefenstahl cannot tell any truths that Sontag recklessly
scorns Riefenstahl’s claim that Joseph Goebbels, who was in charge
of Nazi film production, hated her and attempted to hinder her work.
Yet Stephen Bach and Jürgen Trimborn—two of Riefenstahl’s best
biographers—take a more cautious approach, realizing that myth and
fact are not opposites but rather stand in an ambiguous tension. Bach,
for example, suggests that conflicts between Goebbels and Riefen-
stahl developed over their views of art and propaganda: “What he
viewed with matter-of-fact cynicism as expedient, she wanted seen as
Art.”18 Similarly, Trimborn suggests that Goebbels did not under-
stand the “propagandistic significance of Riefenstahl’s films.”19 Both
Trimborn and Bach also suggest that Goebbels became enraged when
Riefenstahl successfully appealed to Hitler to end Goebbels’s inter-
ference with her filmmaking methods.20 That earlier biographers also
 8 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

credited some of Riefenstahl’s statements about Goebbels, becomes,

for Sontag, only an example of their gullibility.
Unused to the rigor and discipline of biography, Sontag cannot
countenance new evidence, such as fuller versions of Goebbels’s dia-
ries that reveal his conflicts with Riefenstahl. Thus she allows her
suspicions to dominate her demolition of Riefenstahl’s career, fasten-
ing on the interview that Riefenstahl gave Cahiers du Cinema in Sep-
tember 1965. Sontag pillories Riefenstahl for denying that her films
were propaganda on the grounds that no scenes were staged and there
is no commentary telling the viewer what to think. Sontag is right, of
course, because, in her words, the film begins with a written prologue
presenting Hitler and the Nazis as the “redemptive culmination of
German history,” a message which is reinforced by the film’s cine-
matic structure. But Riefenstahl is also making a distinction between
her work and newsreels and other conventional, voice-over documen-
taries—and critics do not dispute that the form of a Riefenstahl film
departs from traditional documentaries.
Since Sontag is only concerned with revealing Riefenstahl’s
prevarications, she does not—as a biographer must—consider the
form and circumstances of Riefenstahl’s apologia. In other words,
Riefenstahl’s desire may well be to obfuscate her Nazi connections,
but she is also defending her art in a particular forum—the interview
format—that has to be assessed with care. Printed interviews are
rarely what they seem: a spontaneous question and answer session.
Interviews are almost never between equals, and they rarely reflect
the full record of what transpired between interviewer and subject.
For a Riefenstahl or a Sontag to submit to an interview, certain
ground rules and vetting are in order. The interviewer knows that he
or she has been granted a privilege and thus questions have to be tact-
fully phrased, especially when the subject is known to be difficult or
formidable—to use the words journalists most often invoke when de-
scribing their efforts to question a mythomane. A Riefenstahl or Son-
tag refuses to be questioned if she does not have at least some kind of
control over the interview. And even in the course of an interview, a
Riefenstahl or Sontag may walk out, threaten to do so, become unre-
 “FASCINATING FASCISM” REVISITED 9

sponsive to questions, or express outrage at the way questions are

posed—as Riefenstahl does repeatedly in Ray Muller’s revealing
film, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.21 Similarly,
when interviewer Paul Brennan asked Sontag about the way she had
managed her career in the literary marketplace, she bristled:

You always use these words that come from a realm of dis-
course that is so alien to me. I don’t manage myself. I don’t
think of myself as being in a market. These are the ways
people are talked about in the world of media and of con-
sumer survey. That is a language that doesn’t do anything
for me.

Brennan abruptly halted his line of questioning, feeling “accused”

and that he had “vulgarized the writer’s role.” Yet interviews—
Sontag’s could fill two or three good-sized volumes—are surely a
species of career management, and Sontag’s letters to her publisher
certainly reveal her career management skills.22
If, then, most interviews are self-serving and self-
aggrandizing—no matter whether the interviewee is Leni Riefenstahl
or Susan Sontag—very few will be real interrogations. So to discover
Riefenstahl misrepresenting herself and her work in an interview is
hardly surprising; indeed a biographer would expect as much because
the interview format itself is not conducive to exploring the truth.
How much outrage, then, is worth expressing about such an inher-
ently limited source of information? To a biographer, hardly any at
all, although of course the biographer has to correct the record. Son-
tag, however, casts herself in the heroic role of truth teller, castigat-
ing, for example, the lack of “informed dissent amid the large number
of tributes to Riefenstahl that have appeared in American and West-
ern European film magazines during the last few years.” That such
dissent has been lacking is true enough, but to the biographer, “Fas-
cinating Fascism” might appear as an exercise not only in reprehend-
ing Riefenstahl but also in burnishing Sontag.
 10 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

It might well be argued that “Fascinating Fascism” was not the place
for a Sontag discourse on parallels between herself and Riefenstahl.
Perhaps, but then there never seemed to be an occasion when Sontag
was willing to confront such issues. Her own argument in Illness as
Metaphor would have seemed to open the door to a discussion of her
own sexuality in relation to the AIDS epidemic, or her own struggle
with cancer. Sontag only dealt with such issues obliquely in inter-
views, which, again, provided the perfect venue for addressing issues
that in her writing she refused to countenance. Virtually the only self-
reflexive passages in Sontag’s writing occur in her fiction—in a few
of the stories in I, etcetera, and in her novels The Volcano Lover and
In America, but even in these cases Sontag portrays herself as a char-
acter, not an “I” accounting for her life and career. Her unpublished
diaries may yield the kind of self-awareness absent from her other
work, but they would not alter the fact that she never attempted any
sort of introspection in her published essays.23
Even when Sontag concentrates in “Fascinating Fascism” on
issues central to “On Style,” her only concern is to denigrate Riefen-
stahl’s devotion to the idea of the beautiful. Still fixated on Riefen-
stahl in interview mode, Sontag quotes Riefenstahl’s answer to a
question about whether there is something “peculiarly German”
about a concern with form:

I can simply say that I feel spontaneously attracted by eve-

rything that is beautiful. Yes: beauty, harmony. And perhaps
this care for composition, this aspiration to form, is in effect
something very German. But I don’t know these things my-
self, exactly. It comes from the unconscious and not from
my knowledge.24

How can the reader of “Against Interpretation” not remember Son-

tag’s manifesto: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of
art.”25 Riefenstahl is saying, in effect, “I’m no interpreter. Judge me
 “FASCINATING FASCISM” REVISITED 11

by my art—its form and style.” But Sontag views this concern for
beauty and form as a ruse that has beguiled film critics, whom she
dismisses because she views them solely as instruments of Riefen-
stahl’s rehabilitation. Nevertheless, the beauty is there, Sontag con-
cedes. Indeed, she writes, unsuspecting readers leafing through The
Last of the Nuba “will probably see it as one more lament for vanish-
ing primitives,” whereas it is actually “an elegy for the soon-to-be-
extinguished beauty and mystic powers,” and is “continuous with her
Nazi work.”26 Notice how even in a phrase like “Nazi work,” Riefen-
stahl’s own contribution as an artist is expunged.
This worship of the primitive, beautiful body is a feature of
Nazi iconography that Sontag sees everywhere in Riefenstahl’s work,
beginning with her early career as an actress in mountain films,27 the
silent features celebrating nature and Riefenstahl’s exquisite physical
grace, and ending with her work as a photographer. Yet such worship
of the primitive is hardly a Nazi prerogative; it is endemic in the
Western idea of the pastoral—from Renaissance poetry to Nanook of
the North (1922) and beyond. Sontag herself penned a rather strident
primitivist, collectivist piece, “The Third World of Women” in Parti-
san Review in the spring of 1973, advocating, for example, the aboli-
tion of washing machines for individual families. Then, too, there is
her admiration for the primitive North Vietnamese in her pastoral
hymn, Trip to Hanoi. So how is The Last of the Nuba that different,
really, from The Last of the Mohicans?
In “Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag finds primitivism disturbing
because in Riefenstahl’s films it leads inevitably to the mediating
figure, to the “worship of an irresistible leader” who inspires the “re-
birth of the body and of community.” But, like Riefenstahl, Sontag
extolled the maximum leader, ending her essay on Cuban poster art
with the exclamation, “Viva Fidel!”28 Both women heroized figures
like Hitler and Che Guevara, while at the same time flaunting their
independence from movements and trends, refusing to recognize their
own complicity with history. Sontag abstracts herself from “Fascinat-
ing Fascism,” as if “On Style” did not make its contribution to the
 12 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

wave of film criticism she despises, just as Riefenstahl exempts her-

self from the rise of fascism that she helped to promote.
The biographer cannot help but see his subject as implicated in
what she describes, so that “Fascinating Fascism,” which includes
passages excoriating the pernicious official art of the Soviet Union
and China, becomes Sontag’s way of forsaking her former naïve and
sentimental leftism. Her sleight-of-hand in “Fascinating Fascism”
works because Riefenstahl was a deserving target in 1975, ripe for a
revisionist strike after she had been pardoned, and then acclaimed, by
film critics and feminists who, ironically, took the sentiments of “On
Style” to heart and said, in essence, “the Nazi propaganda is there,
but that is not all that is there.”
It may be objected that Sontag’s politics were far more nu-
anced than this comparison of her with Riefenstahl allows. Others
might reply that Sontag’s politics were not nuanced but confused. At
any rate, inspection of certain sentences in “Fascinating Fascism”
yields evidence of a closed mind, determined to render an indictment:

Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl’s por-

trait of them evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ide-
ology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the
incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental,
the joyful and the critical.

But this same constellation of antinomies characterizes the pastoral.

What is more, is it so insignificant that the Nuba are black?29 Are
Riefenstahl’s loving close-ups in The Olympiad of the beautiful Jesse
Owens insignificant—merely a propaganda sop intended to deflect
charges of racism against her?30 Why does she, for example, show
him in the starting block, poised for action, the embodiment of a Hel-
lenistic athlete—his thigh muscles bulging with energy about to be
released? Isn’t there a Riefenstahl aesthetic that exists apart from the
crude phraseology of “Nazi work”? Sontag observes in “On Style”
that Riefenstahl’s films are “unique among the work of Nazi artists.”
Isn’t that because there is more to Riefenstahl than Nazi ideology?31
 “FASCINATING FASCISM” REVISITED 13

Sontag concedes that Riefenstahl’s depiction of the Nuba is

part of the Noble Savage tradition, but claims that that tradition is
Nazified in Riefenstahl’s emphasis on a culture that wrestles for
dominance, the “victory of the stronger man over the weaker.” Even
this survival of the fittest mentality, however, can hardly be attributed
only to fascist aesthetics. Sontag deplores a worldview that regards
“success in fighting” as (she is quoting Riefenstahl) “the main aspira-
tion of a man’s life,”32 but hasn’t this been the case for much of
world history? Sontag might as well haul a writer like Norman Mailer
into her essay and suggest that machismo and fascism do not merely
share certain values but are identical.33
Rather than confronting the troubling aspects of her own ar-
guments about form and content, Sontag engages in the optometrist’s
art: overcorrection. Having nearly excommunicated history and
moral judgments in “On Style,” she does not merely restore them to a
rightful place in “Fascinating Fascism” but goes on to reduce art to
their parameters. The compounded ironies of “Fascinating Fascism”
therefore reach a kind of perverse climax when Sontag quotes Goeb-
bels’s speech attacking and outlawing art criticism because it elevates
intellect, “head over heart” and “intellect over feeling.”34 Sontag ar-
gues that Riefenstahl’s obsession with the Nuba derives from the
Goebbels/Nazi aesthetic. But in the quotation Sontag cites, Goebbels
sounds as though he has just read “Against Interpretation” and “On
Style.” Art critics like Hilton Kramer, in fact, have suggested that
those essays promote feeling over intellect in such a way as to negate
artistic standards and the role of the mind and morality in assess-
ments of art.
Sounding like the critics of “On Style,” Sontag arraigns
Riefenstahl’s films as exemplary of a fascist aesthetic that promul-
gates surrender, mindlessness, and the glamorization of death.
Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation is reprehensible, Sontag suggests, pre-
cisely because her work is of a piece with totalitarian art and with
contemporary regimes in which the “will is staged publicly, in the
drama of the leader and the chorus.” Sontag has to admit, however,
that these generalizations cannot subsume Riefenstahl, whose promo-
 14 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

tion of the beautiful is never “witless, as it is in other Nazi visual art.

She appreciates a range of bodily types—in matters of beauty she is
not racist.”35 In matters of beauty? But surely Riefenstahl’s idea of
beauty is inseparable from everything else that makes her films
works of art. Isn’t that exactly what the author of “On Style” would
have us believe? Absent from “Fascinating Fascism” are words like
“genius,” “grace,” and “intelligence”—a vocabulary used in “On
Style”—and their absence suggests that there are dimensions of
Riefenstahl that are not disclosed in “Fascinating Fascism.”
Instead, Sontag is concerned that Riefenstahl is benefiting
from a revival of reactionary attitudes toward art. Isn’t this the con-
cern of the cultural historian? What does all this palaver about con-
temporary trends ultimately have to say about Riefenstahl’s art?
Curiously, Sontag affirms that Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad
may be the two greatest documentaries ever made, “but they are not
really important in the history of cinema as an art form.”36 Sontag
claims that Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), the renowned and innovative
Soviet filmmaker, is more important. Is this true?37 And what can it
mean when Sontag immediately adds that Vertov never made a film
as “purely effective and thrilling” as Riefenstahl’s two masterpieces?
Sontag’s transitions from one argument to another begin to
falter, suggesting an uncertainty that half-acknowledges Riefenstahl’s
distinctiveness and half-submerses her in the contemporary revival of
fascist aesthetics. Audiences like Riefenstahl, Sontag supposes, be-
cause in the 1970s the desire for an exalted sense of community and
an absolute leader jibe with the leader/community choreography of
Triumph of the Will: “A fair number of young people now prostrating
themselves before gurus and submitting to the most grotesquely auto-
cratic discipline are former anti-authoritarians and anti-elitists of the
1960s.”38 What a burden this Sontag sociology places on Riefen-
stahl’s films, which take their place in history but at the expense of
her art.
In Sontag’s conclusion, quantity has transformed quality.
What was once acceptable as a minority taste (hers) that appreciated
the aesthetic dimensions of Riefenstahl’s films is just too dangerous
 “FASCINATING FASCISM” REVISITED 15

to be trusted in the hands of the masses. To see Riefenstahl as an art-

ist is now (in 1975) a dangerous proposition. But if Sontag is right in
“Fascinating Fascism,” then what is one supposed to say about art, or
about the continuing relevance of “On Style?”
The question looms over part two of “Fascinating Fascism,”
which is mainly a report on the contemporary fascination with Nazi
regalia, especially SS uniforms and accessories. Sontag wants to hold
Riefenstahl hostage to these phenomena, which is rather like holding
Sontag hostage to “On Style,” as perhaps this essay seems to do. But
the point is not simply to show that she contradicted herself, or that
“On Style” approached the subject of art in an inadequate fashion,
but rather to ask why Sontag did not deal with her own contradictions
instead of simply foisting them onto Riefenstahl? Even worse is the
suspicion that Sontag’s reading of Riefenstahl may, in part, be a mat-
ter of projection. As Audrey Salkeld concludes,

In fact, the demeaning of the Nuba—in the way Sontag sug-

gests Riefenstahl achieves—could as easily lie solely in
Sontag’s interpretations of these images. Associations con-
cerning Riefenstahl in her mind could intrude into her rela-
tionship with the pictures.39

Indeed, Salkeld suggests that it is Sontag’s reading of Riefenstahl that

is demeaning to the Nuba. When Sontag looks at the Nuba pictures,
she sees not the pictures per se, but rather her idea of what Riefen-
stahl sees.

Of course, “Fascinating Fascism” was not Sontag’s last word on

Riefenstahl. But her choice of the interview format to carry on her
argument reflects the dodges inherent in a form of communication
that Sontag, like Riefenstahl, was adept at manipulating. First up was
the Salmagundi interview (Winter 1975/76) conducted by close
friends, Robert Boyers and Maxine Bernstein. Boyers began with a
 16 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

fulsome tribute, saying he came of age reading Sontag’s essays,

which were literary events for “those of us who went through those
years, awaiting expectantly your new work.”40 This is exactly the
kind of drum roll Kevin Brownlow and other film critics supplied for
Riefenstahl and that Sontag scorned. In effect, such interviews an-
nounce, “The platform is yours.”
Boyers quoted the Riefenstahl passage from “On Style” and
suggested that “Fascinating Fascism” was a “change of large dimen-
sions in your approach to criticism.” This was a tactful way of asking
Sontag why the later essay, in effect, repudiated the earlier one. But
he softened the way for her by adding, “Or do you see a continuity
between these two essays which you could perhaps clarify here?”41
Now part of a duet, Sontag answered:

A continuity, to be sure, in that both statements illustrate the

richness of the form-content distinction, as long as one is
careful always to use it against itself. My point in 1965 was
about the formal implications of content, while the recent
essay examines the content implicit in certain ideas of
form.42

How neat! But this is argument by deflection. Content and form have
now become so elastic that they can be turned inside out. Critics have
noted Sontag’s tendency to have her cake and eat it too. What trou-
bles them about her reformulations is that they always accrue to her
benefit. “On Style” is “correct—as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go
very far,” Sontag added. “I would still argue that a work of art, qua
work of art, cannot advocate anything. But since no work of art is in
fact only a work of art, it’s often more complicated than that.”43 Here
Susan Sontag’s argument sounds like a tautology looking for an es-
cape clause.
A year later in a Performing Arts Journal interview Sontag
notes, “It seemed to me all too easy to say that Riefenstahl’s work is
beautiful. The question is: What kind of beauty? In the service of
what ideas, what forms of consciousness, what emotions?”44 But this
is precisely the set of questions absent from “On Style.” The PAJ in-
 “FASCINATING FASCISM” REVISITED 17

terviewer then suggested that “Against Interpretation” advocated a

way of looking at art that was radically different from that suggested
by “Fascinating Fascism.” Sontag disagreed, calling “Fascinating
Fascism” a “polemic against one reductive way of accounting for art,
much more common a decade ago.”45 But “Against Interpretation”
was a manifesto, an annunciation of core principles, not merely a re-
sponse to the zeitgeist. Like Riefenstahl, who never gave ground in
interviews, Sontag implied she was misunderstood.
Fritz Raddatz, one of the few interviewers to challenge Son-
tag, would ask next whether, in the “final analysis,” all her work is
“meant to be political?” Sontag gave an elusive, lofty response:

I think it is more complicated. So little do I have literary or

other models, so little can I imagine narrow, specific goals.
Of course, I talk with people, take on their problems, and
people force me to think about my own work. But I couldn’t
say that I have a precise notion of my work. I probably fol-
low more my own direct interests.46

Raddatz’s abrupt, cut-to-the-bone response—“A somewhat private,

not to say narcissistic, answer”—elicited this testy riposte:

Not at all. But I do want to tell you, quite frankly, it’s get-
ting a bit boring for me to define my position and my goals.
To the work of the writer there also belongs quite a goodly
amount of innocence, of undefinability. Certainly strong ac-
tivity is an assumption, but I cannot find it narcissistic if I
don’t serve some sort of creed, an ideology or even a politi-
cal movement.47

Recourse to the artist’s innocence is a classic Riefenstahl ploy—as is

the proclamation of the artist’s autonomy.
Finally, Roger Copeland, ever the helpful interviewer, men-
tioned Hilton Kramer’s criticism of “Fascinating Fascism” and of-
fered that “I don’t think you ever pitted the aesthetic and the ethical
against one another.”48 Of course not, Sontag replied, scoring a
knockdown of a straw man argument. In fact, “On Style” provides
very little opportunity to raise the ethical issues Kramer thinks are
 18 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

important—the very issues Sontag canvasses in “Fascinating Fas-

cism.”

Sontag provided her final word on “On Style” in the thirtieth anniver-
sary edition of Against Interpretation, ranking it with “Notes on
‘Camp,’” as one of the essays she liked “quite a lot.” Her retrospec-
tive has a Riefenstahl-like sense of wonder at how her work had been
received, expressing her surprise that “people found what I said was
‘new’ (it wasn’t so new to me), that I was thought to be in the van-
guard of sensibility and, from the appearance of my very first essays,
regarded as a taste maker.”49 But that was why Roger Straus advised
her to publish “Against Interpretation,” and why she came to New
York: to be perceived as part of the vanguard. Indeed, she says as
much in this piece. Yet she also claims, “I didn’t set out to write so
many manifestos.” Her work, however, is calculated to shock—as
she obliquely acknowledges by mentioning her “irrepressible taste
for aphoristic statement.”50 A self-confessed devotee of Oscar Wilde,
she knew quite well that phrases like an “erotics of art” would excite
controversy.
Sontag’s thirtieth anniversary reminiscence remains recalci-
trant, refusing to analyze her intentions or to gauge her impact on
readers. Indeed, she eschews any awareness of what that impact
might be, much as Riefenstahl rejected the efforts of countless inter-
viewers to reckon with the implications and consequences of her
work. It is the mission of “Fascinating Fascism” to remove Riefen-
stahl from the nimbus of her own self-regard and wrench her back
into history. Even though many of Sontag’s arguments are tenden-
tious, “Fascinating Fascism” challenges readers to consider the full
context in which works of art are created and received. It is regretta-
ble that what Sontag did for Riefenstahl, the artist, she could not do
for herself.
 “FASCINATING FASCISM” REVISITED 19

Notes
1
Susan Sontag, “On Style,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New
York: Picador, 2001), 25-26. This paperback is a reprint of the 1966 edition
with a new afterword.
2
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other
Essays, 9.
3
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), 75.
4
“Afterword: Thirty Years Later,” Against Interpretation, 308. See also Son-
tag’s remarks to Charles Ruas in Leland Poague, ed., Conversations with Su-
san Sontag (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 176: “I would
much rather write about things that I like rather than things I don’t like. That’s
why I’m not a critic.” See also p. 185.
5
See Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York:
Knopf, 2007), 271: “‘In our many conversations,’ Kurt Kreuger remembered,
‘I do not recall Leni to have been hateful toward anyone, even Hitler, except
Susan Sontag.’” See also Leni Riefenstahl, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 623, 625.
6
Susan Sontag, Conversations with Susan Sontag, 176.
7
Ibid., 201.
8
See Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 167-68
9
Rollyson and Paddock, Susan Sontag, 96-97.
10
Susan Sontag, Conversations with Susan Sontag, 148-49.
11
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 79.
12
“The Evolution of Susan Sontag,” The New York Times Book Review, 9 Febru-
ary 1975, 101-02.
13
See, for example, two recent biographies that carefully document Riefenstahl’s
lies: Steven Bach, Leni; and Jürgen Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life (New
York: Faber and Faber, 2007), first published in Germany as Riefenstahl: Eine
deutsche Karriere (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2002).
14
See, for example, the first chapter, “A Legend in Her Own Time,” of Carl Rol-
lyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Life and Legend (New York: iUniverse, 2008), the
revised edition of Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
15
Rollyson and Paddock, Susan Sontag, 59-60. See also Carl Rollyson, “Susan
Sontag: Sui Generis,” in Carl Rollyson, Female Icons (New York: iUniverse,
2005), 131-34.
16
Steven Bach, Leni, 4.
 20 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

17
On Sontag’s view of biography, see Conversations with Susan Sontag, 232-33,
and Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, “Susan Sontag: The Making of a Biogra-
phy,” in Rollyson, Female Icons, 94-127.
18
Steven Bach, Leni, 105.
19
Jürgen Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl, 86.
20
Compare Steven Bach, Leni, 105, with Jürgen Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl, 82-
86, 141-43.
21
Muller’s stroke of genius was to gain Riefenstahl’s consent to his proposal to
have a video crew film the process of making the documentary with her, thus
capturing scenes in which she attempts to manipulate the director into shooting
the film her way.
22
See Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, The Making of an Icon, 205 for the Bren-
nan interview. The biography also quotes and comments on Sontag’s corres-
pondence with Roger Straus.
23
The first volume of Sontag’s journals has now been published. Susan Sontag,
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963. ed. David Rieff (New York: Far-
rar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). The first volume does not provide any insight in-
to Sontag’s view of her own career in relation to Riefenstahl’s. For a review of
these journals, see Carl Rollyson, “Like Mother, Like Son,” Advocate.com, 21
May 2009, http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid85184.asp
24
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 85.
25
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 14.
26
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 86.
27
Glenn B. Infield, Leni Riefenstahl: The Fallen Film Goddess (New York: Cro-
well, 1976), 23: “Siegfried Kracauer, an author on the German cinema and the
social and economic structures of the German middle classes, believed that the
heroism depicted in the mountain films was ‘rooted in a mentality kindred to
the Nazi spirit.’” Sontag relies heavily on Kracauer’s thesis, although as Infield
notes, other authorities on the Weimar period, such as Walter Laqueur, reject
the films as examples of proto-fascism.
28
See Sontag’s introduction to Dugald Stermer, The Art of Revolution (New
York: McGraw Hill, 1970).
29
Audrey Salkeld, A Portrait of Leni Riefenstahl (London: Pimlico, 1997), 252-53
reports, “The Sudanese government . . . was delighted with the sensitive por-
trayal she [Riefenstahl] always gave its people and had grown increasingly ac-
commodating of her travel requirements. In 1975, President Nimeiri granted
her Sudanese citizenship in recognition for her services to the country, telling
her she was the first foreigner to receive such an honour. The following year
he presented her with a special medal in appreciation of her books and her love
for the country.”
 “FASCINATING FASCISM” REVISITED 21

30
See Jürgen Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl, 276-77: “And Annie Leibovitz, long-
time companion of the Riefenstahl critic Susan Sontag, quoted the director un-
reservedly when invited by the Committee for the Olympic Games in Atlanta,
Georgia. Many of the black-and-white photographs of athletes in her Olympic
Portraits look like stills from Riefenstahl’s Olympia film of 1936.”
31
It is surprising that Sontag, an aficionado of the dance, makes so little of Rie-
fenstahl’s dance aesthetic. Dance was Riefenstahl’s first love, and the shots of
her dancing with Nuba in Muller’s film express a love of graceful movement
having nothing whatsoever to do with fascist aesthetics. See Audrey Salkeld, A
Portrait, 263-64. More than any other Riefenstahl biographer, Salkeld attacks
the fundamental orientation of “Fascinating Fascism”: “How much more sym-
pathetic—and perceptive—is the realization by Thomas Elsaesser (in Sight and
Sound, February 1993) that it is not innate fascism but her ‘dance-view’ of life
which informs Leni Riefenstahl’s preoccupation with the human form, leading
her to ‘instrumentalize the body’. According to Elsaesser, ‘a consistent line
runs through her life which seems to focus on the body as total expressive
fact.’”
32
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 89. Audrey Salkeld notes: “Other artists
have taken similar photographs of the Nuba before and since. George Rodger
who inspired Riefenstahl took his wrestling photographs in 1948 and 1949
and, with his different pedigree, they were considered high points of his career.
Nobody interpreted them as in any way fascistic.” Audrey Salkeld, A Portrait,
262
33
At one time Sontag disliked bootlegging moral outrage into assessments of
works of art. Thus she argues that is it not appropriate to make a “moral re-
sponse to something in a work of art in the same sense that we do to an act in
real life. I would undoubtedly be indignant if someone I knew murdered his
wife and got away with it (psychologically, legally), but I can hardly become
indignant, as many critics seem to be, when the hero of Norman Mailer’s An
American Dream murders his wife and goes unpunished.” “On Style,” 23.
34
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 88
35
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 92-3.
36
Ibid., 95.
37
Even if Sontag was right in 1975 about Riefenstahl’s lack of importance, sub-
sequent history has made her comment supererogatory. Steven Bach, Leni,
298, notes Riefenstahl’s impact not only on the films of the Disney Corpora-
tion and of George Lucas but also on magazine layouts, billboards, and repre-
sentations of media politics. Jürgen Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl, 276, cites the
films of Steven Spielberg and Michael Jackson videos. Perhaps, though, Son-
tag has in mind only the circle of avant garde filmmakers she admired, since
she refers to her own film work in “Fascinating Fascism.” Her point would still
 22 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

seem moot, however, since her own reputation as a filmmaker is very slight,
and she cites no other evidence for her discounting of Riefenstahl’s influence.
38
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 96-7.
39
A terse Rainer Rother, whose work Bach and Trimborn rely on heavily, com-
ments that “Fascinating Fascism” “contained several errors and was based on a
contention that came to seem increasingly problematic.” Rainer Rother, Leni
Riefenstahl (New York: Continuum, 2002), 161. Rother’s work was first pub-
lished in German as Leni Riefenstahl: Die Verführung des Talents (Berlin:
Henschel, 2000).
40
Robert Boyers, Conversations with Susan Sontag, 57.
41
Ibid., 58-9.
42
Susan Sontag, Conversations with Susan Sontag, 59.
43
Ibid., 61.
44
Ibid, 84.
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid., 95.
47
Ibid.
48
Roger Copeland, Conversations with Susan Sontag, 190.
49
Susan Sontag, “Afterword” to thirtieth anniversary edition of Against Interpre-
tation, 309.
50
Ibid.