The definitive biography of Leni Riefenstahl, the woman best known as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the twentieth century. It is the story of huge talent and huger ambition, one that probes the sometimes blurred borders dividing art and beauty from truth and humanity.

Two of Riefenstahl’s films, Olympia and Triumph of the Will , are universally regarded as the greatest and most innovative documentaries ever made, but they are also insidious glorifications of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, in this masterful new biography, Steven Bach reveals the truths and lies behind this gifted woman’s lifelong self-vindication as an apolitical artist who claimed she knew nothing of the Holocaust and denied her complicity with the criminal regime she both used and sanctified.

The facts and her actions, many unknown until now, bear chilling witness: her passionate enthusiasm for Hitler from her first reading of Mein Kampf ; her involvements with Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and Julius Streicher, who advanced her career, and with Hitler, who personally helped finance it; her role as silent eyewitness to wartime atrocities against Jews; and her use of slave labor in the form of concentration camp Gypsies destined for Auschwitz. We see her after the war trying to sell footage to Hollywood under an alias, manipulating a sham “discovery” of the Nuba tribes of Sudan into a career comeback, fighting to disinherit her closest living relatives, and—to the end—unable to express remorse for the millions murdered by the Nazi regime made mythic by her work.

Relying on new sources—including interviews with her colleagues and intimate friends, as well as on previously unknown recordings of Riefenstahl herself—Bach gives us an exceptional work of historical investigation that untangles the past and is also an objective but unsparing appraisal of a woman of spectacular gifts corrupted by ruthless personal ambition.

斯蒂文·巴赫（Steven Bach，1938-2009）曾任联美电影公司（United Artists）副总裁，著名传记作家，生前在哥伦比亚大学和本宁顿学院教授电影研究。他在联美电影公司时曾参与了《愤怒的公牛》、《曼哈顿》、《法国中尉的女人》和《天堂之门》等电影的制作。著有传记《玛琳·黛德丽：人生和传奇》（The Life and Legend of Marlene Dietrich）、《光彩夺目：莫斯·哈特的生涯和时代》（Dazzler：The Life and Times of Moss Hart）等。关于莱妮·瑞芬斯塔尔的这本传记在欧美影响巨大，被《纽约时报》评为2007年最值得关注的图书。