Leni Riefenstahl's Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic

Abstract

n labeling a text or fascist, critics often restrict their criteria (to the extent these are articulated at all) to contentbased motifs such as the valorization of a Fiihrer or leader figure, the exaltation of nature, the glorification of the military and of death, or the negative portrayal of racial (especially Jewish) groups. Although these motifs clearly pervade National Socialist culture, one can question whether, on the one hand, they are present in all of Nazi culture, and whether, on the other hand, they are unique to that culture. Already in the thirties and forties Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin offered analyses of Nazi culture that went a step further by concentrating on structural as well as thematic tendencies of fascism. Both thinkers address Nazism's

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