Leni Riefenstahl is the living, breathing refutation of the proposition that beauty and the good go hand in hand.
She was indisputably brilliant at creating gorgeous and effective images, both as a film maker and still photographer. But, as this article in the New York Times makes painfully clear, she had no more moral sense than a turnip (and quite possibly less).
"I don't understand," she said, articulate if shaky here in her light-filled home south of Munich in the Bavarian Alps, her clothes neat and her makeup careful. "I didn't do any harm to anyone. What have I ever done? I never intended any harm to anyone."
She insists that she was interested only in beauty. "I'm not interested in politics at all," she says. "Politics came to me. Other people wanted to put me into politics."
She was fascinated by Hitler, no question, she says, and wrote to him in 1932, asking to meet. "I didn't see a man, erotically attractive," she says. "I saw in him, and it's important, the person who was able to offer work to six million unemployed."
Riefenstahl is 100. She is also the poster girl for the fallacy of equating age and wisdom. This artist lives a long and productive life, and dreams of a peaceful death which she believes will come soon, while the regime she glorified brought the lives of millions to a cruel and premature end.
Beauty in the service of evil is a terrible sin.
An artist without a moral compass is potentially one of the most dangerous creatures on the planet. Art is serious business.
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