We were all collaborators too. We kashered Stalin, we kashered murder, we kashered murder and told ourselves such is the price to practice art in a place that murders art. But we died for our sins, and you live on in a free state: still only forty-five, apparently beautiful and prosperous, with only a matter of time before someone decides you're allowed to create films again. We, even the most powerful among us, were mere ministers serving at the pleasure of rulers with low intellect: you were film's Czar, its Kaiser. Short of Orson Welles there has not been a more powerful director on earth, and Hitler granted you that power no differently than he granted to Goering or your apparent beloved Goebbels.
Why couldn't you settle for something a little less? Was it because I told you to demand more? I wanted you to be the cinematic equivalent to Gentileschi or Mary Cassatt, even one of the greatest artists who served film like Michelangelo and Rembrandt served art. Why was that not enough? Why did you demand to be the Hitler of film? Why couldn't you have settled for an apprenticeship of a few masterly musicals and mountain pictures before you painted your masterpiece?
You must remember how you wanted to make a movie from his music, but you always hated Tchaikovsky: you routinely referred to him as 'sentimental Russian scheissemusik'
And you always hated when I hummed the aria from Onegin, you know which one. I can only guess why you hated it now, but it is still my favorite aria in all of opera just as Onegin is still my favorite book. I can read it now in the Russian everyone says is so much better: it is.
What does the day coming has in store for me?
It escapes my eyes, it is hidden!
Shall I fall to the deadly arrow, or will it pass by?
All for better, there is a pre-determined time
For life and for sleep
Blessed is a day of simple tasks
And blessed is the day of troubles.
Will the day beam shine in the morning
And the bright day shall reign
And I, well, will I, perhaps, will descent
Into mysterious darkness of my fatal tomb?
And the memory of a strange poet will fall into Abyss
The world shall forget me, but you, you, Olga!
Tell me, will you, the maiden of beauty, come to shed a tear
Over the early urn
And think "he loved me, he devoted to me
The gloomy dawn of a troubled life!"
Ah Olga, I did love you,
To you alone I devoted
The gloomy dawn of my troubled life
Yes Olga, I did love you!"
One day, this regime will end, and even if I am dead, a woman of your natural health will still be alive. I will make however many copies of this letter I must so that you can one day read it, and if not you, then our son: yes, I don't know if the NKVD or you sent me those pictures, but I know Bela Schoen lives and I hope the price of being Jew with a Nazi mother is not too steep for his soul.
But oh Leni, how I did love you in the wonderous dusk of an untroubled life I did not deserve. There were so many wonderous women, there are wonderous women still, but only one Leni Riefenstahl. Only one whose wonders are used to create and conquer worlds. You were not Hitler, and I do not hold you responsible as though you were, but you took the entire apparatus of a state to paint a film that used an entire empire as your canvas. I can't know why you did it, but I know you well enough to know your opportunity for artistic power without precedent superseded the value of any principle, any friendship, any love you felt for any human being who might disappear in smoke.
And Leni Riefenstahl, I ask you before Hashem and Hitler, did you ever shed a tear over the urns full of ashes you helped to burn?
No comments:
Post a Comment