Brutalities cry for attention. Attention to the appalling causes disturbance. Deal with it. You’re at school to be disturbed.
By Todd Gitlin for Tablet Magazine
In college, I took a sociology-history course that included a segment on Nazi Germany. One day, we were ushered into an auditorium where we sat through Triumph of the Will, probably the greatest Nazi propaganda film ever made. Leni Riefenstahl’s diabolically inspired 1935 paean to Hitler and his Nazi gang of usual subjects is brilliantly shot and edited to hold viewers rapt with wave after wave of spectacles. For almost two hours, the reverent, obedient masses go through the requisite motions at Nuremberg on Party Day, forming vast human battalions, reverberating in a demonic call-and-response with their lionhearted idol. In most of Riefenstahl’s sequences, individual life melts into rituals of submission and the mass worship of power. Equally compelling, and therefore terrifying, were the interspersed images of radiant young blonds frolicking in the sunshine in a summer-camp atmosphere. Weirdly, I remember best, probably for its erotic implications, a sequence in which some young Germans drink, or wash, from the same water spigot. Taken a few at a time or en masse, the Nazis are enraptured by the opportunity to sink into the (to them) transcendent embrace of der Führer. If ever there was a celebration of “Strength through Joy,” this is it. The ideological fusion is complete: eternal life, eternal surrender, eternal mass murder in the making.
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