Triumph of the Still Bylined: Christina and Clemmie cry cancellation while Leni Riefenstahl gets reassessed
Nothing says 'cancelled' like a lavish spread in a Sunday paper
Paraphrasing the most enduring sage of our age — Dril — I offer up this correction to a piece in last weekend’s Times Saturday Review: Regarding the Nazi propaganda maker Leni Riefenstahl, you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to her’.
Lovely Leni collaborated with Hitler in the most literal sense; he was heavily involved in at least three of her films including Triumph of Will, a lavish love letter to the Nuremberg rallies and dedicated to, as Riefenstahl said in a contemporary interview, “the glorification of the Führer”, and Olympia, her record of the 1936 Olympics games in Berlin.
Riefenstahl’s international reputation was in ruin by November 1938, when news of Kristallnacht — the brutal organised destruction of Jewish businesses and mass arrest of more than 3,000 Jewish men who were sent to the concentration camps — became international news. She was touring the US to promote Olympia and was immediately asked to leave the country.
And yet, in 2021, The Times just put Riefenstahl on the front page of its Saturday Review section, using a photograph of her standing beside a young Mick Jagger and the headline Leni Riefenstahl: Hitler’s muse (and Jagger’s friend). Written by Nigel Farndale and pegged to his new novel about the film director, the piece opens with a truly eye-popping set of paragraphs:
In some ways Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl was the Margaret Thatcher of her day, a feminist trailblazer the feminist movement would rather forget. Arguably she was the greatest female film director of the 20th century — no less a film critic than The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael thought so — yet she picked the wrong side, even if she did always claim that she was only interested in art, not politics.
Although she was never a member of the Nazi Party and always denied being a propagandist, her films, especially Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) about the 1934 Nuremberg rally, nevertheless helped to create what became known as the “Hitler myth”, presenting the Nazi leader as a sort of Wagnerian demigod. And even though the Allies deemed her a “fellow traveller only” after interrogating her at the end of the war, she remained a controversial and ambivalent figure to the end of her long life, admired and reviled in like measure.
Just as cabinet photographs of Thatcher show her surrounded by men in suits, so Riefenstahl, in part the subject of my new novel The Dictator’s Muse, was always the only woman in the picture, surrounded by men in those sharp Hugo Boss uniforms. Although there were other prominent women in Hitler’s inner circle, such as Magda Goebbels and Winifred Wagner, she was the only one who came close to having any real power and influence.
Imagine being Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Champion or Claire Denis for example and hearing that the “greatest female film director of the 20th century” remains the one who benefited from the vast resources of the Nazi state and the patronage of one of histories greatest monsters.
Farndale leans on the authority of The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael who did indeed say that Riefenstahl was “one of the dozen or so creative geniuses who have ever worked in the film medium” but he might also have looked to the words of Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center:
Without the Riefenstahls of the world in the 1930s, the Shoah might not have happened. I would consider her an unindicted co-conspirator.
It is not surprising that The Times is so open to kindly features on Riefenstahl though. It was active in her rehabilitation while she was still alive. Reinvented in her sixties as a ‘respectable’ photographer in Africa, after publishing two books on the Nuba tribe, she was commissioned by The Sunday Times to photograph the 1972 Munich Olympics and again in 1974 to shoot a spread featuring Jagger and his then-wife Bianca.
Having Hitler as your muse — and really he was her muse, not the other way round — and collaborating with the Nazis on some of the most notorious propaganda ever created is not enough to be ‘cancelled’. Riefenstahl did a Kissinger and lived to 101 — the truly evil simply refuse to die young — and was shot by Helmut Newton for Vanity Fair on the occasion of her 90th birthday.
Susan Sontag nailed the process with which Riefenstahl was able to become ‘an icon’ — that combination of words that removes moral questions in favour of simply sticking around long enough — in Fascinating Fascism, her 1974 essay for The New York Review of Books. She writes:
The rehabilitation of proscribed figures in liberal societies does not happen with the sweeping bureaucratic finality of the Soviet Encyclopedia, each new edition of which brings forward some hitherto unmentionable figures and lowers an equal or greater number through the trap door of nonexistence. Our rehabilitations are smoother, more insinuative. It is not that Riefenstahl's Nazi past has suddenly become acceptable. It is simply that, with the turn of the cultural wheel, it no longer matters. Instead of dispensing a freeze-dried version of history from above, a liberal society settles such questions by waiting for cycles of taste to distill out the controversy.
And yet, we are told day in and day out that we are now living in a society where an unseen but all-powerful cancellation department can evaporate anyone — writers, actors, politicians, you name it — simply for the crime of saying they’re English… I mean, saying the wrong thing.
Despite there being no examples of famous people who are truly ‘cancelled’, beyond those actually jailed for sex crimes, our newspapers reverberate with the enervated cries of the ‘cancelled’.
The day after The Times published the barely-concealed Riefenstahl encomium, The Sunday Times dedicated a whole page to the war reporter Christina Lamb writing about her own brush with ‘cancellation’. It came with the headline Nothing could prepare me for the online war: Christina Lamb on being attacked by the trolls and was trailed with this dramatic intro:
One sentence was all it took. After social media took objection to her dispatch from the royal funeral, the foreign correspondent and her family have suffered a campaign of abuse, bullying and death threats.
In April, The Sunday Times sent Lamb to report on Prince Philip’s funeral and her frontpage report on the event included the line:
Prince Philip was the longest-serving royal consort in British history — an often crotchety figure, offending people with gaffes about slitty eyes, even if secretly we rather enjoyed them.
It appeared to dismiss racist comments as just part of an ongoing joke that ‘we’ enjoyed. There was an angry response, not least from the East And South East Asia Network (EASA) — a group of East Asian journalists and campaigners — which published an open letter and a petition calling for a retraction which reached 17,000 signatures in a matter of hours (the number now stands at almost 65,000). EASA wrote:
Portraying the national as a collective ‘we’ that ‘secretly’ enjoys racist and derogatory slurs at the expense of ethnic groups is insensitive at best, and encouraging racist violence at worst.
The Sunday Times and Lamb apologised. Now Lamb has returned to the story, writing a piece about the response she received — mixing together disgusting anonymous abuse with comments from named critics, including references to their businesses and the suggestion that legal action may be forthcoming.
Though she apologises again for the phrase she wrote — while still making excuses for it — Lamb places herself in a continuum of people she says have been trolled: From Nick Watt who was barracked and abused last week by a group of anti-lockdown protestors to Donald McNeil of the New York Times who resigned after saying the n-word to a group of students several times.
While there is never any excuse for sending anonymous abuse, targeting family members, or sending death threats, linking angry criticism of your words from named individuals with abuse from “trolls and bots” is a deliberate elision. And a full page in The Sunday Times where you get to name your critics and they are given no right to reply is a weapon.
Lamb anticipated this criticism and addresses it in her article:
My detractors will say I am trying to present myself as a victim. But I have spent my career highlighting abuse and just because I am a target, it would be pathetic to stop now. I have a platform and believe it’s right to speak out.
I am a woman in her mid-fifties with lots of support from family, friends and employers, and a well-established career. But what about teenage girls, perhaps just starting out in a new job, insecure about themselves? No wonder some are driven to self-harm or suicide.
Yes, I am sorry for what I wrote, I have learnt from this and will read my copy more closely in future. But if I get something wrong, does it mean I am a racist?
In the British media, saying that someone said something racist is often treated as a bigger issue than the racist words themselves.
On the day before Lamb’s claim of cancellation appeared, another journalist with a huge platform and a national newspaper byline suggested she too had been silenced. The Sun’s Clemmie Moodie had written in a previous column on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s baby daughter Lilibet:
Lilibet isn’t a Princess . . . but by maintaining their royal connection in such a blatant, contrived fashion, they have cunningly ensured that she will always be entitled.
Presumably, a Spotify baby playlist will follow. (No nursery rhymes though, because we all know Baa Baa Black Sheep is racist).
Moodie says she was just referring to an old story about schools rewriting the song because they considered it racist but plenty of readers saw a Sun writer seizing its well-used dog whistle and giving it a blast.
Like Lamb, Moodie raised the spectre of mental health in her response to the criticism and anger:
If, as a nation, we are to prevent a mental health epidemic, with crippling costs to the NHS from those needing post-cancellation after-care, cancel culture must itself be cancelled.
And if it’s not . . . well, if it keeps me away from the braying, stone-throwing left-wing mob, perhaps the prospect of being banished to the tower isn’t such a bad one after all.
Today — writing again in The Sun — she completes the ‘cancellation’ story cycle by talking about all the ‘sensible’ people who have rallied behind her:
It seems we’re all fearing imminent cancellation.
One household name, a daytime presenter, texted to say he was too terrified to go off-script in case the “worker bees scouring the media, who know exactly what to do to get us sacked” took offence. And, well, get him sacked.
Brilliantly though, I was also contacted on behalf of another wonderful children’s charity who said they’d “love” to work with me. Turns out Sun readers really are the voice of common sense.
No one is cancelling Lamb or Moodie and, unlike many people who fall into the sights of their respective newspapers, they have the tools, the connections, and the backup to argue back. Bolstered by national newspaper bylines they can pour hot oil on their critics, dubbing anyone who disagrees with what they say a “troll” and rolling up honest anger with opportunistic abuse.
I began today’s column with the words of one Twitter sage and I’ll end it with the wisdom of another. Journalists who used the pages of national newspapers to claim they are the hard-done-by, silenced ones embody this tweet:
… and they will never stop. They couldn’t be cancelled even if it were a thing.