Omitted history

I am currently doing the HSC, and studying Modern History. As part of this course, everyone has to do a personality study. At my school, we're doing the wonderful horrible Leni Riefenstahl.

Before this year, I'd never heard of Leni. Turns out she's a really important person. She worked as a film director for the Nazi Party in the lead-up to World War Two, directing a very propaganda-y film called Triumph of the Will that glorifies all things Nazi, followed by a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

After the war, Leni was arrested and trialled on the grounds of being a Nazi, but was eventually acquitted. But she never worked as a director again. Ever since the end of the war, until her death in 2003 at the remarkable age of 101, she protested her innocence, stating that she only did what she did because she was passionate about film and her career, and had no real idea about the Nazi policies including the concentration camps. Considering her close relationship with Hitler, I'm not convinced, and neither are most of the historians studying her life.

But it begs some interesting questions - when investigating a person, can you take what they say about their life as truth? Are autobiographies reliable sources? (Is the HSC making me overthink things???)

For an assignment that I'm finishing off at the moment, our teacher pointed us to 'The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl', a three-hour epic documentary of her extraordinary life. The best part about it is that the old footage and recounts are spliced with candid interviews with Leni herself. When I heard this, I though 'bingo! I'm going to hear it exactly as it was!'. Alas, no. She lies, sometimes right out. If anything, the documentary has made me even more confused about what really happened, and what her real motives were.

But it has brought me one major epiphany: perhaps we find the truth about history in what isn't said. Maybe all we'll ever know about Leni is that she didn't want to tell the truth about why she worked for Hitler, and maybe that's enough - if she won't tell the truth, she's obviously got something to hide.