I.

Susan Sontag is a writer worth quoting, and “Fascinating Fascism” is one of her most deliciously sententious essays; an exhortation to share in her disdain for the justifiably reviled figure of Leni Riefenstahl. But beneath the rich supply of aphorism and wit, excoriation and outrage, we find a treacly moralism and naïve disengagement with historical precedent that reverses her earlier praise and defence of the director. It says as much about Sontag’s sensibility as it does about the aesthetic choices of her adversary.

The published versions of that essay—its first appearance in the New York Review of Books in 1974 and its revised publication in Sontag’s 1980 collection, Under the Sign of Saturn—set out to eviscerate “the Führer’s favorite filmmaker” and thereby extinguish any vestigial hopes the auteur had of rehabilitating her image. In making Triumph of the Will, Sontag contended, Riefenstahl had exploited every existing cinematic technique to astonish the viewer, and even contrived some new ones at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. In return, she basked in the fortune of being Hitler’s chosen documentarian and advanced her fortunes with monstrous self-interest.

Ostensibly a double review of Riefenstahl’s lavish coffee-table book on the Nuba of Sudan and a niche collectors’ publication titled SS Regalia, “Fascinating Fascism” is actually an assault on the depths of Riefenstahl’s debt to Hitler and an admonition about the deviant sexual appetites Sontag believed were conjured by Triumph of the Will. As chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels held an unrivalled official position, but Riefenstahl had been personally anointed by Hitler, whose glories were also featured to elegant effect in the two-part documentary Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations and Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty (1938). Hitler’s rise was her rise. Then, when the war ended, Riefenstahl orchestrated a hide-saving campaign of revisionism and denial, furiously abjuring any suggestion of wrongdoing and repudiating the exclusivity of her access: a life story, Sontag decreed, “full of disquieting lies.”

“Fascinating Fascism” marked a shift in Sontag’s position as an aesthete, previously articulated to great acclaim in earlier essays like “Notes on Camp” in 1964 and “On Style” in 1965, both of which were published by Partisan Review, the organ of America’s liberal intelligentsia. Consisting of 58 points, “Notes on Camp” projected Sontag into the stratosphere by making intellectual fare of low culture. It offered ceremonial pronouncements on the victory of irony and style and made heretical pairings of the offensive and the alluring, old pieties and new pretensions, mysticism and sodomy. As Sontag’s biographer Benjamin Moser notes, the essay was an expression of admiration for other sexual and domestic possibilities and a life beyond bourgeois constraints. It also established Sontag as the supreme highbrow critic of low culture, putting precise language to an esoteric sensibility that had hitherto resisted articulation (even, it seems, to herself).

The following year, Sontag used “On Style” to proclaim herself a champion of Riefenstahl, a somewhat contrarian position premised on an evangelical belief in the ability of film—Riefenstahl’s film—to transcend its subject matter:

In art, “content” is, as it were, the pretext, the goal, the lure which engages consciousness in essentially formal processes of transformation. This is how we can, in good conscience, cherish works of art which, considered in terms of “content,” are morally objectionable to us. … To call Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too, which we reject at our loss. Because they project the complex movements of intelligence and grace and sensuousness, these two films of Riefenstahl (unique among works of Nazi artists) transcend the categories of propaganda or even reportage. And we find ourselves—to be sure, rather uncomfortably—seeing “Hitler” and not Hitler, the “1936 Olympics” and not the 1936 Olympics. Through Riefenstahl’s genius as a film-maker, the “content” has—let us even assume, against her intentions—come to play a purely formal role.

The scare quotes do a lot of heavy lifting in this passage: they are a marker of intellectual distance. Viewers of Riefenstahl’s work as cinema understand the aesthetic value of a celluloid Hitler, and they are a different breed to the zealous audience of devoted soldiers or eager Fraus within the films. And although Riefenstahl’s acclaimed and strenuous camerawork places the film’s viewer in a subordinate position to the Führer, Sontag believed the right viewers would recognise the manipulations despite their formal virtuosity. When watching Riefenstahl’s films, she advised, one must be a critic, not a moralist, “detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation and approval.”

This call for an aesthetics beyond morals and politics was nothing new. From Kant’s aesthetics through Oscar Wilde’s contention that there is “no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” a commitment to beauty and form wended through modernism and New Criticism until the 1960s. At which point, art became urgent and relevant and political and invested with moral responsibility. By invoking the aesthete’s defence of Triumph of the Will, Sontag aligned herself with an unfashionable tradition of elite 19th-century artists and critics who sought to protect their position against science and religion. Sontag was slow to state her own political proclivities. She remained tangled up in arguments about aesthetic experience and distrustful of ideology. And while she argued with her own positions, fellow cultural critics and artists broke with modernism and took a stand for civil rights.

“Fascinating Fascism” marked a sharp departure from Sontag’s earlier avowal that art was “beyond indignation and approval.” Art has consequences, she now decided, and Riefenstahl had a lot to apologise for. Triumph of the Will, she declared, is the “most successfully, most purely propagandistic film ever made.” But she remained fascinated by Riefenstahl herself. Although she claimed to have a “detached appreciation of Riefenstahl,” she detailed the iridescent beauty and athleticism of Riefenstahl’s earlier work as a star of German cinema. And although she was “anti-autobiographical,” Sontag often chose subjects she admired, envied, or both.

Sontag’s values were not terribly different from Riefenstahl’s: an unapologetic devotion to beauty and form, a commitment to superiority and a refusal to fail, doggedly pursuing accolades and basking in the gratification of rising in a male-dominated world—grandiose, unapologetic, and unlikeable. The two women pursued celebrity through connections to Andy Warhol. In 1964, Sontag visited Warhol at the Factory, where she sat for seven Screen Tests, posing with sunglasses, a dykey and louche icon on the rise. Behind the camera, Warhol reassured her: “You don’t have to do anything. Just what you are doing.” The Sontag of the Screen Tests was nothing like the iconic and inscrutable figure photographed by Peter Hujar and Diane Arbus. Briefly, she appeared self-possessed and present as a sexual being—an elegant poseur.

Ten years later, Leni Riefenstahl enjoyed her own Warhol moment. A spread in the pop artist’s own Interview magazine featured pictures of Riefenstahl taken by Bianca Jagger—reciprocation for a photoshoot the German auteur had conducted with Bianca and her husband, Mick, in an elaborate spread for the Sunday Times. Bianca’s Interview piece strains credulity with its presentation of a coy and reluctant Riefenstahl. “I want to say again because it is so important,” Bianca wrote, “that [Riefenstahl] doesn’t even care to talk about the political things that have battered her past. Maybe, because she has been so hurt. But more, I think, because she is an artist.” These fleeting moments as a Warhol muse indicated that the American intellectual and the German filmmaker had both crested into fame and become recognisable figures in the pop-culture constellation.

Along with these intersections, the beliefs of Sontag and Riefenstahl had long since been consolidated through vast differences in geography and circumstance. In 1945, as Riefenstahl was being de-Nazified, Sontag had her first exposure to the horror show of the death camps. Riefenstahl’s proceedings were overseen by the Allied forces, who forced her to look at photographic documentation of atrocities. In her memoirs, she recalls “emaciated figures lying on bunks, their gigantic eyes helplessly peering into the camera.” Years later, the images remained seared in her mind. On the other side of the world, a twelve-year-old Sontag was in a bookstore in Santa Monica, glimpsing photographic documentation of the Holocaust for the first time. “Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously.” Looking at versions of the same abject images, Sontag and Riefenstahl had a fleeting alignment: Sontag was shocked into lifelong engagement with the force of the photographic act, while Riefenstahl was obliged to acknowledge the shadow world of documentation from which her cinema had been a dazzling distraction.

II.

Sontag was by no means the first person to censure Riefenstahl. After all, the Nuremberg Trials had taken place three decades earlier and Riefenstahl had long since been classified a “fellow traveller” of Nazism. But Sontag was the first intellectual to condemn her in such a vigorous and surgical manner in a highly esteemed publication. Her subject felt the sting as intended. Some twenty years later, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir would include a brief but bitter rant about Sontag’s role in the campaign to disgrace her. By this time, Riefenstahl was 73 (though she would live three more decades), facing enormous debt, and trying to move on with her life: “Was I to be condemned until the end of my life to struggle for my livelihood, while I yearned more and more for peace and quiet? In this state of pain, weakness and depression I was on the very brink of putting my life to an end.” Sontag’s piece had devastated Riefenstahl, a friend reported. “I do not recall Leni to have been hateful towards anyone, even Hitler, except Susan Sontag.” 

“Fascinating Fascism” went through many drafts. Writing and rewriting across over a dozen versions, Sontag ultimately crafted a steely series of dramatic tableaux: “godlike Nuba”; the allegorical excesses of Riefenstahl’s early Alpine films; the exquisite geometry of Hitler’s sexed-up SS; and the blasphemous sexual theatre of the homosexual—all of which illustrated the moral compromise of fascist aesthetics. Among the many iterations of “Fascinating Fascism,” a prologue appeared in the fourth draft that she composed between the two printed versions of the essay. The many drafts—held in Sontag’s capacious archives at the Department of Special Collections at the Charles E. Young Research Library, at UCLA—reveal an obsessive and convulsive writing process. In the opening to the fourth draft, Sontag issued an ominous warning of imminent cultural crisis (the words in square brackets indicate Sontag’s revisions in pen):

There is a revolt in the dreams of the human mind. Something strange [distressing] is becoming clear [happening] at this moment in our culture, painful to contemplate [face up to], tricky to generalize about: some mighty heave and exhaustion of feeling, dark mutations of taste (taste is context) that are coming to make all [certain] judgements of taste appear problematic, dishonest—almost in bad taste. These mutations affect sexual feelings, moral pieties, political convictions. ... In the privacy of lives, bashful longings are less and less afraid to avow themselves. Mostly, though, it’s not yet in the open. These are delicate matters. One hesitates to violate the taboo. Hopeful [Good-hearted/Trustful] citizens and lovers may be disheartened; the cynical and complacent [and the philistine] may feel succored. Still, the taboo should be violated. Refusing to acknowledge [discuss in public some discouraging features of the evolution of modern sensibility] what might discourage us makes us even more vulnerable than we already are. 

Unlike the essay’s final (and oft-quoted) opening, the moral panic of this prologue hardly befits a cool intellectual reluctant to hand-wring over tawdry human urges—after all, she did suggest that pornography, viewed correctly, offers a version of personal transcendence. In this draft of “Fascinating Fascism,” however, Sontag warned of the lurking eagerness of “the philistine” to cast off sexual discretion, assert perversions, and turn private life inside out.

That she cut this opening entirely is no surprise; Sontag was an inveterate reviser of her own firmly stated convictions and this apocalyptic preaching was at once too cryptic and too revealing. Certainly, it said nothing about the threat of fascism in 1975 Manhattan and everything about Sontag’s fear of her own sexual shadow. While everyone around her was publicly rejecting prudery, Sontag remained starchy and reserved. Her sexual identity had always been a source of shame, and now she was living in the epicentre of a sexual-liberation boom. While gay men were cruising along the West Side Piers, Sontag was a few blocks away living a closeted life as far as the public and even many of her acquaintances were concerned. Dropping the original prelude to the essay excised the human drama in Sontag’s own aversions and attractions. 

The most well-known version of “Fascinating Fascism”—the NYRB article—begins with the bluntness of a tribunal’s opening statement. Here is Sontag’s opportunity to preside over a belated trial of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi aesthetics: “First Exhibit. Here is a book of 126 splendid color photographs by Leni Riefenstahl, certainly the most ravishing book of photographs published anywhere in recent years.” And like that, Sontag begins to prosecute her case in the court of highbrow public opinion. The impressive layout in Last of the Nuba is accompanied by jacket copy and “a lengthy text by Riefenstahl,” a choreographed marvel of amendments and misinformation: a jealous Goebbels had schemed against the beleaguered documentarian, throwing up obstacles at every turn; the party rally had not been staged for the camera (it was a documentary); and Riefenstahl had been a mere “acquaintance” of Nazi leadership. Sontag pulls apart this revisionism before conducting a full exegesis of the book’s magnificent images, which—for all their inversion of Aryan ideals—nonetheless expose Riefenstahl for what she always was: a “beauty freak.” 

In spite of Sontag’s deft conclusions about the book, notes scratched on the back of her rough drafts reveal a mind wrestling to interpret: “Nuba=it’s about a complete lack of complexity” and “Who is this book addressed to? People who feel alienated.” The same, of course, could equally have been said about Triumph of the Will. For all of the expiating contortions and the insidious messages Sontag deciphers in every last word and image of Riefenstahl’s book, The Last of the Nuba remains a photo essay clearly aimed at a European art market of voyeurs to an endangered civilisation—the colonial primitivism and exotic native scenes on offer in many “Dark Continent” travel books. Only, here they are photographed to spectral, spellbinding effect.

In the New York Times, two months before Sontag’s essay appeared, Eudora Welty awarded The Last of the Nuba a favourable review, summarising her breezy admiration for Riefenstahl’s enduring “convictions of romantic affinity” by saying, “she made timeless photographs.” Welty continued: “They give us fresh comprehension of man in, as might be, his original majesty and acceptance of life, in his vanity and courage, his beauty, vulnerability, pride.” To Sontag, Riefenstahl’s oeuvre—from the early Alpine films to her coffee-table offering on the Nuba of Kordofan—was all cut from the same cloth. She had spent a lifetime vaunting fascist aesthetics and pandering to reprehensible allegiances in the guise of cinema verité.

By the 1970s, Riefenstahl’s final push for redemption had been rewarded by some felicitous timing and a culture of subversive play. Having raged against her critics for so long, Riefenstahl found reprieve simply by living so long. “A liberal society settles such questions by waiting for cycles of taste to distill out the controversy,” Sontag remarks in “Fascinating Fascism.” Likewise, feminism opened doors for even morally dubious female artists, and feminists’ willingness to bypass squeamishness and count Riefenstahl as one of their own served her well. Riefenstahl, after all, presented an irresistible example (along with Agnes Varda and Shirley Clarke) of female cinematic excellence.

But Sontag wanted no part in this: “Part of the impetus behind Riefenstahl’s recent promotion to the status of a cultural monument surely owes to the fact that she is a woman. ... Feminists would feel a pang at having to sacrifice the one woman who made films that everyone acknowledges to be first-rate.” With auteur theory, feminism, and a mythologised energy that transformed her from Riefenstahl the person to “Riefenstahl” the cultural icon, she conjured enough public admiration to mingle with cineastes and scandal-proof celebrities. Her lifelong rejection of feminism did not matter. Feminism had conspired to make her one of their artistic exemplars, yet another myth with which Riefenstahl was happy to play along.

On Sontag

A new collection of essays from the mid-70s offers a frustrating glimpse of the author’s strengths and weaknesses.

QuilletteRiley Moore

III.

The second, much shorter part—or “Second Exhibit”—of “Fascinating Fascism” reviews a book titled SS Regalia by Jack Pia. A quick search for the book today finds it featured on the sort of military-history websites that host granular discussions of badges, ranks, headgear, sidearms, collar runes, and other paraphernalia. (One reviewer gives SS Regalia four stars and calls it “A collector geek’s wet dream.”) It is also available in the reading-room stacks of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.  

The pairing with The Last of the Nuba is initially disorienting, but Sontag soon makes her critical intentions clear:

Here is a book to be purchased at airport magazine stands and in “adult” bookstores, a relatively cheap paperback, not an expensive coffee-table item appealing to art lovers and bien-pensants like The Last of the Nuba. Yet both books share a certain community of moral origin, a root preoccupation: the same preoccupation at different stages of evolution—the ideas that animate The Last of the Nuba being less out of the moral closet than the cruder, more efficient idea that lies behind SS Regalia. Though SS Regalia is a respectable British-made compilation (with a three-page historical preface and notes in the back), one knows the appeal is not scholarly but sexual.

Thus unfolds Sontag’s course-reversal. Gone is the droll affection for camp pretension. Serving the modus operandi of a sinister regime, Gothic expression, costumes, theatricalisation—the mischievous calculations of queer artifice celebrated in “Notes on Camp”—are now treated with stern disapproval. What had once been eccentric and audacious is now ominous. SS Regalia presents chilling proof that punctilious war historians are not-so-covertly producing pornographic material. Denied a charitable camp alibi, SS Regalia is proof of a moral end of days. Its very cover, Sontag complains, broadcasts the book’s compromised integrity:

Across the large black swastika of an S.S. armband is a diagonal yellow stripe which reads ‘Over 100 Brilliant Four-Color Photographs Only $2.95,’ exactly as a sticker with the price on it used to be affixed—part tease, part deference to censorship—on the cover of pornographic magazines, over the model’s genitalia.

The book’s red, black, and white cover patently exploits the Third Reich’s striking graphics. Its peek-a-boo yellow price banner entices the knowing reader with a winky promise of erotic gratification. SS Regalia also allows Sontag to fulminate further about the moral flaccidity of those who fail to treat fascism with the correct mixture of discernment and disgust:

Art which evokes the themes of fascist aesthetic is popular now, and for most people it is probably no more than a variant of camp. ... The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context and the context has changed.

Taste was always of immediate concern to Sontag—it “has no system and no proof,” it is a sensibility. It is also thoroughly about class. And Sontag had the most carefully refined and calibrated taste in people, art, emotions, and even morality. The deviance of sexualising fascist aesthetics is low culture with high stakes. But the high/low divide she made a career of studiously flouting does not apply to the commoners, the unserious, and the ignorant. Are the instinct-driven masses unable to properly ironise these cultural convolutions or muster the required degree of self-awareness? This was Sontag at her most stiflingly moralistic and aristocratic.

Sontag’s assertion that ethical issues that are innocuous to the elite are of acute concern to the philistines recalls the psychological heritage of Gustave Le Bon. In The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895)—a book that influenced both Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)—Le Bon articulated a reactionary science of hierarchies, condemning “the collective mind” of the crowd as feminine, morally regressed, lacking discernment, and incapable of conscious control. This weaker-willed population appears in Sontag’s “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967), where she warns: “not everyone is in the same condition as knowers or potential knowers. Perhaps most people don’t need ‘a wider scale of experience.’ It may be that, without subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening of experience and consciousness is destructive for most people.” As “a knower” herself, Sontag could rely upon the necessary measure of moral discrimination in her encounters with art, high or low.

In the tradition of Le Bon, Sontag maintained that the effect of fascist aesthetics hinges on winning the rapture of a feminised crowd, impressing masses under the narcotic hold of the leader: “Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the feminine masses, as rape. (The expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy: the leader makes the crowd come.)” Fascism—as politics, as aesthetics, as kink—expunges the masculinity of its disciples, while its uniforms project force, discipline the body, and invest collective mythology in the individual (whose personhood becomes irrelevant). For all of its corrective reversals, “Fascinating Fascism” uses the force of the photograph to do the work of the quotation marks in “On Style.” Whereas seeing “Hitler” and not Hitler in Riefenstahl’s films allowed the viewer to be a cineaste and not a frothing ideologue, in “Fascinating Fascism,” mediation is what makes those gazing at Triumph of the Will or Nazi regalia unrepentant perverts. A uniform is the vestment of a shared project, while a “uniform” is dense with sexual meaning. 

As Sontag explains, SS uniforms hold a particular charge—slick, brazen, striking. The SA never stood a chance at electrifying followers: “[The S.A.] have gone down in history as beefy, squat, beerhall types; mere brownshirts,” Sontag jeers. Here, she recalls William Shirer’s epic 1960 study, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. “The brown-shirted S.A.,” Shirer explains, “never became more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, [Ernst] Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their particular jealousies, can.” These startlingly bigoted remarks from an esteemed historian and firsthand witness to the Nazi rise betray a facile alignment between homosexuality and Nazis that became a prevalent trope in movies like Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1971), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975)—films that Sontag would certainly have seen.

But by the mid-1970s, this conception of Nazism was already looking shopworn and outdated. With Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, Hannah Arendt had advanced the novel and somehow more morally troubling theory that many of Hitler’s supporters were desk bureaucrats more than sexual deviants or monsters. The perpetrators of the Nazis’ atrocities were not exceptional at all, Arendt argued, they were just obedient functionaries. Sontag was an admirer of Arendt—she spoke of Arendt’s formidable influence over her “intellectual formation” and described her as a “model of seriousness”—and yet she still embraced the notion that Hitler’s followers were aberrant and sexually depraved. In “Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag did not adopt a radical approach to criticising Riefenstahl, she was rehearsing ideas that were, by that time, widely dismissed as myopic and ahistorical.

As Sontag explains in the second half of “Fascinating Fascism,” fascist aesthetics offer a perilous sexual opportunity in the form of sadomasochism precisely because they have been popularised in “mass culture.” Somewhere between composing “The Pornographic Imagination”—her defence of pornography as a resource for mystical fulfilment in a post-religious culture—and “Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag had whetted her moral seriousness. Like Shirer, she asserted that homosexuals, in particular, are attracted to the trappings of Nazi kink. While “Sadomasochistic fantasies” may be the stuff of heterosexual desire, she pronounced, “it is among male homosexuals that the eroticizing of Nazism is most visible. S-m, not swinging, is the big sexual secret of the last few years.”

Worse still, practitioners of s-m are unabashed, adulterating their sexuality by transforming brutal oppression into erotic opportunity. Bored with the social contract, “as fucking and sucking come to seem merely nice,” homosexuals have no choice but to turn to sadomasochism for titillation. Sontag’s aversion to the exploitation of Nazi aesthetics for sexually gratifying ends echoes the concerns of postwar conservatives who discussed Nazism more as a moral crisis of sexuality than as an atrocity of antisemitism and industrial murder. That Nazi politics were massively repressive was certainly true, but any aetiology of homosexuality in Nazism is simply pernicious homophobia. Sontag’s decision to dwell on her suspicion that pleasure was being derived from misinterpretations—fantasies even—of sexually repressed Nazi perpetrators was a startlingly flippant, even reckless verdict, and an abrogation of her seriousness as an intellectual. 

As a “pugnacious aesthete,” Sontag pledged her attention to beauty and her firm belief in hierarchies and virtuosity. But these qualities that she shared with Riefenstahl were what she found most repulsive in the director. To Sontag’s horror, the fascist aesthetics that represent Riefenstahl’s victory over the ordinary had become acceptable—even titillating—to mass culture. Triumph of the Will had made the eroticisation of fascism pornography for the masses. To Sontag, Triumph of the Will is about ethics not just because it is about Nazism but because it’s about the sexualization of Nazism.

Sontag’s castigation of the moral principles of crowds is full of stereotypes straight out of George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941). Orwell condemned Left intellectuals for being disconnected from working-class sentiment, wilfully uninterested in understanding the appeal of uniforms, of spectacles, of the rhetoric of war—to their detriment. But, Orwell explained, patriotism works:

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a POSITIVE force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.

In Sontag’s effort to situate herself on the side of integrity and morality, she missed the chance to see what was plain to Riefenstahl. Triumph of the Will may demonstrate elaborate cinematic technique but it also shows continuous parades of goose-stepping men, drills, pageantry, women enjoying parades, speeches, flag processions, Hitler presiding over parades, handshaking, Sieg Heil saluting, and nocturnal flame-lit parades in a seemingly endless loop. Riefenstahl’s painstaking editing achieves a sense of constant movement, relentless and self-contained action. 

But the “fascist aesthetics” that Sontag pinpoints in these scenes of choreographed fervour precede Nazis. They have a long history as military aesthetics, stretching back to Homer—a device in epic narratives that intensified events, created suspense, and deepened the reader (or listener’s) emotional investment in the story. Riefenstahl’s notion of beauty is patently classical: strength, vitality, harmony, the perfect balance of the human form, Greek ideals of physical beauty. In short, fascist aesthetics were military aesthetics; they were epic poetry, and treating fascist aesthetics as iconography outside the arc of military history is historically naïve. But Sontag’s repudiation of this nationalist spectacle remains, to this day, a prevalent trope in the Left’s inability to understand the “tastes” of the populist New Right, simply dismissing its appetites and desires as trashy and stupid. Sontag was on the cusp of that transition between the high modernist defence of art for its own sake and a new era of hyper-politicisation and aggressive moralism in which we are still living.

IV.

When it appeared in the New York Review of Books, “Fascinating Fascism” caused an immediate stir. First came the praise. On 7 February, Martin Peretz, owner and editor of the New Republic, dashed off a letter to Sontag: “Your piece on Leni Riefenstahl was simply magnificent. It made my mouth water. This is a declaration of jealousy. Won’t you write for us?” Just as quickly, the backlash arrived. On 9 February, in the pages of the New York Times, the art critic Hilton Kramer took her to task for her volte face:

The result is one of the most important inquiries into the relation of esthetics to ideology we have had in many years, and the only really troubling aspect of its publication—so welcome in every other respect—is the author’s refusal to acknowledge her own contribution to a phenomenon she now vehemently deplores.

Sontag clapped back in a never-published response to Kramer, defending her right to modify her alleged “shameless aestheticism”:

I thought it enough for one essay to take on Riefenstahl, Nazism, the aesthetics of fascism, and the politics of sado-masochism without writing about myself. But if Mr. Kramer wants to have an explanation of how the same person could have written Tune [sic] in later this year for “Against Interpretation, revisited” ... or “Sontag’s mea culpa.”

And there were letters to the editor—lots of them. Only six days after the article appeared, Robert Silvers, Sontag’s benefactor and devoted editor at the NYRB, wrote to Sontag:

We’ve been getting piles of mail from the sub-world of fascist studies and I’m enclosing some of them. The one we felt should be published, particularly in view of the pain in the neck it will cause if we don’t publish it, is the one from Adrienne Rich which I’ve put on top. Please read through this if you can bear it and see if you can bring yourself to reply to this very grinding dogmatism, or so it seemed to me. None of the others seem worth publishing.

Film scholar David B. Hinton had fact-checked Sontag’s article and found it “marred with factual and historical errors” that were “so great that they call into question her critical conclusions.” Quotes were dubiously sourced, he alleged. Authors were misidentified. Sontag had the story all wrong: Riefenstahl had, Hinton insisted, struggled to make Triumph of the Will.

And so began Sontag’s exhausting project of defending “Fascinating Fascism.” Across five drafts, she composed an acerbic riposte to Hinton, fine-tuning the language, putting pressure on every word. She opened by reducing his niggling scrutiny to “professional zeal.” Though she addressed three errata concerning source material, she swiftly revisited the haziness of Riefenstahl’s biography. By relying on “Riefenstahl and her friends” (Hinton was writing a book titled The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, which came out in 1978), his conclusions were already tainted. Hinton, Sontag concluded, “refuses to acknowledge the difference between a fact and an idea.” Her reply consumed 2,500 words, and she concluded by describing Hinton as a mediocre scholar who relied on the same suite of “tactics” as all other Riefenstahl “apologists.”

Responding to the attack from the esteemed feminist poet Adrienne Rich was a more delicate matter. In 1975, Rich and Sontag were both enjoying huge creative and intellectual peaks. Both were also in relationships with women, but Rich had just divorced and was living openly as a lesbian. Her 1973 anthology of poems Diving into the Wreck had won a National Book Award and established her as a radical and intrepid feminist voice on all forms of oppression. Each was a luminary, receiving lavish praise and scooping up accolades in their respective fields. And here was Rich calling Sontag’s feminist bona fides into question.

“Fascinating Fascism,” wrote Rich in her long letter to the editor, overlooked the glaring “masculinist, virilist, patriarchal values” that underwrite fascist aesthetics. Sontag was a failure and a disappointment. She had neglected to elucidate the sinister alliance between “the phenomenon called fascism” and “patriarchal history, sexuality, pornography and power.” Thus, Sontag enacted the same ideological dissociations perpetrated by fascism. Rich concluded: “One is simply eager to see this woman’s mind working out of a deeper complexity, informed by emotional grounding; and this has not yet proven to be the case.” And with that, Rich brought the force of the era’s political reality to bear on Sontag’s aesthetic view of the world.

Sontag’s rejoinder ran through several drafts, but in the end, like her reply to Hinton, it was critically tepid. Rather than acknowledging her vacillations, she was flustered and defensive and too headstrong to admit that she had changed her mind. She did not want to be restricted by demands for coherence from Rich or anyone else. Annotations show Sontag trying out a diplomatic and unperturbed response: “I am pleased that this essay has interested many people, but I am startled by the reproaches I have been getting for not including in it an explanation of the evolution of my own attitudes.” Clenched and alert, one of the many unpublished versions of the letter strains the limits of nonchalance: 

A quick answer to the puzzle Adrienne Rich has concocted in her flattering, censorious letter: “how the same mind produced this brilliant essay and the equally brilliant essay which appeared a year or two ago in Partisan Review (‘The Third World of Women’).” Easy. By addressing itself to a different problem, with the intention of making a different point. That’s how it usually works—the life of the mind, I mean.

Innumerable drafts record Sontag’s various correctives and calculated retorts as she brooded over every word. She sequenced versions and sub-versions with numbers and brusquely circled letters: “2nd draft (C),” “2nd draft (D),” and so on. The printed version was a 2,000-word reply. “Like all capital moral truths, feminism is a bit simple-minded,” she would finally write. Questioning Sontag’s loyalties came at a cost for Rich. After her letter to NYRB, Rich would only appear in the prestigious journal once more, a conspicuous absence for an author of her rising literary stature.

Sontag was at her most spiky when she had a worthy opponent—and such opponents were most often women. She indicted Riefenstahl for being an opportunist, for compulsively lying, for waiting out public amnesia to reclaim the celebrity in which she had basked so briefly but so exceptionally. In Riefenstahl, she found something of a doppelgänger—a successful woman among men, a filmmaker and self-mythologiser, unreserved and photogenic. Riefenstahl knew how to work both sides of the camera and she appears in twelve photographs on the back cover of Last of the Nuba, a sequence Sontag describes as a “ravishing ... chronological sequence of expressions (from sultry inwardness to the grin of the Texas matron on safari) vanquishing the intractable march of aging.” Riefenstahl’s looks were partly the point. Once a Weimar-era beauty, she was now, almost vampirically, refusing to die. But like Sontag, she knew the advantages of being glamorous and captivating.

Half a dozen or so drafts after the NYRB article, the final version of “Fascinating Fascism” appeared in Sontag’s third essay collection, Under the Sign of Saturn. (In 2000, she referred to the NYRB essay as the “somewhat mutilated” version.) Marginalia and profuse notes show that her writing had undergone extensive revisions again. But in this final version, she did not yield to critics who had complained about her reversals and perceived disloyalties. 

A.O. Scott has identified Sontag as an admirer of “system-builders”—people who create worlds by animating the intellect. In Riefenstahl, she found someone with every ill-gotten advantage, who exploited technology and art to dissemble and seduce and forswear all moral imperatives. During the decades after the war, Riefenstahl’s tenacity was pure hubris. In response, Sontag was relentless in revealing the con of Riefenstahl’s claim to being anything less than a system builder of Nazism’s beguiling affirmations. In an early draft of the essay, she tested out an idea with an uncharacteristic tone of speculation: “There is such a thing as fascist aesthetics. And Riefenstahl seems an excellent test case of it.” But rather than using Riefenstahl’s work to examine the rhetorical forces that animated hatred and atrocity under Hitler’s rule, or to discuss antisemitism and the Holocaust, Sontag used the case study to broadcast her suspicions about Riefenstahl’s mercenary protestations of innocence and to highlight her moral condemnation of her generation’s debauched sexual proclivities.

The work of both Riefenstahl and Sontag has staying power. The films and the criticism continue to provoke, frustrate, and inspire imitators and detractors. World-builders in both word and image, Sontag and Riefenstahl were equally masters of aesthetic control, jealous of their own power and cultural currency, insecure and superior. Sontag was rational, restrained, and discriminating, while Riefenstahl’s florid defensiveness and frantic displays of umbrage were the behaviour of someone unreconciled with her past. Riefenstahl showed amazing stamina across her career, remaining faithful to hidden allegiances, and refusing to undergo any form of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the process of working through her Nazi past—or simply apologise. While Albert Speer, another brilliant spinner of his own Nazi past, and Werner von Braun, who made himself indispensable to the anticommunist fight—were rehabilitated, Riefenstahl appeared on talk shows, charged shamelessly into lawsuits on copyright and Holocaust denial, and wielded her excuses with feral conviction. 

The idea that “Fascinating Fascism” signalled Sontag’s shift away from pure aestheticism is not entirely accurate; taking a moralistic position did not make her an ethicist. “Fascinating Fascism” is a marvel of Sontagian reversals and paratactical gems, but it is also disingenuous, and even silly and paranoid. Her elaborate takedown of Leni Riefenstahl refused ideological solidarity with feminism and hardened hierarchies between elite knowers and the bovine masses, rehearsing unsavoury and anachronistic theories of irrationality and contagion and perpetuating insulting stereotypes. Sontag did go on to compose serious and impactful studies on ethics—of photography, of metaphors, of patriotism. As in all of her work, in “Fascinating Fascism” she wanted to pursue what had not been represented. And even if fascist aesthetics were cribbed from ancient principles of military liturgy and performances of state might, she gave the term her own imprint.

Sontag later noted to an interlocutor that the title, “Fascinating Fascism,” as quintessentially Sontag as it has become, was not her choice. And Riefenstahl, who greedily seized upon every opportunity for self-promotion until she drew her last breath, claimed to know nothing whatsoever about the very phenomenon that defined and destroyed her: “I’ve no concept of fascist aesthetics unless it be the Hitler salute or the fascist salute with the raised right hand.” Fascist aesthetics may have existed before Triumph of the Will, but without Leni Riefenstahl “Hitler” would not have been at their pulsating centre.