We live up by the gate in what was once the gardener’s shed. The house is so snug that my work desk is in the kitchen which is also basically our bedroom. While people ate cheese and drank beer, they examined the books on my desk. “This is a beautiful edition,” said one woman of a book. “You’re reading this?” said a man (a German) of another. The book the German man picked up was Leni Riefenstahl’s memoir (called Leni Riefenstahl). Many years after her death, Riefenstahl remains, to understate matters massively, a controversial character. She was a film director (most famously of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will) and a dancer, and a first-class mountaineer. She might have ranked as one of the twentieth century’s most bad-ass humans except that she was, as bluntly articulated by one of the “Gypsy” extras Riefenstahl used in a film before sending her off to a concentration camp, “friends with Hitler” and (again, to massively understate matters), “not a good person.”
