“Fascinating Fascism” is the title of Susan Sontag’s celebrated NYRB article on Leni Riefenstahl’s "The Last of the Nuba," a photographic chronicle of the “aloof, godlike Nuba” of southern Sudan. The laudatory reception of this work, Sontag argues, functions as the cap to the snowballing rehabilitation of Riefenstahl in the eyes of the world; a rehabilitation which includes her reintegration into post-war society as a filmmaker summarily “concerned with beauty." Implicitly, therefore, this redemption assumes her to have been wholly unconcerned with the lamentable propagandistic “tangents” to her earlier and greatest works: the Nazi films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia. It is rather strongly implied by Sontag that this insidious cleansing of Riefenstahl’s reputation is symptomatic of the immense and bizarre appeal of fascist ideas; it is only by virtue of our own fascination with fascism, not as an object of study, but as an ideology with visceral mass appeal, that someone as irremediably entwined with its catastrophic past should find herself so startlingly and “convincingly” rehabilitated. Available here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/...
Author
Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford. Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader. Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea. Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city. A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers. Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow. Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.
