Leni Riefenstahl is 96 and still fighting. She wants the credit she believes her photographs and groundbreaking films deserve. And she wants it in Germany. As a director, Riefenstahl was used to vast resources and to throwing her weight around. She blames a cabal of "opinion formers" and "leftwing intellectuals" for destroying her reputation. Throw in an international Jewish conspiracy and it's right back to the era that overshadows her life.
Riefenstahl is still a pariah solely because of her close association with Hitler between 1932 and 1945. Many in Germany will never forgive her for using her undoubted cinematic genius to glorify the Fuhrer and for the privileges she enjoyed while other artists were being persecuted.
Riefenstahl, however, insists that she had nothing to do with politics and was driven only by aesthetic criteria. She may have been championed over the years by the likes of Jean Cocteau and Rainer Werner Fassbinder - and her technical achievements acknowledged in advertising and photography - but it is veneration in her homeland that she craves. Even now, however, with the opening of the first retrospective of her life and work in Germany, this veneration is denied her.
Indeed, the exhibition, at a tiny film museum in the Prussian town of Potsdam, has provoked heated discussions in the media about whether it should even have been mounted. And rather than proclaiming her genius, the organisers are merely presenting her as part of an ongoing review of women in film and art under dictatorship. They have also been constrained by Riefenstahl herself, who demanded that the exhibition be "objective" before giving the curators access to her personal archive. At home in Munich recovering from a lung inflammation, she has yet to see the show.
Yet, since it opened, people have flocked to see Riefenstahl's studies of the Nuba tribes in southern Sudan, her marine photography from the 1980s, as well as previously unpublished letters, photographs and reviews of her work.
The exhibition has also become embroiled in the fierce debate about Germany's obsession with war guilt. In October, the author Martin Walser criticised the planned Holocaust memorial in Berlin while, irony of ironies, he was picking up a peace prize for his new book. The controversy was further stoked by his insistence that Germany should now look away from the disgrace of the past. Walser's comments were condemned by Ignatz Bubis, the president of the Jewish central council of Germany, who accused him of attempting to suppress history.
The curators are suggesting that outright rejection of art created during the Third Reich is no longer good enough. This has caught the Zeitgeist at a time when Helmut Kohl's old elite, who could remember the war and lived in its early aftermath, has just been swept from power by Gerhard Schroder's younger Social Democrats. German democracy, so the reasoning goes, should now be strong enough to deal with Leni Riefenstahl's work.
But a glance at the rapt crowd watching the slow-motion images of muscular bodies from Riefenstahl's 1938 Olympia 1 and 2 (Fest Der Voelker and Fest Der Schoenheit) and the hysteria from the Nazis' 1934 Nuremburg rally in Triumph Des Willens (Triumph of the Will), explains why the Allies banned her works after the war. Even now, Triumph of the Will has to be accompanied by an explanatory introduction.
"I lived during the fascist time. I was in Paris in 1940 when the Germans marched in," said Lucette Danelius (76), from Berlin, after viewing the exhibition with her daughter. "Just hearing the songs from Triumph of the Will, made me think back. The images are so evocative. To say that she was not a politician is madness. She glorified Hitler. Hers was a dangerous aesthetic because she is without a doubt a great artist. For example the pictures from Africa are brilliant."
But younger Germans have welcomed the show. "She is in a particular context," said Irene Dietz (37), a public relations executive from Frankfurt-am-Main. "She was a controversial person and that comes over. I think it is important to show what she's done and speak about it without prejudices. In my view she was a toy of the regime." She caused in-fighting within the propaganda ministry when Hitler chose her to direct Sieg Des Glaubens (Victory of Faith) in 1933 - the first of her two films on the Nazis' Nuremburg rallies. Yet unlike directors of other key films from the time, such as Jew Suss, she is alive and able to assert that she made documentary rather than propaganda films.
Time has exposed Jew Suss for what is was, but Riefenstahl continues to present herself as the hunted innocent. After the premiere of Victory of Faith, she was hailed as the new star of German film-making. The film was thought to have been destroyed after the war, but it turned up in an East German archive in 1987.
Riefenstahl made sure her own company produced Triumph of the Will. It starts in the sky in Hitler's plane and nears Nuremburg with a snippet from Wagner's Meistersinger. As it makes its final approach, its silhouette looms over the ranks of supporters marching through the city. After a rapturous welcome at the airport, Hitler is shown watching phalanxes of uniformed party members goose-stepping past.
Riefenstahl flicks manically around to show as many of the adoring hordes as possible, thanks to cameramen on roller skates travelling down the aisles. "At the time, people had not seen Hitler close up. It was a very intimate film," said Martin Loiperdinger, who has written a thesis on Triumph of the Will. "No politician had ever been the star of a film."
Riefenstahl's detractors say Hitler and his followers are presented too lovingly in the film, for all the innovative use of zoom lenses, angles and her ability to convey the passion and the fervour of the party faithful. Yet there appears to be enough evidence to support Riefenstahl's artistic defence. The preparations for her piece were thorough. She selected six events during the rally between September 4th and 10th omitting, for example, the parade of National Socialist women. She emerged after seven months in the cutting room with a documentary that has been hailed as the most effective piece of celluloid propaganda ever - . so effective that it was used to persuade the US authorities to set up their own propaganda film unit.
Luis Bunuel wrote of her films: "They were ideologically repugnant but fantastically made. Impressive." Sixty years on, Bunuel's observation has maintained its resonance. In the former East Germany, Riefenstahl was a pariah and any West German critic trying to separate her work from the time was usually denounced as an apologist.
But a thaw may be on its way. As one of two living Germans who have graced the front cover of Time - the other being Claudia Schiffer - she was invited by Bill Clinton to the magazine's 75th birthday party this year in New York.
The Munich-based film historian, Feli Moller, who has written on Goebbel's war-time film ministry said: "She has faced the biggest problem - (being) a genius in the time of the Nazis. If you look at the things objectively, there is no doubt that the cinema and the aesthetic are brilliant. But in the service of Hitler? Being a genius is one thing but being it in the service of wrong is another thing. Whether you can separate the artists from the reality is one of the difficult questions."
To the drama of the party rally pictures, she added beauty in her depiction of the 1936 Olympic Games. There was no attempt to make this work contemporary. With her battalion of cameramen, she shot 400,000 metres of film. Over three hours in two slices, Fest Der Voelker and Fest Der Schoenheit, she made sport into a cinematic event for the first time.
In Fest Der Voelker, visual panache - aided by cutting-room tricks and grating music to accentuate the pain and the "tension" of a three-hour marathon - turned the event into an artistic milestone. It also added lustre to the Nazi regime. Although she was to travel to Scandinavia and France to soak up plaudits for the film, her arrival in Hollywood was marred by the pogroms on November 9th, 1938. Her embarrassment was accentuated by boycotts by intellectuals and film-makers, led by the many artists who had fled Germany.
From the aesthetic high of 1936-1938 followed ignominy. She was arrested in April 1945 by US soldiers and sent to Dachau, where she was questioned about her links with the Nazi high command. While undergoing "denazification" in Munich and Berlin between 1948 and 1950, she worked on her long-term film project Tiefland, which finally appeared in 1954. Since then, one of the century's most innovative film-makers has been lost to feature films.
As Helene Bertha Amelie Riefenstahl nears the end of her life, Germany is again powerful, throwing billions of Deutschmark into the development of Berlin and itching to be "normal". Fitting this brilliant chronicler of the "abnormal" into that new vision will be an Olympian task.
The retrospective is at the Film Museum, Potsdam (00-49-331 271810), until February 28th 99209434