SOURCE: Leffland, Ella. “The Life but Not the Times.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (26 September 1993): 13.

In the following review, Leffland faults Riefenstahl for failing to question her own moral responsibilities regarding her role in Nazi Germany in Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir.

In 1989, Leni Riefenstahl's memoir was about to be published by Doubleday when the book's editor and its translator received threatening phone calls and the project was dropped. Now, four years later. St. Martin's Press is bringing out the book [Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir] under the same editor. No translator is credited on the title page.

It is evident that Leni Riefenstahl, who was in her mid-80s when she wrote the memoir and is now 91, remains a highly charged subject more than half a century after she made The Triumph of the Will and Olympia. These two documentary films, the first depicting the 1934 Nuremberg Rally and the...