Lion Recalls Friendship with Gazelles

"I always took care to protect them," lion recalls. "In fact, we had dinner together."

In 1987, the German actress and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl delivered her memoirs to her publisher. The director of The Triumph of the Will used her autobiography to recall the moment, fifty-five years in the past, when she had met this remarkable guy named Adolf and a bunch of his cool friends. They thought she was hot, and wanted to party with her; in particular, her milkshake brought Joseph Goebbels to the yard a little more than Riefenstahl would have wanted, and she kept hitting him with the clue stick by asking him about his wife, not that pervo ever stopped being a skeeze.

Leni’s nice friends

She thought the whole crew was super-neat and really smart, she recalled, and she told Hitler that man did he really know how to give a great speech. But she also remembered, over and over again, how firmly she had counseled the leaders of the NSDAP to avoid an agenda of hate or prejudice, which wasn’t nice. They responded, she was happy to report, by thanking her for her candor, because they were very receptive to that kind of message. Here’s their very first meeting:

That Hitler guy — such an open mind for political dialogue!

Later some Americans appeared in Germany and showed her pictures of these, like, camp places. Riefenstahl was completely taken by surprise, and wondered if her nice friend Mr. Hitler had been told.

This kind of memory is why so many people in France turned into former members of the French Resistance as soon as the war was over and the Germans left. Vichy something? Hmm, Vichy something, Vichy something. Uh, rings a bell? (Was it perhaps a kind of pastry?)

In California, a state senator named Jack Tenney ran a Cold War version of HUAC in the state legislature, hunting communists in Hollywood and labor unions. Senator Tenney was a Cold War Republican, but had started in politics as an assemblyman — a pre-Cold War Democrat, and a staunch FDR supporter. Today, a massive oral history transcript in the special collections at UCLA contains one discussion after another about all the times Tenney accidentally stumbled into far-left events as a young man: See, he had to use the bathroom, and there was this hotel, and he figured there would be some public restrooms in there and he just went in to pee, AND THEN SUDDENLY he realized there were some socialists having a meeting in the hotel, and they put a delegate ribbon on his lapel because they thought he was someone else, see, total case of mistaken identity and and and he didn’t want to be rude, so he left it on, but….

All of these accidents became awkward for Tenney later on, as he sternly questioned committee witnesses about their attendance at communist events, and they said that yeah, Jack, I was there with you. But anyway.

So.

No reason to bring this up, right at this moment…

…but just keep in mind what happens to the memory, particularly among politicians and media figures, as significant political and cultural shifts take place.