Leni Riefenstahl’s film communicates the pleasure the people experienced—how “good” it felt to them, as Knausgaard puts it—at having escaped the quotidian chaos of their shabby republic and their trivial private lives, at being liberated from the restrictions of rationality and deliberation, at being on the brink of achieving something large and lasting, deep and simple. Knausgaard attempts to reconstruct the emotions of those who were attracted to National Socialism, on grounds that it is impossible to understand “the last major utopian movement in the west” without understanding what moved Germans to embrace Nazism.
