Excerpt from Delayed Rays of a Star by Amanda Lee Koe, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Leni was anxious about her future, that is, she believed it was bright and would like for it to come faster. She'd given her first public modern dance recital, at twenty- one, to a sold- out audience. A wealthy admirer had sponsored the concert hall, and was chivalrous enough to buy up a whole chunk of unsold tickets. Nothing was so difficult if you got to know the right people. When Leni broke her knee, it was far from the end: she began to carve out her transition into acting while still on crutches and managed to attract the attention of a director before her bones healed. Not yet twenty- six, but already with a varied body of work to call her own, Leni wanted to be the reason for things, to have her name known, and she was pleased to consider herself immaculately on track.

Quite unlike second- rate nobodies like the blonde, who in their last- ditch desperation resorted to making a scene in public. Nothing pained Leni more than having to put up with a woman who did not know how to act like a woman. Some people should be barred from parties; just look at what the blonde was wearing. She needed an urgent referral to a good couturier— if she could only afford one! Garish sashes with busy prints crisscrossed her body, and had she really thought to tie a white swan's feather to her purse? Her style alone was enough to give Leni a headache. This was the Berlin Press Ball 1928, not the Bavarian Yuletide Fair 1890. The blonde had tried to steal everyone's thunder with her idiotic pipe- shaped cigarette holder, and when no one paid any attention to that, she had the cheek to spill her drink on the Chinese actress visiting all the way from Hollywood. What would she think of Berlin now?

To Leni's surprise, they were sharing a laugh, and the Chinese actress had not kicked up a fuss. She was even game enough to relight the blonde's half- smoked cigarette. The blonde had to inhale with all her might because the cigarette holder was so thin and long. She started coughing from inhaling too deeply. The Chinese actress patted her on the back. The cigarette went out again.

The photographer had a smile on his face: Ah, women.

Leni pictured what he saw. She could perceive with ease the audience or camera's viewpoint, reversing how things appeared to herself. She had an instinct for mise-en-scène, and would later apply a dancer's understanding— that beauty was line— without reserve to every canvas. Floating her arm in a deconstructed arabesque, capturing the grace of gravity in an acrobatic high dive, counterpointing the stark swastika of a Party flag with a twenty-thousand-strong marching contingent— she had a singular talent for visual harmony, and she never passed up a chance to show it. What is my crime? Leni turned around and asked the press after the war. Don't let's be unsporting after the fact. If the films I made were really propaganda, would they have toured film festivals and won prizes? I was good at what I did. He saw that in me, nothing more. Naturally, none of this discouraged the papers from churning ever more lurid and pulpy headlines: RIEFENSTAHL'S NAKED DANCES FOR THE THIRD REICH; NAZI SLUT WITH A MOVIE CAMERA.

Eisenstein made movies for Stalin, Leni said to the papers, and nobody calls him a slut. Was it that I made movies for the NSDAP, or is it that I am a woman?

But retrospection is a ripe-looking fruit a few sly boughs out of reach. We are not given to know if its flesh is tart or sweet until everything is too late. To be fair, as of this moment that whole scrum of set pieces was still up in the air, and things could have gone any which way. The Great Depression was still a year off, the re-formed Nazi Party had garnered a pitiful 2.6 percent of the popular vote in the latest federal elections, Hitler was just another rabble- rouser slapped with a public speech ban who'd recently renounced his Austrian citizenship for fear of being deported back to Linz, and Leni had yet to pick up a movie camera. She was simply an actress posing for a photographer alongside two young women at a party, sliding her left foot up so the dress would fall around her calf and flatter the line of her body, imagining how the picture would turn out as she heard the shutter click: in the foreground their three bodies of proximate height— all three were tall, the Chinese woman ever so slightly taller than the other two— in the background, a gilded mirror framed by banded wallpaper.

Excerpted from Delayed Rays of a Star by Amanda Lee Koe. Copyright © 2019 by Amanda Lee Koe . Excerpted by permission of Nan A. Talese. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.