The Director (Book)

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    Book Review: ‘The Director,’ by Daniel Kehlmann

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    A new novel considers the perplexing life and times of G.W. Pabst, the Austrian filmmaker who worked in the shadow of the Reich.THE DIRECTOR, by Daniel Kehlmann; translated by Ross BenjaminMovie stars and Nazis are irresistible ingredients in any book. “The Director,” Daniel Kehlmann’s smartly entertaining new novel about the great Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, offers both, detailing their once intimate, often symbiotic ties. Here, Greta Garbo and Joseph Goebbels have just two degrees of separation between them.Pabst (1885-1967), along with Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, was one of Weimar cinema’s big three — the most cosmopolitan as well as politically engaged of the trio. Considered a leftist, Pabst achieved renown for a series of socially conscious and sexually frank silent movies, including “Secrets of a Soul” (1926), which fiddled with Freud, and “Pandora’s Box” (1929), the film that established its star Louise Brooks as the era’s most devastating flapper.Red Pabst, as he was called early in his career, made a brilliant adjustment to sound with the antiwar film “Westfront 1918” (1930) and “The Threepenny Opera” (1931). But he was a bad fit in Hollywood, where, speaking little English, he arrived by way of France after the Nazis came to power. He then haplessly returned to Austria, now part of the Reich, perhaps to visit his ailing mother. Trapped by the outbreak of war, he remained there, making several apolitical “prestige” films for the Nazis and forever compromising his reputation.Pabst was “a precise and exacting artist,” according to the film scholar Eric Rentschler, as well as “an extremely private person who did not readily divulge his thoughts.” Kehlmann’s Pabst is a gifted psychologist when it comes to directing actors but a stranger to himself in all other matters, a genius who thinks in motion pictures but is unable to direct the flow of his own life.The novel’s German title, “Lichtspiel” (“light play,” a term for movies), evokes its fluid phantasmagoria: “The Director” is a book of dreams and of dreams within dreams. Indeed, beginning with a chapter in which Pabst’s fictional assistant director is hustled into a disastrous TV interview to reminisce about his former boss, the novel careens from nightmare to nightmare. Some, like the opener, are absurd. Others, like Pabst’s complete inability to navigate a Hollywood party, are painfully comic. Still others, once Pabst and his family return to the Reich, are terrifying.Was Pabst an opportunist, a victim of circumstance, a cowardly practitioner of anticipatory obedience or simply a solipsistic accommodationist? Although he failed to comprehend Hollywood, he learns the rules of the Reich when summoned to the office of propaganda, led in the novel by the unnamed “Minister.” (Suave, menacing and hideously self-assured, Goebbels handily directs the director.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Novelist Finds Unsettling Echoes in a Nazi-Era Filmmaker’s Compromises

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      The spark of inspiration for “The Director,” Daniel Kehlmann’s new historical novel about a filmmaker toiling for the Nazi regime, came during the first Trump administration. Kehlmann noticed Americans taking special care about what they said and to whom they said it. The self-censorship faintly echoed stories he’d heard from his father, who was a Jewish teenager in Vienna when the Third Reich came to power.The word “Austria,” for example, was banned by the regime. Suddenly, everyone lived in Ostmark.Kehlmann, a boyish 50-year-old born in Munich, has long been fascinated by the ways that citizens accommodated Hitler’s dictatorship. He centers his novel on the largely forgotten G.W. Pabst, an Austrian film director who gained fame in the era of silent movies and flamed out in Hollywood in the 1930s.Through an unfortunate happenstance — he’d returned to Austria to check on his ailing mother just as war broke out — Pabst was stuck when the Nazis slammed shut the borders. Eventually, he worked for the German film industry, which was overseen by the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.In Kehlmann’s telling, this was both a nightmare and a golden opportunity.“That’s the crazy irony here,” he said. “Pabst had more artistic freedom of expression under Goebbels than he did in Hollywood. And that’s what I really wanted to write about. A world where everybody is forced to make compromises all the time. And eventually, those small compromises end in a situation that is completely unacceptable, completely barbaric.”Kehlmann is surprisingly buoyant and sunny given the darkly comic pickles he regularly creates for his characters. During a three-hour conversation at a small kitchen table in his Harlem apartment, he held forth on his work, his life and on politics, which became unnervingly relevant to his latest novel when Donald Trump was re-elected.Louise Brooks in G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film “Pandora’s Box.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More