From Hollywood to Hitler

The Atlantic

06-05-2025

'I don't know what I would have done.' When the novelist Daniel Kehlmann hears Germans talk about the Nazi era, that is what many of them say. We were sitting in a Manhattan café at the end of February, discussing his latest book, The Director, about the Austrian filmmaker G. W. Pabst's collaboration with the Third Reich. Kehlmann, himself born in Germany and raised in Austria, wasn't about to dispute the truth of the sentiment. But he sensed a cop-out in this confession—an anticipation that compromise is possible, even probable. 'It's kind of a moral capitulation that masks as being humble.'
The idea that complicity is not a line that one jumps across, but rather an accumulation of rationalizations, fascinates Kehlmann: the wishful thinking that the threat is sure to end soon; the worries about how best to keep one's children safe; the need to continue working; the self-protective modesty of telling oneself, What difference could I possibly make? Yet whenever he considered depicting the Nazi period, he was deterred by the limitations of conventional storytelling: The 'easy way of writing about victims—they're in a terrible situation, and bad stuff happens to them, and then they either escape or they don't'—struck him as boring, especially given the firsthand family memories he'd grown up with as the son of a Jewish father who had survived the war years in Vienna. What seemed far more interesting was the question of what happens in the gray zone between victim and perpetrator.
Kehlmann never intended to focus on historical fiction, and he has written a number of contemporary novels as well as plays and television shows. But seeking out figures from the past who allow him to explore ideas became something of a trademark almost two decades ago, after the unexpected mega-success, in 2005, of Measuring the World. For that novel, he fictionalized the lives of two early-19th-century German men of science, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, both obsessed in a cultlike way by a drive to capture nature in all its dimensions. The book sold more than 2.3 million copies in Germany, making Kehlmann a literary celebrity there and bumping Harry Potter from the top of the best-seller list.
Great art might warrant 'moral compromise,' Kehlmann said. 'But how far do you go?'
Half a dozen novels later, The Director draws on history closer to home. Kehlmann's father—who survived the war because his parents used false documents that classified them as half Jewish, and paid bribes—would describe daily life under the Nazis for his son, such as the neighbor who welcomed her husband home from work with a 'Heil Hitler, Papi!' He also described seeing 'people beaten to death with metal sticks,' Kehlmann told me: His father spent three months at the Maria Lanzendorf concentration camp after being rounded up in a raid on a party of Viennese resistance activists, and was released only when the parents of a fellow prisoner resorted to a bribe. This living history left Kehlmann aware of how moral crevasses, narrow and wide, can form. 'In a dictatorship,' he said, 'corruption is actually often your savior.'
Pabst's story, which he came across while researching silent films of the time, offered just the kind of ambiguity he sought. In 1933, Pabst fled Germany, like most of the country's creative class. But then, improbably, shockingly, he returned to the Third Reich in 1939, directing films during the war—including one pretty good one, Paracelsus —under the supervision of Joseph Goebbels's ministry of propaganda. What brought Pabst back and why he allowed himself to be co-opted by the Nazis, though, remain a mystery. In a report for the occupying Americans about Germany's cultural figures, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer concluded his brief on Pabst by admitting, 'I have no key for unlocking his behavior.' The gaps in Pabst's story provided Kehlmann with the chance to ask a compelling question. Great art might warrant 'moral compromise,' he told me. 'But how far do you go?'
The German title of Kehlmann's novel is Lichtspiel, an old-fashioned synonym for cinema that literally translates to 'play of light,' and brings to mind the swift flicker between right and wrong. 'Every single step he takes is kind of defensible, but he still gets to a place that's completely unacceptable' is how Kehlmann described his idea of Pabst's odyssey to me. Working with a biography that needed much filling in, Kehlmann decided, in each instance, to make his Pabst a man who never actively chooses to embrace his Nazi benefactors. Instead, he allows his resistance to them to steadily erode. Even to describe how he lands in the Reich, Kehlmann took from his research the most benign interpretation: Pabst had made a quick trip back to Austria to check on an aging relative and then found himself trapped.
The Nazi world Pabst enters is rendered on the page in the expressionist tones of the German silent movies that Pabst, alongside his fellow German auteurs Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, transformed into high art in the 1920s. Kehlmann moves among his characters' points of view as if he were manning a roving camera; he even brings in the perspectives of two women whom Pabst made stars, Greta Garbo and the flapper beauty Louise Brooks (the latter cast in what is perhaps his most famous and accomplished film, Pandora's Box).
Kehlmann wanted the book to feel in some ways like those emotionally heightened films, with their exaggerated, dramatic effects. In the pivotal scene where Pabst is first offered his Faustian bargain (whatever he needs to make films as long as he does so under Nazi supervision), Goebbels's office seems to elongate at one point, and time loops inexplicably: The minister enters, sits down, and then enters again, and 'the two men became one man.' Horror and comedy also become one. The pair of government agents who come to seize Pabst's screenwriter, Kurt Heuser, are full of the bumbling wit of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
'What's this about?' Heuser asks.
'Everyone asks that,' says Karsunke.
'Always,' says Basler.
'Always, always, always,' says Karsunke.
'And yet we never answer that.'
Kehlmann's ridiculous Nazis, he told me, are inspired by those in Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be and, more recently, Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit. His protagonist's moral dilemma, though, never becomes a joke.
Leni Riefenstahl, the director whose propaganda masterpieces for Hitler included Triumph of the Will, appears in The Director as a comic-book incarnation of evil ('the villainous monster that I think she was,' Kehlmann said). But her machinations also serve as an extreme example of complicity against which Pabst's more subtly evolving behavior can be measured. He's enlisted as a consultant on her film Lowlands and discovers, in addition to her imperiousness and narcissism, that she is using concentration-camp inmates as extras— something that Riefenstahl actually did, and that Pabst may have witnessed during the few days he worked with her on the film. Kehlmann has Pabst realize who they are only after he has given the group of emaciated, thirsty men acting instructions. His assistant, an invented character named Franz Wilzek, informs him that they've been brought from Maxglan, a concentration camp that held Roma prisoners. 'There's nothing we can do,' Wilzek tells him. 'We didn't make it happen. We can't keep it from happening. It has nothing to do with us.'
Pabst wanted to say something, but his voice failed him. He saw the gaunt faces in front of him, the wide eyes, the mouths. He heard the instructions he had given: look over there, raise your head, things like that, and what else had he said? Suddenly it was unbearable to remember.
'We have to keep going.'
Pabst didn't move.
'Come on,' Wilzek said gently. He put his hand on Pabst's shoulder. Ordinarily, Pabst should not have tolerated such a gesture, but at that moment he was grateful.
'Nothing can be done,' said Wilzek.
'No,' said Pabst. 'I guess not.' He managed to stand up.
The last of the three films that Pabst made under the Nazis, The Molander Case, was lost. Kehlmann told me that he has read Pabst's notes, but no reel has ever been found. We do know that it was shot in Prague just as the Russian army was approaching. As The Director is winding down, Kehlmann offers his own version of Molander 's production and adds a detail that reveals Pabst to have become no better than Riefenstahl: He, too, uses extras from a nearby camp.
The scene finds him in something like a dissociative state, desperate to finish his film before the Red Army arrives, but needing 750 extras, and strongly hinting, without saying the words, where they can be found. The sequence to be filmed takes place in a concert hall, and when the inmates arrive, they play the audience, row after row of spectators costumed in evening wear—'an old man with shrewd, piercing eyes, next to him a woman of indeterminate age wearing a silk headscarf, probably to cover a shaved head.' This is a quiet atrocity. 'No one,' Pabst murmurs to himself. 'Not a single person. Will be harmed because of us. No one has been … The film must be finished.'
The fact that Molander is lost was a big help, Kehlmann told me, because he needed to imagine it as a masterpiece, though Pabst's notes on the film suggest that it probably wasn't. In The Director, one imperative allows Pabst to avoid facing the moral gravity of what he is doing, even when it is staring at him through 750 pairs of eyes: the need to make his art. Kehlmann said that inventing the detail about Pabst using concentration-camp inmates as extras (he had Theresienstadt in mind, he told me) gave him pause; he was, after all, using the name and story of a real person. But then he began to consider the widespread use of forced labor in the wartime Reich, including in the film industry. The big studios, such as Barrandov and Babelsberg, were surrounded by barracks packed with imprisoned Eastern Europeans, including children as young as 10, who would build sets, carry cables, and do other menial work. Pabst must have made use of them too, Kehlmann said. The leap to imagining him bringing in extras from Theresienstadt would not be that great.
As a novelist, and as someone who could understand the pull of the creative support the Nazis offered Pabst—in an art form like film, which is possible only with resources and infrastructure—Kehlmann felt that he could fairly represent Pabst, even with all his flaws. The incremental ways that Pabst moved toward that final travesty, and his muddled sense of how far he was going, perceiving his own actions at certain moments as if through a camera's lens, all seemed somehow comprehensible. Which merely reinforced Kehlmann's awareness of how easily one slips into moral compromise. He is leery of claiming that novels teach readers anything, he said, but if he learned a lesson from Pabst's story, it was that 'the best way to avoid all these gray areas of complicity is to not enter the gray area at all if you can.' As a counterexample, Kehlmann pointed to Thomas Mann. Here was a writer who insisted as early as 1933 that no matter the inducements, or how strong the nostalgia, 'I cannot return to Germany until justice and freedom have preceded me there.'
From the December 2024 issue: George Packer on Thomas Mann's startlingly relevant novel
But Kehlmann did want to grant Pabst a glimmer of artistic redemption, or at least the possibility of it. He sent me a YouTube link to Pabst's 1943 film, Paracelsus, the one pretty good film in his wartime oeuvre, and wanted to make sure that I noticed one scene in particular. The movie is about a famous Renaissance-era alchemist who was ahead of his time in his holistic and herbal approach to medicine. In the film, Paracelsus confronts the local authorities as a plague approaches, demanding that they lock the gates to the town. The cinematic style is naturalistic and conventional, except for what happens at the 45-minute mark.
The plague has arrived, represented by a jester figure who is infected with it. He begins to dance—strange, jerky movements—and soon everyone around him is following along, as if entranced. Their eyes go vacant, their arms flail, and they begin a frantic parade of death. The whole sequence looks like the zombie dance in Michael Jackson's 'Thriller,' as interpreted by Martha Graham. It is eerie and beautiful, and then, on Paracelsus's command, it all stops. 'Have we come to the madhouse?' he asks. He identifies the jester as the bringer of the plague; we hear the sound of a scythe being sharpened and we see, for a second, the face of death, a skull for a head, appear on the screen. And then the film returns to its normal mode.
In The Director, a character modeled on the British writer P. G. Wodehouse, who was also for a time trapped in Nazi Germany, attends the 1943 premiere of Paracelsus in Salzburg and is dumbfounded by the scene. 'For a moment I doubted whether this was something I had actually seen—could I have dreamed it? How dark it had been, how bizarre and masterly—how German, really.' I, too, couldn't help but wonder whether Pabst had intended it to be subversive: people possessed by a sick jester who leads them to death? Watching this surreal swerve, I suddenly realized that the movie had come out the same year that the German army was defeated at Stalingrad and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place.
The Wodehouse character couldn't say for certain that Pabst was trying to include a message to his Third Reich viewers. Nor can Kehlmann. 'The thing about subversiveness in a real dictatorship is it has to be so ambiguous that it's not even clear it's subversive,' he told me. The Director is full of such inconclusiveness. The timing of Kehlmann's U.S. book release, though, almost inevitably invites a quest for a subtext (and he did start thinking about Pabst during the first Trump administration). Kehlmann was a little overwhelmed by the connections. 'I mean, I like that my books are relevant,' he said, 'but I would prefer it to be less relevant in the current situation in America.'
Still, I couldn't resist asking him, somewhat desperately, how one should approach the test of life under totalitarianism, if the verdict that 'I don't know what I would have done' signals moral resignation. The only correct answer to this intellectual exercise, Kehlmann replied, is to say instead, quite simply, 'I hope I would have done the right thing.'