The strange story of the visionary director trapped in Goebbels's fist

Telegraph

10-05-2025

Halfway through The Director, Daniel Kehlmann's engrossing and terrifying seventh novel, its protagonist meets a powerful politician, a Minister of the Reich. This man has a Rhenish accent and a slight limp on his right side. 'Delighted, delighted, delighted!' the Minister says on meeting his guest, until, when the supplicant rejects one of the Minister's suggestions, the latter changes his tack. ''Wrong answer,' said the Minister. 'Wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer.'' The lack of exclamation mark reveals which statement is serious and which is not. The unrelenting repetition is ruthless and shocking.
The Director delivers such shocks with similar ruthlessness but far more subtlety. Kehlmann proves his mastery of the historical form in reconceiving the life of GW Pabst, the Austrian director who was the contemporary and compatriot of Fritz Lang – whose visionary Metropolis (1927) remains as visionary as the day it was made. Pabst's name has mostly passed into obscurity; it's the names of the women whose early careers he furthered, among them Louise Brooks, Leni Riefenstahl and Greta Garbo, whose reputations have endured.
The real Pabst made films – not as successfully as he would wish – in France before the Second World War. Kehlmann takes effective liberties with his story by getting him to Hollywood, that place garlanded with alien palms. But it's true that Pabst returned to Austria (renamed Ostmark) during the war. Here, extraordinarily, he and his wife Trude cross the border back into the Fatherland just as his compatriots are escaping. Yes, his mother is ill and needs to be cared for; but yes, a charming Nazi agent persuades him that back in the Reich he will have all the money he needs to make the films he wants, all the staff, all the freedom. Yet the knowledge of how that meeting with Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is going to go – for, although he is never named, it is he in the scene described above – underscores, rather than undermines, the dread.
Kehlmann's last novel, Tyll, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. It was centred on another entertainer caught up in a destructive conflict: the Thirty Years' War of the 17th century. Tyll himself is based on a character from German folklore, a jester, a trickster. Both novels use shifting viewpoints to observe global events, and human responses to those events, with a wickedly observant eye, though where Tyll is a spark, Pabst is, in Kehlmann's depiction, eternally gloomy. Yet his inertia, which takes on a haunting, deeply surreal air, is frightening: we feel ourselves drawn into his paralysis and the paralysis of everyone around him, including his son, Jakob, who's inducted inexorably into the Hitler Youth.
Over and again, Kehlmann's central characters observe themselves performing actions as if from a great distance – or indeed, as if in a film. Jakob, as a teenager, learns to be a bully, learns that violence in his new world brings dominion and success. 'When you can't do something, and at the same time have no choice but to do it, there's only one solution: have someone else do it. Someone who looks like you and who uses your body, but who has no difficulty shooting two bullets into the head of a small screaming deer.'
Perhaps it is a deer, or perhaps it is not. As in Tyll, Kehlmann draws in elements of German mythtelling to deepen his tale. When Pabst and his family arrive at the family home near Salzburg, they are met at the station by the caretaker, Jerzabek, who rants about the Jews – 'The Führer was now driving out the vermin' – to his passengers in the carriage. If those passengers take issue with these sentiments or even reply, the author does not note it. But gradually Jerzabek develops into an ogre, his two monstrously tall and cruel daughters like trolls in a dreadful fable. Is Jerzabek real, or a figure of Pabst's imagination?
The truth is somewhere in the middle: his sinister weirdness demonstrates how much the power of our own storytelling, for good or ill, compels us. Make peace with a monster, Kehlmann suggests, and the monster will appear in another form, right in your own house, opening a trap door to a cellar – and by then it's too late.