‘The Director' by Daniel Kehlmann book review

Washington Post

06-05-2025

'The Director,' by Daniel Kehlmann. (Summit)
Early in Daniel Kehlmann's new novel, a man meets, and praises, the Austrian film director G. W. Pabst, who is living in exile from the Nazis. 'You are a master,' the man says. 'You're a dark painter, a true artist of dreams.' Little does this artist know that in a matter of years he will find himself swallowing his pride, abandoning his principles and creating more of those dreams within the nightmare of the Third Reich.
'The Director' sees Kehlmann once again blending fact with fiction to dramatize a famous figure. The Munich-born author has always managed this fusion with aplomb. His last novel, 'Tyll' (published in English in 2020), set a mischief-making character from German folklore against the backdrop of a 17th-century Europe ravaged by war and rife with black magic. His international bestseller, 'Measuring the World' (2006), mapped the lives and discoveries of two scientists of the German Enlightenment. Kehlmann's latest book, deftly translated by Ross Benjamin, focuses on a key period of Pabst's story and examines how his art was forged through both integrity and complicity.
The first part of the novel constitutes a calm before the storm. It is the 1930s and Pabst has fled his homeland for Hollywood. Hailed as Europe's greatest director, he is talked into making a film with a weak premise. He has little creative control and the film flops. Fellow émigré director Fred Zinnemann tells Pabst's wife, Trude, that her husband could succeed in the United States if he picks himself up and 'learns the rules.' 'We escaped hell, we ought to be rejoicing all day long. But instead we feel sorry for ourselves because we have to make westerns, even though we're allergic to horses.'
Pabst envisions making his mark in the U.S. with other projects. First, though, he returns to Nazi-run Austria with Trude and their son, Jakob, to visit his mother, whose health is failing. But his best-laid plans to move his mother to a sanitorium and his family back across the Atlantic are thwarted when Germany invades Poland. War breaks out ('world Jewry wouldn't have it any other way,' says one character) and borders close. Unable to escape, Pabst has no alternative but to accept the lifeline thrown to him by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and make films for the Nazi studios. Given good scripts, high budgets and fine actors, Pabst produces work he is proud of. But his decision to collaborate and to compromise will come at a heavy price to him, his family and his reputation.
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'The Director' gets off to something of a false start with an opening chapter that revolves not around Pabst but rather his former assistant, the now-aged Franz Wilzek, who is so forgetful and volatile that he threatens to be a disastrous interviewee on an Austrian TV show. Wilzek turns out to bookend the novel. When he reappears in the closing chapter, the haze obscuring his memory briefly clears and he remembers a pertinent truth. This allows his creator to cap the proceedings with a neat twist — one that puts a character and a past event in a markedly different light.
Between these two sections runs a narrative that is largely episodic. Most of those chapter-length episodes are interlinked but a few are stand-alone. Sometimes Kehlmann makes smooth transitions from scene to scene; on other occasions his chapters take the form of choppy jump-cuts. This can prove initially disorienting, particularly when he skips forward in time or switches viewpoint.
However, it would be churlish to take Kehlmann to task over his structure as his episodes comprise a series of enthralling set pieces which, when pieced together, add up to a thoroughly satisfying whole. In one unsettling chapter, Pabst and his family are made to feel unwelcome in his mother's home by the property's caretaker, a Führer fanatic whose manner veers between subservient and malevolent. In another almost surreal chapter, Trude attends a book club and watches in shock as a woman is banished from the group for mentioning books the Nazis have banned and burned. A familiar scene on a train in which browbeating Germans in uniform check passengers' papers and passports is rendered more original, and indeed more sinister, by being relayed through the eyes of a young and naive Jakob. And there are thrills when an uprising in Prague forces Pabst and Wilzek to halt filming and make a frantic run for cover.
Kehlmann also impresses with scenes involving Pabst and various historical personalities. Greta Garbo and 'living flame' Louise Brooks leave him high and dry by turning down his film pitch. Hitler's filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl rails against Pabst's creative criticism and threatens him with 'consequences.' P.G. Wodehouse, a prisoner of war in the Reich, remarks on how much freedom Pabst has as a director. But it is Goebbels's cameo that is the most entrancing. Kehlmann depicts 'the Minister' at his most unhinged: shrieking with rage, laughing with glee, smashing a telephone and giving Pabst, 'an enemy of the German people,' a choice between punishment and redemption.
'The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in,' Pabst says at one point. Kehlmann's novel is both a vivid depiction of those circumstances and a captivating portrait of the artist navigating them.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New Republic.
The Director
By Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin