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Winnipeg Free Press
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Art, morals and power
In this darkly absorbing and deeply intelligent novel, German writer Daniel Kehlmann charts the choices made by the real-life Austrian-born film director G. W. Pabst, a master of the silent and early sound eras. Known as 'Red Pabst' for his empathetic exploration of social issues, he leaves Europe after Hitler's rise to power, joining a community of cinematic exiles in Hollywood. Then, in a seemingly inexplicable turnaround, he returns to Austria — annexed by the Nazis and now called Ostmark — and ends up creating films under the patronage of the Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Clearly, Pabst has struck some kind of Faustian bargain, but Kehlmann's writing is so subtle it's difficult to mark the exact moment at which the filmmaker falls into complicity. Testing the boundaries between art, power and moral responsibility, The Director evokes creative life under totalitarian rule with exacting precision and scathing effect. Heike Steinweg photo Daniel Kehlmann's latest novel traces the movements of director G.W. Pabst, who fled Austria after Hitler's rise to power but voluntarily returned while the Nazis were still in power. Dividing his time between Berlin and New York, Kehlmann has generated buzz in the English-speaking world with such works as Measuring the World and the International Booker-nominated Tyll (translated, as is The Director, by Ross Benjamin). Kehlmann's approach to period stories is idiosyncratic and urgent, cutting the realistic horrors of history with sharp, ironical humour. This is not a comprehensive or conventional biographical novel. Kehlmann uses the outline of Pabst's life but fills it in with passages that are imagined and inventive, sometimes terrifying and sometimes out-and-out surreal. Working in long, loosely connected chapters, many of which function as standalone vignettes, Kehlmann takes us first to 1933, with Pabst somewhat adrift at a Los Angeles party. He's awkward and overheated and his English is poor. Kehlmann also has a running joke about how Pabst is constantly being confused with fellow Weimar filmmakers F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. 'No good coffee anywhere, but the fruit juices are astonishing!' says a cheerful compatriot, but Pabst seems unable to adapt to this sunny paradise — and to his demotion to the cinematic B-list. Not longer after, the novel relocates to France, where Pabst and his wife, Trude, are spending a drunken evening with German refugees in a Paris bar. Desperate for documents and safe passage out of Europe, these actors, writers and critics are shocked when Pabst reveals he is voluntarily returning. (The chapter ends with a sombre listing of these historical characters' fates — who escapes to America, who dies by suicide when a transit visa expires, who is murdered by the Nazis.) Pabst's reasons for going back to Austria remain deliberately opaque. He explains that he must visit his aging mother, but Kehlmann slyly suggests this might just be the first of the director's many rationalizations and self-delusions. Pabst's actual biography has hazy areas, and Kehlmann demonstrates how this haze can be a byproduct of fascism, as people cover over guilt with blurred memories and disputed histories. The Director introduces us to various real-life figures, from Greta Garbo (aloof, imperious) to a comic British writer who is clearly P.G. Wodehouse (humorous, hapless) to Goebbels (whose meeting with Pabst showcases Kehlmann's brilliantly sinister use of doppelgangers and double meanings). Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl is portrayed as an appalling moral monster who is also inadvertently, grotesquely hilarious. Kehlmann also has an Orwellian eye for the kind of totalitarian infiltration that goes beyond controlling citizens' actions to policing their words and even thoughts. Trude attends a book club with the wives of high-ranking Nazis, a supposedly pleasant social occasion where a wayward opinion can have dire consequences. No wonder Trude enters into an 'internal exile' of perpetual drunkenness. The Director In another scene, prisoner-of-war Wodehouse — making a compulsory appearance at a film premiere — learns to his bemusement that the Hitler regime has outlawed criticism. Practitioners of this supposedly 'Jewish and Bolshevik' discipline are now replaced with 'describers.' (They aren't even allowed to say whether a film is good because that would imply that it could be bad.) The demand for 'genuine Aryan cinema' hangs over Pabst's film The Molander Case, based on a book by bestselling Nazi hack Alfred Karrasch. The film was in the late stages of production in Prague when the Soviet army reached the city and remains unfinished and unknown, allowing Kehlmann to turn it into an enigmatic question. Is it as cinematically brilliant as Pabst's (highly unreliable) narrative insists? And even if it is, could it possibly be worth Pabst's deal with the devil? Art remains when the mess of politics is over, Pabst says to Trude in one scene, but she seems to have a clearer sense of the cost. Kehlmann's own responses to Pabst's moral situation — the director's small, incremental compromises and then his sudden, terrible capitulation — are incisive and unsparing, full of absurdities and killing ironies. And they are never didactic, this novel of ideas remaining immediate, entertaining and a really good read. Alison Gillmor writes on film for the Free Press. Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Atlantic
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
From Hollywood to Hitler
'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.'
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
In this novel inspired by G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl is among the bit players
Daniel Kehlmann's latest novel, 'The Director,' an engrossing meditation on the exigencies of art and the dangers of artistic complicity, lands in the United States at a good time. Which is to say, a bad time, when both institutions and individuals must gauge the risks of free expression in an increasingly oppressive environment. The German novelist most recently authored 'Tyll,' shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and his translator, Ross Benjamin, has rendered his new historical fiction in idiomatic English prose. With a page-turning narrative that is both technically sophisticated and intellectually engaging, 'The Director' sits at the charmed intersection of commercial and literary fiction. In his acknowledgments, Kehlmann says the novel was 'largely inspired by the life stories of the historical G.W. Pabst and his family.' Among his inventions is a Pabst son, Jakob, an aspiring artist turned Hitler Youth member — someone whose perceptions, once astute, are polluted by circumstances. The same can be said of Pabst himself, whose monomaniacal devotion to his art inclines him to ugly compromises. Read more: A fresh look at a director who 'sinned' The politically tricky world of 'The Director' is off-kilter in a variety of ways. (The German title, 'Lichtspiel,' means both 'play of light' and 'film.') Disorientation is a pervasive theme, beginning with Pabst's attempt to establish himself, along with other expatriate film artists, in Hollywood. But language is a barrier, and the deference he demands conflicts with the movie capital's norms. Strangers confuse him with another Austrian-born director, Fritz Lang, and Pabst's American movie, 'A Modern Hero,' fashioned from a script he loathes, is a flop. The director's return to Austria, in part to help his aging mother, is poorly timed. (The book's three sections are 'Outside,' 'Inside' and 'After.') At Pabst's rural estate, the once submissive caretaker, Jerzabek, and his family, now Nazis, hold the whip hand. The wife cooks comically inedible food; the daughters terrorize Jakob. The Pabst family is caught in a real-life horror movie from which escape proves difficult. Trapped by the outbreak of war, Pabst agrees reluctantly to make movies — well-funded and ostensibly nonpolitical — for the Third Reich. His professional unease is echoed by the novel's gently surreal bending of time and space and its metaphorical conflation of life and film. The novel's first-person, postwar frame involves another absurdist twist: Franz Wilzek, a resident of an Austrian sanatorium, is corralled into a live television interview. Formerly a director and, earlier, an assistant to Pabst, Wilzek suffers from dementia, and the interview reveals his befuddlement. It is cut short after Wilzek denies the existence of a lost Pabst film, 'The Molander Case,' shot in World War II's waning days. 'Practically nothing is known about the circumstances of its shooting,' Kehlmann writes in the acknowledgments. That historical gap unleashes the novelist's imagination. Most of Kehlmann's narration is in the third-person, with constantly shifting perspectives that add to the book's off-kilter feel. At times we see the action through Pabst's eyes; at others, from the viewpoint of his wife, Trude; his son, Jakob; the actor Greta Garbo; and the Reich envoy Kuno Krämer. A captured British writer offers his first-person take on Pabst's 1943 film, 'Paracelsus.' Leni Riefenstahl turns up too, as both actor and director, a collaborator in every sense. So, too, does the actor Louise Brooks, depicted as the great love of Pabst's life. Read more: G.W. Pabst: The high art of lurid lives Over time, dreamscapes, film sets and Germany's crumbling, war-ravaged cities become indistinguishable. In films, Pabst reflects, 'the painted backgrounds looked real and unreal at the same time, like something out of the strangest dreams.' In Berlin, he observes that 'the edges of the houses seemed askew,' while 'the street down below rolled away very straight into an endless distance,' evoking 'how films had looked fifteen years earlier.' Similarly, when Pabst visits the Nazi propaganda ministry, its geometrically baffling corridors remind him of 'a trick he himself had used repeatedly in long tracking shots.' When he encounters the minister — an unnamed Joseph Goebbels — he sees him briefly as two distinct men. As Pabst moves toward the exit, the office door recedes. He finds that 'the room had folded over so that he was suspended from the ceiling, walking upside down.' The climactic (and amply foreshadowed) blurring of nightmare, film and reality occurs in Prague, during 'The Molander Case' shoot. A group of prisoners, gaunt and starving, are commandeered to serve as unusually cooperative movie extras. A stunned Wilzek, spotting a familiar face, reports that 'time had become tangled like a film reel.' Kehlmann gives Pabst's self-justifications their due. 'The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in,' the director says. An actor differs: 'One contorts oneself thousands of times, but dies only once … It's simply not worth it.' Later, Pabst declares, 'Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it's made. And later, when you look back, it's the only thing that mattered.' Perception, and what one chooses not to see, is another one of the novel's themes. 'Look closely,' Jakob insists, 'and the world recedes, becoming a mixture in which nothing is clean and everything runs together.' But is that true? Wilzek, the novel's unlikely hero, does look closely, and what he sees impels him to take a moral stand. Kehlmann's epigraph, from the Austrian Nazi writer Heimito von Doderer's 1966 short story collection 'Under Black Stars,' describes 'drifting along on a broad wave of absurdity, although we knew and saw it.' But 'this very knowledge was what kept us alive,' von Doderer writes, 'while others far better than we were swallowed up.' A post facto reflection on his times, it casts a troubling light on our own. Klein is the Forward's contributing book critic. Get the latest book news, events and more in your inbox every Saturday. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In this novel inspired by G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl is among the bit players
Daniel Kehlmann's latest novel, 'The Director,' an engrossing meditation on the exigencies of art and the dangers of artistic complicity, lands in the United States at a good time. Which is to say, a bad time, when both institutions and individuals must gauge the risks of free expression in an increasingly oppressive environment. The German novelist most recently authored 'Tyll,' shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and his translator, Ross Benjamin, has rendered his new historical fiction in idiomatic English prose. With a page-turning narrative that is both technically sophisticated and intellectually engaging, 'The Director' sits at the charmed intersection of commercial and literary fiction. In his acknowledgments, Kehlmann says the novel was 'largely inspired by the life stories of the historical G.W. Pabst and his family.' Among his inventions is a Pabst son, Jakob, an aspiring artist turned Hitler Youth member — someone whose perceptions, once astute, are polluted by circumstances. The same can be said of Pabst himself, whose monomaniacal devotion to his art inclines him to ugly compromises. The politically tricky world of 'The Director' is off-kilter in a variety of ways. (The German title, 'Lichtspiel,' means both 'play of light' and 'film.') Disorientation is a pervasive theme, beginning with Pabst's attempt to establish himself, along with other expatriate film artists, in Hollywood. But language is a barrier, and the deference he demands conflicts with the movie capital's norms. Strangers confuse him with another Austrian-born director, Fritz Lang, and Pabst's American movie, 'A Modern Hero,' fashioned from a script he loathes, is a flop. The director's return to Austria, in part to help his aging mother, is poorly timed. (The book's three sections are 'Outside,' 'Inside' and 'After.') At Pabst's rural estate, the once submissive caretaker, Jerzabek, and his family, now Nazis, hold the whip hand. The wife cooks comically inedible food; the daughters terrorize Jakob. The Pabst family is caught in a real-life horror movie from which escape proves difficult. Trapped by the outbreak of war, Pabst agrees reluctantly to make movies — well-funded and ostensibly nonpolitical — for the Third Reich. His professional unease is echoed by the novel's gently surreal bending of time and space and its metaphorical conflation of life and film. The novel's first-person, postwar frame involves another absurdist twist: Franz Wilzek, a resident of an Austrian sanatorium, is corralled into a live television interview. Formerly a director and, earlier, an assistant to Pabst, Wilzek suffers from dementia, and the interview reveals his befuddlement. It is cut short after Wilzek denies the existence of a lost Pabst film, 'The Molander Case,' shot in World War II's waning days. 'Practically nothing is known about the circumstances of its shooting,' Kehlmann writes in the acknowledgments. That historical gap unleashes the novelist's imagination. Most of Kehlmann's narration is in the third-person, with constantly shifting perspectives that add to the book's off-kilter feel. At times we see the action through Pabst's eyes; at others, from the viewpoint of his wife, Trude; his son, Jakob; the actor Greta Garbo; and the Reich envoy Kuno Krämer. A captured British writer offers his first-person take on Pabst's 1943 film, 'Paracelsus.' Leni Riefenstahl turns up too, as both actor and director, a collaborator in every sense. So, too, does the actor Louise Brooks, depicted as the great love of Pabst's life. Over time, dreamscapes, film sets and Germany's crumbling, war-ravaged cities become indistinguishable. In films, Pabst reflects, 'the painted backgrounds looked real and unreal at the same time, like something out of the strangest dreams.' In Berlin, he observes that 'the edges of the houses seemed askew,' while 'the street down below rolled away very straight into an endless distance,' evoking 'how films had looked fifteen years earlier.' Similarly, when Pabst visits the Nazi propaganda ministry, its geometrically baffling corridors remind him of 'a trick he himself had used repeatedly in long tracking shots.' When he encounters the minister — an unnamed Joseph Goebbels — he sees him briefly as two distinct men. As Pabst moves toward the exit, the office door recedes. He finds that 'the room had folded over so that he was suspended from the ceiling, walking upside down.' The climactic (and amply foreshadowed) blurring of nightmare, film and reality occurs in Prague, during 'The Molander Case' shoot. A group of prisoners, gaunt and starving, are commandeered to serve as unusually cooperative movie extras. A stunned Wilzek, spotting a familiar face, reports that 'time had become tangled like a film reel.' Kehlmann gives Pabst's self-justifications their due. 'The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in,' the director says. An actor differs: 'One contorts oneself thousands of times, but dies only once … It's simply not worth it.' Later, Pabst declares, 'Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it's made. And later, when you look back, it's the only thing that mattered.' Perception, and what one chooses not to see, is another one of the novel's themes. 'Look closely,' Jakob insists, 'and the world recedes, becoming a mixture in which nothing is clean and everything runs together.' But is that true? Wilzek, the novel's unlikely hero, does look closely, and what he sees impels him to take a moral stand. Kehlmann's epigraph, from the Austrian Nazi writer Heimito von Doderer's 1966 short story collection 'Under Black Stars,' describes 'drifting along on a broad wave of absurdity, although we knew and saw it.' But 'this very knowledge was what kept us alive,' von Doderer writes, 'while others far better than we were swallowed up.' A post facto reflection on his times, it casts a troubling light on our own. Klein is the Forward's contributing book critic.
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In a Nazi-Era Filmmaker's Compromises, a Novelist Finds Reasons to Fear
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. He spent four years researching and writing 'The Director' (published in Germany in 2023), splitting his time between Manhattan and Berlin with his wife, an international criminal lawyer, and their 16-year-old son. He dug into film archives and libraries, studying the career of one of the great auteurs of the Weimar Era. Pabst peaked early. He helped make Greta Garbo an icon with 'The Joyless Street' in 1925 and four years later launched Louise Brooks in 'Pandora's Box,' which Quentin Tarantino has called one of his favorite films. To understand how the left-leaning Pabst ended up as one of the Nazis' marquee directors, Kehlmann read deeply about Germany's slide into autocracy. Now he sees chilling parallels between what happened then and what has unfolded since Trump's second inauguration. Eroding the rule of law, persecuting 'enemies,' elevating incompetents and extremists to top jobs — it all comes from the same playbook. 'I'm not surprised it's happening,' he said, in a matter-of-fact tone. 'I'm surprised it's happening this fast.' His message comes across like a scholar's sober warning about the future, and it would provoke pure dread were he not such a surpassingly gifted storyteller. Among his big influences are the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. Like them, he is a master at depicting decent people making terrible choices, with results that are both droll and catastrophic. An atmosphere of moral queasiness permeates 'The Director,' and the author is in perfect control of the barometric pressure. Kehlmann is best known for 'Measuring the World,' which reimagined the adventures of two real-life 19th century scientists and established him as one of literature's foremost ironists. The novel, planted at the top of the German best-seller list for 37 weeks, .became a career-maker in 2005. Twelve years later, he published 'Tyll,' the story of a court fool and tightrope walker who pranks his way through the Thirty Years' War, leaving a trail of patrons and spectators in his wake, some injured, others amused. It didn't sell very well, but it developed a base of fans so ardent that they occasionally approach Kehlmann and weep as they discuss it. Though fame has so far eluded Kehlmann in the U.S., he's achieved the kind of renown in Germany that is rare for writers. 'I was once on this tiny boat in Gambia with some Germans and I didn't know what to say to them, so I mentioned that I knew Daniel and it was like, they went insane,' said the writer Zadie Smith, a longtime friend who blurbed 'The Director.' 'I think he's sold a book to everyone in the country.' Kehlmann's interest in film started in childhood. His father, Michael, survived a few months in a Nazi labor camp when he was 17 years old and went on to direct movies, television and theater. The younger Kehlmann would gravitate to historical novels through an interest in the way minds are rewired by culture and circumstance. In 'The Director,' he unpacks what is 'total' about totalitarianism. Nazism warps every interaction and every opinion, and social status is no longer determined by talent. Gifted people on the wrong side of the ideological divide are persecuted. Hacks are elevated and praised. There is no record of a meeting between Goebbels and Pabst, one of the artistic liberties taken in 'The Director.' But the minister really did demand high-quality movies and micromanaged what became known as 'Hitler's Hollywood,' a studio system that produced more than 1,000 films, including screwball comedies and musicals. American and British productions had been banned, and Goebbels wanted polished features to prove the cultural superiority of German art. He also needed to fill theaters to feed pro-Nazi newsreels to the masses. Volker Schlöndorff, the director of 'The Tin Drum,' which won an Academy Award in 1980, remembers meeting directors in the 1960s who had worked for the Nazis. Many were under the mistaken impression that they'd fooled the system by making escapist fare. 'They had played right into Goebbels's plan,' Schlöndorff said in a phone interview. 'He didn't want straight propaganda. He wanted something more devious than that. Many of the actors and directors had no idea they were helping the Nazis.' In the novel, Pabst starts off physically repulsed by the mere idea of working for the Reich, but gradually comes around. It beats life in a concentration camp, his other option, and the regime places his mother in a comfortable home for seniors. He and his family eat well. He gains cachet. As the war ends, Pabst has made two films, 'The Comedians' (1941) and 'Paracelsus' (1943) — yes, those are real movies — and he has devolved into a state of moral derangement. Scrambling to finish 'The Molander Case,' which was filmed in Prague, he desperately demands extras to serve as the audience for a scene set at a classical music venue. The next day he is directing a startled group of starving Jews, ferried in from the nearby Theresienstadt transit camp, who have been quickly fitted with appropriate costumes. 'The Molander Case' is real, too, though it went missing and has never been shown. As Kehlmann says in an afterword, little is known about its production, so the appearance of these doomed extras is an invention of the novel. What's certain is that camp prisoners appeared in other Nazi-era films, one of which Pabst co-directed with Leni Riefenstahl, a Hitler favorite. 'The studios in Berlin and Prague were surrounded by barracks filled with prisoners, and the film industry used slave labor on the sets, with kids as young as 10 years old,' Kehlmann said. 'Pabst must have used 10-year-old slave laborers. I don't see much difference between that and what happens in the novel.' Moral and financial corruption were endemic in the Reich. Kehlmann's paternal grandparents survived because a Nazi official swung by every month and left with a piece of furniture, a bribe just large enough to get their file regularly placed at the bottom of a pile. Most of Kehlmann's relatives perished in the Holocaust. We met the day after Germany's parliamentary elections, in which the hard-right Alternative for Germany party had over-performed, winning 20 percent of the vote. Kehlmann greeted the news with equanimity. The AfD would not join the ruling coalition, he predicted — correctly, it turned out — because there remains in his home country a powerful social stigma against extremist politicians, something he finds alarmingly absent in the U.S. At a dinner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art not long ago, he sat next to a man who proudly identified himself as a major Trump donor. By Kehlmann's lights, the Republican Party is now demonstrably more dangerous than the AfD. Deep-pocketed members of the party are mixing in the highest echelons, he said, even though they support an administration posing an existential threat to democracy. 'Everybody says that society here is too polarized and too fractured,' he said. 'But maybe on the level of the really wealthy, it's really not fractured and polarized enough.' American friends tell Kehlmann that he's being alarmist. But if you grow up in a country where the guardrails failed, he said, you appreciate the fragility of guardrails. 'For us visa- and green-card holders, free speech is already practically suspended,' he said. 'Lawyers are advising us to not go to demonstrations, and the media is telling us to delete all messages not favorable to Trump from our phones before we try to enter the U.S., otherwise we might be turned back or even disappear into detention. 'Immediately I'm thinking, can it be bad for me to say something like this to The New York Times? Which, I think, proves my point.'
