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The Guardian
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Director by Daniel Kehlmann review – the author's best work yet
Georg Wilhelm Pabst was one of the most influential film directors in Weimar Germany, probably best known on the international stage for discovering Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. His radical approach earned him the nickname of 'Red Pabst', and when Hitler was elected to power in 1933, Pabst reacted by taking his family to the United States. He intended to emigrate permanently, but what was supposed to have been a brief trip back to Austria to visit his sick mother saw Pabst detained inside the Third Reich for the duration of the second world war. This unfortunate turn of events had a dramatically detrimental effect, not only on Pabst's immediate situation but on his entire postwar career. Daniel Kehlmann has frequently used historical events as the basis for his fiction, most famously in his breakout 2005 novel Measuring the World, which draws on the work of the German explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt, and more recently in 2017's Tyll, which brings to life the capricious exploits of the legendary jester Till Eulenspiegel during the thirty years' war. But Kehlmann's works are so much more than fictionalised biographies, and his new novel The Director is as imaginative and bold in its use of editing as Pabst's own movies. In the opening chapter Franz Wilzek, the assistant director on Pabst's lost 1945 film The Molander Case, is being interviewed on TV about his life and career. Wilzek, who is in the early stages of dementia, insists that this elusive film was never shot. The underhum of hostility around the subject from both the interviewer and his producer hints at something unspoken, the memory of an event that Wilzek either cannot or will not revisit. But Franz Wilzek did not really exist, and the film he is said to have worked on was left unfinished. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion This is just one of the novel's divergences from recorded history, and anyone looking to uncover the details of Pabst's life will find Kehlmann an unreliable narrator. But nothing in Kehlmann's world is accidental, and The Director is more interested in the unstable no man's land between facts and the truth than in any point-by-point rehash of 'what really happened'. Following a meeting with Joseph Goebbels that ricochets queasily between horror and comedy, Pabst tries to convince himself that 'all he'd had to do was make a hand gesture and say a few words'. Meanwhile, in the decaying rural mansion that has become his prison, his son Jakob – a fictional amalgamation of Pabst's two real sons, Michael and Peter – is forced by schoolfriends to enter a bottomless cellar where the Pabsts' black-shirted caretaker Jerzabek scuttles in the cobwebby darkness like a giant spider. Trude Pabst – an actor and aspiring screenwriter before taking on the sacrificial duties of Great Man's Wife – is caught in a web of her own, increasingly finding solace in alcohol, if only to avoid the society of her Nazi neighbours. Pabst himself seeks refuge in work, taking on subjects that are 'German enough' not to offend the censor. The films he creates offer their own coded criticisms of the regime, though in the eyes of the postwar commentariat, his resistance is too covert, too artistic. The novel's denouement takes us finally to the film set of The Molander Case, relocated to Prague in order to escape the allied bombing. Pabst is determined to finish the film by whatever means necessary, even as more and more of his support staff are forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht. He insists to Wilzek that 'without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film would not exist.' This argument about the ultimate supremacy of art has been the position Pabst has occupied all along; in the midst of the falling bombs and the fleeing civilians, the teenage soldiers and the advancing Russians, it is an argument that is forced to its utmost and must surely break. Even at this distance of 80 years, the sense of claustrophobia and ultimate folly is all encompassing. One feels an aching sympathy for Pabst, caught in a situation so far beyond his control that 'when he tried to breathe in, there was only icy water, and in the distance, he knew, monsters were moving … black and many-armed, at home in the darkness'. It would seem that Kehlmann also is prepared to cut him some slack, saving his bitterest condemnation for Leni Riefenstahl, who really did use concentration camp inmates as extras, and for Alfred Karrasch, the author of the novel on which The Molander Case is based and who, unlike Pabst, really did espouse Nazi ideology in his work. Kehlmann's characterisation of both is hilarious, merciless and brilliant. The Director has all the darkness, shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms' fairytale: it is Kehlmann's best work yet. The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin, is published by Quercus (£22). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The strange story of the visionary director trapped in Goebbels's fist
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.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Highlight Communications (ETR:HLG) shareholders have endured a 68% loss from investing in the stock five years ago
Highlight Communications AG (ETR:HLG) shareholders will doubtless be very grateful to see the share price up 47% in the last quarter. But that can't change the reality that over the longer term (five years), the returns have been really quite dismal. The share price has failed to impress anyone , down a sizable 68% during that time. So we're not so sure if the recent bounce should be celebrated. Of course, this could be the start of a turnaround. With that in mind, it's worth seeing if the company's underlying fundamentals have been the driver of long term performance, or if there are some discrepancies. Check out our latest analysis for Highlight Communications Given that Highlight Communications didn't make a profit in the last twelve months, we'll focus on revenue growth to form a quick view of its business development. When a company doesn't make profits, we'd generally hope to see good revenue growth. Some companies are willing to postpone profitability to grow revenue faster, but in that case one would hope for good top-line growth to make up for the lack of earnings. Over half a decade Highlight Communications reduced its trailing twelve month revenue by 2.5% for each year. That's not what investors generally want to see. The share price decline of 11% compound, over five years, is understandable given the company is losing money, and revenue is moving in the wrong direction. The chance of imminent investor enthusiasm for this stock seems slimmer than Louise Brooks. Ultimately, it may be worth watching - should revenue pick up, the share price might follow. You can see how earnings and revenue have changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values). Take a more thorough look at Highlight Communications' financial health with this free report on its balance sheet. Highlight Communications shareholders are down 44% for the year, but the market itself is up 16%. However, keep in mind that even the best stocks will sometimes underperform the market over a twelve month period. Unfortunately, last year's performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 11% over the last half decade. Generally speaking long term share price weakness can be a bad sign, though contrarian investors might want to research the stock in hope of a turnaround. I find it very interesting to look at share price over the long term as a proxy for business performance. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. For example, we've discovered 3 warning signs for Highlight Communications (1 can't be ignored!) that you should be aware of before investing here. Of course Highlight Communications may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of growth stocks. Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on German exchanges. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Sign in to access your portfolio
