06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Review: ‘The Director,' by Daniel Kehlmann
THE DIRECTOR, by Daniel Kehlmann; translated by Ross Benjamin
Movie stars and Nazis are irresistible ingredients in any book. 'The Director,' Daniel Kehlmann's smartly entertaining new novel about the great Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, offers both, detailing their once intimate, often symbiotic ties. Here, Greta Garbo and Joseph Goebbels have just two degrees of separation between them.
Pabst (1885-1967), along with Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, was one of Weimar cinema's big three — the most cosmopolitan as well as politically engaged of the trio. Considered a leftist, Pabst achieved renown for a series of socially conscious and sexually frank silent movies, including 'Secrets of a Soul' (1926), which fiddled with Freud, and 'Pandora's Box' (1929), the film that established its star Louise Brooks as the era's most devastating flapper.
Red Pabst, as he was called early in his career, made a brilliant adjustment to sound with the antiwar film 'Westfront 1918' (1930) and 'The Threepenny Opera' (1931). But he was a bad fit in Hollywood, where, speaking little English, he arrived by way of France after the Nazis came to power. He then haplessly returned to Austria, now part of the Reich, perhaps to visit his ailing mother. Trapped by the outbreak of war, he remained there, making several apolitical 'prestige' films for the Nazis and forever compromising his reputation.
Pabst was 'a precise and exacting artist,' according to the film scholar Eric Rentschler, as well as 'an extremely private person who did not readily divulge his thoughts.' Kehlmann's Pabst is a gifted psychologist when it comes to directing actors but a stranger to himself in all other matters, a genius who thinks in motion pictures but is unable to direct the flow of his own life.
