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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.
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Oscars, eyebrows and accents: Anjelica Huston's best roles - ranked!
Wielding a Belarusian accent like a weapon, Huston joins the Wickiverse as The Director, head of the Ruska Roma syndicate, who is forced to help Wick when every assassin in Manhattan is trying to kill him. She can also be seen bullying a dancer, a taste of things to come since The Director will be back very soon, in Ballerina, the new Wick spin-off starring Ana de Armas (out on 6 June). In 1949 New York, a Polish refugee finds himself married to three women. Paul Mazursky's adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's tragicomedy is like straight-faced Woody Allen, and Huston nabbed her second Academy Award nomination for playing Tamara, a cynical yet sensitive concentration camp survivor. A pity the film doesn't revolve around her instead of her less compelling husband. Drew Barrymore makes an adorable proto-feminist heroine in this daft but charming revisionist Cinderella. Meanwhile, Huston's eyebrows are working overtime, but she still imbues her wicked stepmother with more nuance than we usually see in a panto villain. If only Disney had taken this as the model for their live-action fairytale remakes. In Woody Allen's darkest film, Huston plays Dolores, a flight attendant whose lover (Martin Landau) takes drastic action when she threatens to ruin his marriage. Allen himself stars in a lighter parallel thread, but it's the Dostoevskian half that packs the punch here, helped by Huston's fearlessly uningratiating performance as a woman at the end of her tether. Stephen Frears' film of Jim Thompson's novel about a trio of small-time scammers in Los Angeles is powered by Huston's Oscar-nominated performance as a bleached-blond con artist whose feelings towards her adult son (John Cusack) may be more than just maternal. It's scrappy, lowlife Greek tragedy, capped by Huston's gut-wrenching howl of despair. In the first of her five films for Wes Anderson, Huston plays Etheline, wife of a neglectful patriarch (Gene Hackman), and holds her own amid the wacky characters and directorial quirks by playing it low-key, almost naturalistic. No wonder her accountant (Danny Glover) is smitten. Was there ever such a delightfully romantic couple as Huston and Raul Julia as Morticia and Gomez Addams? Barry Sonnenfeld's directing debut is little more than a procession of deliciously morbid sight gags and punchlines ripped straight from the original New Yorker cartoons, but who cares when Huston is giving a masterclass in deadpan delivery, and looking fabulous with it? 'Don't torture yourself, Gomez. That's my job.' On the set of John Huston's black comedy, Anjelica overheard someone saying, 'Her father is the director, her boyfriend's the star, and she has no talent.' She duly silenced any whispers of nepotism by stealing every scene she was in, as Maerose, a scheming mafia princess trying to win back her ex (Jack Nicholson, with whom she had a long-term relationship). She was the third generation of Hustons to bag an Academy Award. In a perfect world, Huston would have won another Oscar for her formidable German-accented turn as the Grand High Witch in Nicolas Roeg's film of Roald Dahl's kiddie horror-comedy. Roeg insisted she wear a 'sexy' dress, and before she removes her wig to reveal her true witchy self in all its Jim Henson Creature Shop hideousness, she does indeed look splendid, as well as terrifying. Huston, who grew up in her father's house in Galway, fits right in with the Irish ensemble cast of the director's small but perfectly formed final film, adapted (by her brother Tony) from a story by James Joyce, set during and after a party in snowy Dublin, 1904. She is deeply affecting as a woman whose melancholy reminiscence of a long-lost love triggers a bittersweet epiphany in her husband. 'One by one, we are all becoming shades,' he reflects. Sublime.
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.
Washington Post
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘The Director' by Daniel Kehlmann book review
'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. 📚 Follow Books Follow '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
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.'
