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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.
Wall Street Journal
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Director' Review: The Mystery of G.W. Pabst
In the 1920s, the Viennese moviemaking pioneer Berthold Viertel prophesied the radical potential of film, calling it 'an immense political tool of the future.' That future came sooner than he imagined. A scant decade later, after the National Socialists took control of Germany in January 1933, they used footage of the Reichstag fire damage and nationwide book burnings to whip up enthusiasm for the persecution of Jews and political opponents. Scores of Berlin-based filmmakers fled the new autocracy, and many found themselves in Hollywood. Among them was the Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who was not Jewish but stood firmly in opposition to the Third Reich. Unlike some of his peers, Pabst did not end his odyssey in Hollywood, and his unusual trajectory has caught the interest of the prolific German-language novelist Daniel Kehlmann. Two of Mr. Kehlmann's novels, 'Measuring the World' (2006) and 'Tyll' (2020), juggle similar elements—history and fabulism, technology and art, grotesquerie and comedy. Like Pabst, the protagonists in those books are forced to maneuver through European cataclysms: the Napoleonic wars in 'Measuring,' the 17th-century conflict known as the Thirty Years' War in 'Tyll.' With 'The Director,' the author pushes his affinity for reimagining dark historical moments into yet more provocative territory. Our first glimpse of Pabst in the novel finds him in a meeting with a pair of self-assured American studio executives. It is 1933 and the director has recently arrived in Los Angeles, where he's constantly being praised, along with F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, as the best of the émigré filmmakers. Nicknamed 'the Red Pabst' for his gritty depictions of urban poverty, he stands out for his groundbreaking editing techniques and his sensitivity with actresses—he's had successes with Greta Garbo in 'The Joyless Street' (1925) and Louise Brooks in 'Pandora's Box' and 'Diary of a Lost Girl' (both 1929). But applause in Hollywood is often cheap, even for its European geniuses. The young Warner Bros. executives, like nearly everyone Pabst meets, briskly mistake him as the director of 'Metropolis' (nope—that's Lang) or 'Nosferatu' (wrong again—Murnau). His humiliations intensify when the picture they goad him into making, 'A Modern Hero' (1934), is torpedoed by harsh reviews. It will be the only film he makes in America. The novel follows the ego-bruised Pabst as he leaves Hollywood for good in 1935. By August 1939 he is back in Austria, which Hitler had annexed the previous year. The policeman checking his papers upon his re-entry asks how he feels about the country's new leadership, and Pabst answers: 'I'm not a political person. I make films.' But it's an important question, as Pabst will go on to spend the war working under the repressive supervision of the Reich. Why did an artist who turned his back on a fascist regime then reverse course and acquiesce to it? Nobody really knows, and it's this mystery that has provoked Mr. Kehlmann's curiosity. The real-life Pabst maintained that he had gone to Austria on family business but was stuck there when the war broke out, his tickets for a U.S.-bound ocean liner folded uselessly in his pocket. Film scholars who contested this explanation include Lotte Eisner, the doyenne of Expressionist cinema, who once remembered telling Pabst that 'the man with the perfect alibi is always the guilty one.'
