Kehlmann’s haunting novel 'The Director' uses Austrian filmmaker GW Pabst’s story during the Third Reich to ask how far we’ll go to save our skins — whether back in Nazi Germany or as bombs fall on Iran, writes Dr Rosemary Sorensen.
HOW MUCH do you know about Pabst?
Not the American beer company, which is actually now a Russian company since it was bought by a sort-of Russian-American businessman in 2014, and which still claims it’s more than just a beverage: it is a symbol of community, nostalgia, and authentic beer enjoyment that has stood the test of time.
Not that Pabst. (Although that Pabst story is pretty interesting, as it’s about how a company that traded on its confected image of all-American hominess had to find a way to avoid mention of Russia at a time when Ukraine was being threatened, again.)
Our Pabst is GW, the Austrian film director, who discovered both Greta Garbo (The Joyless Street) and Louise Brooks (Pandora’s Box), who is often mistaken for having directed Metropolis (that was Fritz Lang) and is remembered as one of the greats of German cinema. And a Nazi propagandist. Or just a bloke who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and, as novelist Daniel Kehlmann puts it, “susceptible to the seduction of an authoritarian regime”.
Kehlmann’s novel, The Director, was published in Germany in 2023, at a time when he thought the return of Donald Trump was impossible. With the English translation now published, there’s a lot of interest in this fictionalised portrait of an admired filmmaker and how we might consider his legacy in light of his own history.
Like Russian directors, who must choose between fleeing or staying and compromising, Americans are, Kehlmann says, “getting into a situation like that”.
Kehlmann told a film buffs site:
“There’s no way to deny it. If you saw the last Oscar ceremony, all these people who used to be so vocal about political issues suddenly didn’t have anything to say.”
So, Kehlmann’s novel is about the art of compromise. He doesn’t judge, but he does make very clear what the cost of that compromise is. Morally and spiritually, as well as practically.
Unfortunately, for a biographer, but fortunately for this novelist, there’s not a lot about Pabst, beyond the bare facts of the movies he made.
Kehlmann said in an interview earlier this month that, influenced by his family background and his interest in film, he was thinking about writing a novel about silent films and so was researching Georg Wilhelm Pabst:
“Then I came upon the fact that he’d returned to Germany after making a film in Hollywood and then made films for the Nazis. I thought this was unbelievable. I’d never heard a story like that.”
Why did a man who despised the Nazis (that much is known) return to Germany, when getting out of Germany was so difficult and staying so dangerous for so many creative people? That’s the complex question that The Director aims not to answer but to challenge us with.
Said Kehlmann:
“I felt that this is my entry as a storyteller into the dark world of the Nazis.”
That story starts in Hollywood, with a riotous scene, completely imagined, where Pabst and his wife are guests at a party hosted by movie moneymen, the big studio bosses who dictate what’s made, who writes the scripts and what actors get the parts. No matter what Pabst says in his broken English, no one listens to him.
But the novel itself actually starts with an even more riotous scene set in latter-day America, where a fictional former assistant director, now old and with dementia, has been brought into a TV studio as a guest on a popular interview program. The TV host is apoplectic with rage that this confused old man can’t answer his questions about working with the late, great GW Pabst and keeps repeating the one story he remembers about Greta Garbo.
It mirrors a later episode in Germany, where Pabst’s mother is in a home for elderly people with dementia. In both scenes, there’s a kind of rhapsody of madness as the old and demented infuriate but also, are outdone by crazy people, whether in the fakery of the American TV studio or the perverse authoritarianism of the expensive German asylum.
At the heart of the narrative is a lost film, possibly Pabst’s masterpiece, that Kehlmann imagines haunts Pabst until his death, aged 81, in Vienna. Despite his dozens of movies and his post-war acceptance as a director both of film and opera, despite being the first to make a film about Hitler, called The Last Ten Days and promoted as ‘The true, terrifying story of Hitler’s last flaming days’, Kehlmann’s Pabst is empty and tragic, and the compromise has cost him in deeply personal ways.
Like a film, the novel is episodic, with set-piece scenes that are frightening and comic at once. There’s a book club that Pabst’s wife, Trude, joins to try to fit in, where the women only read one Nazi-approved novelist and she has to find ways to praise the dull prose. There’s the meeting with Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, where the offer too good to refuse (at risk of being sent to a camp) is made to Pabst.
It’s worth noting here that Kehlmann has made a film about Kafka, so he’s well-schooled in the black humour of nightmarish authoritarianism.
There’s a scene narrated in the first person by one of those British actors who became known as Lord Haw-Haw, broadcasting propaganda back to England. Thus does The Director remind us of the awful Second World War, the Nazi’s obsessive hatred of and attempt to annihilate Jews and, crucially, all the ways people were forced to collaborate in the evil, whether by doing nothing or by assisting, to save their own skins.
Hello, Israel. Hello, America. Hello, Europe. And, from a distance, but surely that’s no excuse: Hello, Australia. Standing by and saying nothing, or, worse still, as some commentators have done this very week, backing the Israeli and American assault on Iran as morally justifiable "self-defence", rusts the soul. This astonishing novel is horribly relevant.
Dr Rosemary Sorensen is an IA columnist, journalist and founder of the Bendigo Writers Festival.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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