The Director, inspired by a true story, details one man's moral compromises in artistic creation

Smarting after a Hollywood flop, Austrian-born director G. W. Pabst, a Weimar cinema pioneer, returned to Europe. Trapped in Austria while visiting his mother when WWII broke out, he became enmeshed in Goebbels’ propaganda machine.

Kehlmann (Tyll, 2020) uses this outline to construct a dark account of one man’s descent into fascist complicity, a path strewn with surrealistic scenarios and chilling self-justifications in favor of art.

The perspective shifts with each chapter, which keeps readers hyper-focused on each nightmarish step. The family’s Nazi-sympathizing caretaker at their Austrian home tyrannizes them; Pabst’s son Jakob begins bullying others. Pabst’s despairing wife, Trude, reluctantly joins an oppressive book club.

Ambitious yet passive, Pabst voices objections to working for the Reich but soon falls into line. “But once you get used to it and know the rules,” a colleague tells him, “you feel almost free.” The prologue foreshadows a mystery about his making of the film The Molander Case, and the reveal is shocking. 

While it takes many fictional liberties, Kehlmann’s novel is purposefully unnerving and timely.

The Director, translated by Ross Benjamin, will be published by Simon & Schuster/Summit Books on May 6th, and I wrote this review for the April issue of Booklist.

The original German title is Lichtspiel ("Light-Play"), an older term used to refer to motion pictures, but which also has symbolic meaning for this novel. You can read an illuminating interview with Kehlmann at Hungarian Literature Online. As hinted in the review and in the interview, if you're expecting a fictional biography of Pabst, be aware that the storyline does diverge from his real life (and his family's) in multiple instances.