‘The Director’ review: Novel fills in gaps of G.W. Pabst’s life

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.”

Author Daniel Kehlmann.

(Heike Steinweg)

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.