Booksology If movies are a place where dreams come true and nightmares are made real, what do films say about history? And can the pursuit of art as a civilizing influence ever mitigate the horrors taking place outside the studio set? Austrian-German writer Daniel Kehlmann confronts the legacy of art and artists complicit with the Third Reich in “The Director,” a taut, unflinching historical novel focused on G.W. Pabst, a European filmmaker in World War II.
Toward the end of the novel, as complications swell on a movie set, an actor confronts in a moment of candor: “But don’t you find it strange, Pabst, that we’re making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse? Such a … work of art?”
The two are working on “The Molander Case,” a sentimental film about a lost violin, in a country occupied by Nazis who are underwriting the production. Resigned to these conditions, Pabst replies, “Times are always strange. 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.” As Kehlmann makes clear in his sharply observed novel, platitudes such as these cannot ameliorate the moral rot of fascism.
Kehlmann bases his story in certain historical facts and figures. Pabst was born in what is now the Czech Republic in 1885 and his career bridged both silent films and the advent of sound in motion pictures as well as the historical and political drama of the 1930s-40s. After a successful career creating realist films and discovering talents such as Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, his attempt to succeed in Hollywood failed. Disenchanted and running out of options, Pabst returned to Europe. From there, his stalled career found dismal achievements in France followed by a return to Austria at the time of its occupation by Germany.
This led to Pabst’s collaboration with the Nazi regime, a stain that lingers even after repeated attempts to revive his career and renounce his involvement. The book’s fictional imagination of an inexplicable life caught in the jaws of the 20th century’s nastiest moments echoes with its protagonist’s dismissal of responsibility. Throughout the book, Pabst parrots, “When you’re making a movie, you’re always in a bind. That’s the normal state of affairs.” But there’s nothing normal about submitting to propaganda, no matter how familiar is has become.
Kehlmann makes no bones about the seedy underbelly of celluloid glamour. The book opens decades after World War II with Franz, an elderly former director, shuffled from the Abendruh Sanatorium in Austria to a studio for an appearance on a Sunday morning television program. Franz has a shaky grasp of memory and isn’t wholly present. Why is he featured as a guest on this absurd show? After some banal biographical questions, he’s asked about “The Molander Case.”
“That film. It doesn’t exist; it was planned, but never shot,” he stresses.
Agitated, as the host presses him, Franz disassociates. In a stream of conscious passage, Kehlmann skillfully captures Franz’s muscle memory as a filmmaker, relying upon cameras and monitors, as his mind then leaps to memories of “black-and-white people in a concert hall.” While time collapses between the past and present, Franz shakes with the stark facts of the past.
The forced pleasantries and awkward exchanges between host and guest devolve into shouting as the interview is cut short. Rosenkranz, the smirking production assistant who scheduled Franz on the program, is fired, but he couldn’t care less. He’s met his objective. “My father was there,” he tells Franz. The memory of the film has been passed down from father to son. This humiliation is his revenge. Confused, in need of a bathroom, Franz attempts to explain himself when Rosenkranz interrupts him. What was this film? Where is it now? This mystery collides with other suppressed histories and brutal compromises in the name of survival and art in this incisive, sweeping novel.
Launching from this arresting opening chapter, Kehlmann takes the reader back to 1930s Hollywood, where Pabst, far from home and out of his element, flounders. The novel sweeps past encounters with legendary divas and fellow exiled directors, following Pabst, his wife, and son back to Austria just as the borders close. With a wide cast of desperate and maniacal characters, consumed by delusion, “The Director” explores the moral and creative limits of a man who says to his wife, “Maybe it’s not so important what one wants. The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in.”
Though art is assuredly a beacon of hope in bleak times, a dogged adherence to its unassailable worth under Nazi occupation warped all who participate in its disturbing project. Editing this film with Pabst, Franz asks, “Could one have been mistaken, imagined it, could one decide to have imagined it, could the memories be false, simply because one wanted them to be?” Kehlmann’s mystery forcefully animates the cost — artistic and moral — of collaboration.
THE DIRECTOR
By Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin
S&S/Summit Books, 352 pages, $28.99
Lauren LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
