In Daniel Kehlmann’s Latest Novel, Everyone’s a Collaborator
Can a historical novel be morally serious, even tragic, and also playful at the same time? For a writer of fiction, history is a dangerous thing to play with—one doesn’t want to be trivial or false. History itself might render judgment. Yet Daniel Kehlmann’s new book, “The Director” (Summit), suggests that such a combination is not only possible but, in the hands of a writer with saturnine wit, exhilarating. “The Director” is a complex entertainment—a sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura.
Kehlmann has re-created the filmmaking career of G. W. Pabst, the brilliant Austrian director who, in the early Nazi period, made it out of Europe to America. But then, calamitously, Pabst went back. Had he stayed in Hollywood, he might have experienced the relative freedom enjoyed by such émigré directors as Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and Billy Wilder. Instead, he was forced to accept mediocre scripts, and was hampered in his use of the techniques that had made him famous, his moving camera and dynamic editing. He was hardly the only one who got trapped. Kehlmann, the leading German novelist of his generation, holds his ancestors to strict account. Virtually none of the Europeans he writes about—film people, writers, technicians, ordinary men and women, by implication the entire culture—is capable of freeing himself or herself from acquiescence and complicity.
But Kehlmann the moralist is also an irrepressible trickster, an endlessly fertile maker of fictional modes. He moves from one character’s point of view to another—no one could accuse him of making judgments about moral worth at a distance. He jumps from realism to expressionism, from sombre representation to scenes that might have appeared in the classic German movies being made when Pabst was a young man. Like the most famous of all such films, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920), the novel begins and ends in a madhouse. Has the entire saga been no more than an off-kilter dream, a distorted fantasy? No, the movies in the novel are real, the suffering is real, the evasions and duplicities are real. The book combines history, biography, and detailed dramatizations of filmmaking; it joins all of these to the active suggestion that, under Nazism, German and Austrian life became an everyday version of the countries’ most tormented films from years before.
The basic elements of Pabst’s story are rendered clearly enough. The man who made a star out of Greta Garbo (he cast her in “The Joyless Street,” in 1925) and then Louise Brooks (she dominated “Pandora’s Box,” in 1929), and who then made one of the great films about the First World War (“Westfront 1918,” 1930), finds himself looking for work in nineteen-thirties Hollywood. He’s lost, dazzled by sunshine, insulted by people who confuse him with Lang and F. W. Murnau. He meets with studio producers who ignore his complaints about a script they want him to shoot, shouting, “Great! . . . Great!” no matter how negative his remarks. The happy American insensibility of “Great! Great!” becomes a fatuous form of mastery. Pabst makes the film they want, “A Modern Hero.” It premières in 1934, and flops, just as he knew it would.
His humiliation is not yet complete. Both Garbo and Brooks, the goddesses he created a few years earlier, refuse to appear in a large-scale drama he is trying to get off the ground. The ineffable Garbo, seeking anonymity and withdrawal while manipulating everyone around her, arranging the light in her house so she appears to be an emanation of nature, enjoys turning him down. So does the implacably willful Brooks, the American girl with dancing eyes and lambent white flesh, the untrained actress whose palpably erotic performance in “Pandora’s Box” remains indelible in the memories of anyone who has seen it. Brooks, in her movies, lures men to their doom—or taunts men with her availability, only to refuse them. In “The Director,” we learn that, during the making of “Pandora’s Box,” she spent an hour with Pabst (“Forty minutes or so,” she says) that he still remembers years later. In a marvellously entertaining exchange between the two, Kehlmann evokes her tumultuous life as star and defiant kept woman. She’s brilliant, remorseless, annihilating others and herself. She tells him that he would immediately leave his wife and child if she so much as asked. Pabst, in his misery, knows that she is right.
Did it happen in just this way? Kehlmann draws on well-known situations and relationships, and then invents according to his fancy. There is an obvious predecessor for the liberties he takes: “Ragtime,” in which the novelist E. L. Doctorow threw together such historical figures as J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, and Houdini in a sensational fantasia of the American era before the First World War. “Ragtime” captures the United States as a modern democratic powerhouse in the making. “The Director” is about decline. Kehlmann exercises the same liberties as Doctorow, yet what holds his fictional whirlwind together is not sensation but an appalling portrait of Europe in a state of emotional and moral disintegration.
Pabst, abandoning Hollywood, departs for France, where he makes a few mediocre movies and drinks too much in meetings with vain and embittered German and Austrian émigrés. The scene of their gathering, with its hopeless and trivial talk, could be read as a sardonic reprise of an effervescent night at Rick’s Café, from “Casablanca.” In August, 1939, Pabst passes through neutral Switzerland and crosses into Austria in order to care for his failing mother, who lives in a castle owned by his family, in Tillmitsch. At the castle (really a large hunting lodge), the longtime servants, transformed by Nazism, abuse and dominate the Pabst family, force them into filthy rooms, serve them atrocious soup. The castle begins to resemble the evilly haunted dwellings of half a hundred Gothic movies, with perhaps a touch of Michael Haneke’s lethal mordancy in “The White Ribbon” added to the mix. Cruel and unaccountable events pile up, overwhelming any sense of normality. The war begins, and the Pabst family is trapped in the Third Reich.
As admirably rendered by the translator Ross Benjamin, Kehlmann’s style is sober and matter of fact, the sentences straightforward, undecorated by colorful words or difficult syntax. Kehlmann avoids simile and metaphor. The world is what it is—except when it isn’t. In some scenes, without much alteration in tone, reality slips away with a shudder. A ladder that Pabst is climbing in the castle’s study suddenly grows longer and more dangerous; a cellar beneath the building stretches on forever, leading to terrifying hidden chambers. In a grotesque and hilarious star appearance, “the minister,” Goebbels himself, who runs the film business from a Berlin office the size of an auditorium, enters the novel with satanic force. Goebbels offers Pabst great equipment, the best actors, and medical care. He also offers him a kitschy Nazi script and, as an alternative to coöperation, internment in a concentration camp. In his office, Goebbels jumps around like a wind-up toy. “New telephone!” he screams at adjutants after smashing his receiver. A replacement appears in exactly a minute and fourteen seconds. This madman is happy—indeed, he’s the one happy character in the novel. All the others are disastrously under threat in one way or another.
Kehlmann set his previous novel, “Tyll,” published in English in 2020, in the middle of the cataclysmic Thirty Years’ War. Parts of the book were devoted to religious fantasy, the doctrinaire blindness of an age in which faith dominated every aspect of life. Only Tyll—a shape-shifting magician and rogue—escapes the totalizing grasp of Christian rule. But in “The Director” no one escapes. Men and women respond to the Nazi dictatorship by becoming, at best, evasive and feebly self-justifying, at worst, morally broken. Their reality has been shredded; they are literally demoralized, with the exception of one man, Pabst’s assistant, a scrupulous fellow who goes mad with dismay. Even a women’s book-club session turns vicious when one reader utters the names “Preminger” and “Schnitzler,” two Jewish artists prominent in Vienna before Nazism.
The unsurprising news in “The Director” is that most of us fall short of moral heroism and will accommodate ourselves to power one way or another. Some of us even become rapt enthusiasts of the very things that had earlier repelled us. (See the career of Marco Rubio.) In the novel’s historical re-creation, is there an anxious note to Americans now losing themselves in accommodation? Kehlmann has spent a lot of time in the U.S., and he lives here now. It’s hard to believe that “The Director,” while looking to the past, is not also meant as prophecy or, at least, as a warning.
Pabst is an intelligent and cultivated man, sensitive to others’ needs—when he can satisfy needs of his own. He spends a day, for instance, coaxing and charming a stiff young actor out of his fears, and he gets a performance out of him. The director is a compound of desire and calculation—an artist, for sure, but an artist in a medium that requires large amounts of money from people in power. Pabst’s abasement proceeds by degrees. After accepting the deal that Goebbels forces on him, he makes some forgettable movies and finds himself working as an adviser to none other than Leni Riefenstahl, whom Pabst, back in 1929, had taught to act (a little) for her starring role in “The White Hell of Pitz Palu,” a “mountain film” that Pabst directed with Arnold Fanck.
In 1943, Riefenstahl, after her years as a state propagandist, is haplessly trying to complete a pet project, “Lowlands,” a film in which she stars (at the age of forty) as a Spanish peasant-girl dancer. But Riefenstahl cannot direct fiction; she cannot act. The scenes of poor Pabst trying to help her while suffering the glare of her implacable egocentricity are perhaps the funniest—and, in some ways, the saddest—in the novel. For her crowd scenes, Riefenstahl calls in some extras who are gaunt and beaten and very thirsty; Pabst hears that they come from a camp near Salzburg, but he’s licked, and he says very little.
At the end of the war, as Nazi control is waning, Pabst has his run of Barrandov Studios, in Czechoslovakia. Energized, even electrified, he turns a Nazi-approved hack novel about a stolen violin into a personal film, a daring experiment called “The Molander Case.” The camera tracks through a concert hall and rises on a crane, and Pabst is where he wants to be, up high, looking down, shooting in such a way that he can cut the individual shots to the movement, creating an irresistible flow of energy, just as he had in his masterpieces from fifteen years earlier. He is so excited, so determined, that he calls to the set a group of extras just as exhausted and damaged as those corralled into Riefenstahl’s film.
“The Molander Case” was indeed shot by Pabst in 1945, but the footage has disappeared. Kehlmann creates a thrilling version of how the film was made and then a perverse and haunting account of what happened to it. He creates the passion to make art at whatever cost, even at the brink of exhaustion and madness. From the beginning, the novel has posed the questions: Is art of supreme value? Is it more important than the betrayals an artist may commit in order to achieve it? More explicitly: Did Pabst win back his honor, at least partly, by making a marvellous film that no one has seen? It’s a strange question—teasing, even hurtful, since it’s unanswerable. The issue of Pabst’s true worth has been lost to historical catastrophe in a way that even a great novelist cannot recover. ♦
