The shocking tale of a filmmaker forced to work with the Nazis

Sydney Morning Herald

a day ago

FICTION
The Director
Daniel Kehlmann
Hachette, $34.99
Daniel Kehlmann is the German writer who is found thrilling wherever he is read. Now he has written a novel about inspired by the life of G.W Pabst, the great filmmaker of Pandora's Box with Louise Brooks, the one who not only fled the Nazis for Hollywood but actually came back. Here is his sketch of Pabst's meeting with the great lord of Nazi propaganda who remains nameless but we know we are in the presence of that uncanny monster Joseph Goebbels with his 'famous high-pitched voice with the Rhenish accent … in his gaunt strangely youthful face …'
Goebbels within a few moments is a great monster forcing Pabst into a blurted, terror-struck confession of his communism, of his sins, forgivable because of his weakness.
The Director is a dazzling and compelling pseudo-biography which rides the deathly riderless horse of what it was like for an artist of great talent to get into bed with a culture of iniquity. The impossible conundrum he tries to ride is the insinuated and insidious myth that the Nazis, as represented by Goebbels, were interested in entertainment and therefore potentially in film that was art, where Stalin's Russia was a mere propaganda machine.
The account of Pabst working on film in Nazi Germany is enthralling, credible and ghastly. There are portraits of the ones who got away, of Fritz Lang, Fred Zinneman, Greta Garbo.
Pabst leaves Germany for the US when the war begins, but returns to Austria with his wife to find a nursing home for his mother. They're headed for Switzerland when war traps them in Germany. What follows is a devastating depiction of how the human face of art can survive in a regime corrupt at every level, oscillating between mediocrity and the riddling abyss of evil. There is a Nazi caretaker who can't even speak proper German but the words that roll in his mouth are sinister beyond belief.
So we get book club talk, opinionated women chattering under the aegis of the swastika. Then again we get Pabst saying lucidly enough that art is the one true thing that remains in the face of the horror of the world that always in practice has to deal with moral ghastliness, as Shakespeare had to deal with Elizabeth I.
The Director is a brilliant portrait of a terrible but intimately recognisable society told in scintillating streamlined sections. There's Pabst's teenage son, who works out you've got to be cruel if you want to make it at school, and who becomes a frisky young Hitler youth, happy-go-lucky with his mates and keen to enlist.