‘The Director' Review: The Mystery of G.W. Pabst

Wall Street Journal

02-05-2025

In the 1920s, the Viennese moviemaking pioneer Berthold Viertel prophesied the radical potential of film, calling it 'an immense political tool of the future.' That future came sooner than he imagined. A scant decade later, after the National Socialists took control of Germany in January 1933, they used footage of the Reichstag fire damage and nationwide book burnings to whip up enthusiasm for the persecution of Jews and political opponents. Scores of Berlin-based filmmakers fled the new autocracy, and many found themselves in Hollywood. Among them was the Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who was not Jewish but stood firmly in opposition to the Third Reich.
Unlike some of his peers, Pabst did not end his odyssey in Hollywood, and his unusual trajectory has caught the interest of the prolific German-language novelist Daniel Kehlmann. Two of Mr. Kehlmann's novels, 'Measuring the World' (2006) and 'Tyll' (2020), juggle similar elements—history and fabulism, technology and art, grotesquerie and comedy. Like Pabst, the protagonists in those books are forced to maneuver through European cataclysms: the Napoleonic wars in 'Measuring,' the 17th-century conflict known as the Thirty Years' War in 'Tyll.' With 'The Director,' the author pushes his affinity for reimagining dark historical moments into yet more provocative territory.
Our first glimpse of Pabst in the novel finds him in a meeting with a pair of self-assured American studio executives. It is 1933 and the director has recently arrived in Los Angeles, where he's constantly being praised, along with F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, as the best of the émigré filmmakers. Nicknamed 'the Red Pabst' for his gritty depictions of urban poverty, he stands out for his groundbreaking editing techniques and his sensitivity with actresses—he's had successes with Greta Garbo in 'The Joyless Street' (1925) and Louise Brooks in 'Pandora's Box' and 'Diary of a Lost Girl' (both 1929). But applause in Hollywood is often cheap, even for its European geniuses. The young Warner Bros. executives, like nearly everyone Pabst meets, briskly mistake him as the director of 'Metropolis' (nope—that's Lang) or 'Nosferatu' (wrong again—Murnau). His humiliations intensify when the picture they goad him into making, 'A Modern Hero' (1934), is torpedoed by harsh reviews. It will be the only film he makes in America.
The novel follows the ego-bruised Pabst as he leaves Hollywood for good in 1935. By August 1939 he is back in Austria, which Hitler had annexed the previous year. The policeman checking his papers upon his re-entry asks how he feels about the country's new leadership, and Pabst answers: 'I'm not a political person. I make films.' But it's an important question, as Pabst will go on to spend the war working under the repressive supervision of the Reich. Why did an artist who turned his back on a fascist regime then reverse course and acquiesce to it? Nobody really knows, and it's this mystery that has provoked Mr. Kehlmann's curiosity. The real-life Pabst maintained that he had gone to Austria on family business but was stuck there when the war broke out, his tickets for a U.S.-bound ocean liner folded uselessly in his pocket. Film scholars who contested this explanation include Lotte Eisner, the doyenne of Expressionist cinema, who once remembered telling Pabst that 'the man with the perfect alibi is always the guilty one.'