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Spectator
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Ambition and delusion: The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann, reviewed
As bombs rain down on Nazi-occupied Prague, Georg Wilhelm Pabst shoots a film – a romantic courtroom drama adapted from a pulp novel by a creepy Third Reich hack, Alfred Karrasch. Although the leading man finds it strange to make any movie 'in the middle of the apocalypse', his director insists that 'art is always out of place'. In retrospect, Pabst assures the star, it will look like 'the only thing that mattered'. The discoverer of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, and the director of The Joyless Street, Lulu, Westfront 1918 and other prewar masterpieces, Pabst really did attempt to film The Molander Case in Prague in 1944-45. The bizarre, chaotic shoot furnishes Daniel Kehlmann with the climactic scenes of this novel, inspired by the great director's compromised career. Molander, in which Pabst sought to redeem a slice of Nazi tripe and show that 'human life is unfulfilled', did not survive. But would even the most sublime of films have erased the 'diabolical madness' of its origin? In Kehlmann's telling, Pabst even agrees to enlist a concert hall of extras from inmates of the Terezín concentration camp. So far as we know, Kehlmann invents that particular atrocity. But he does not alter the against-the-tide trajectory that Pabst actually chose in 1939. After years in Hollywood among fellow émigrés, the Vienna-born film-maker returned to care for his sick mother at the ramshackle Austrian 'castle' – more a run-down hunting lodge – that his global renown had bought. Trapped by the outbreak of war, 'Red Pabst' somehow agreed to make movies for the Nazi film industry. We don't need propaganda from you, urges Dr Goebbels, but 'deep films for deep people' to counter America's 'cheap commercial trash'. Seduced by 'good scripts, high budgets and the best actors', Pabst for a while fools himself that he will stay true to his gift. Obey the rules and, at the UFA studios, 'you feel almost free'. In novels such as Tyll, Fame and Measuring the World, the German-Austrian Kehlmann – whose Jewish paternal grandparents came through the war thanks to forged papers – has created trickster and magician characters whose imagination reframes actuality. As he trudges to the Prague station with a sackload of reels, Pabst the master-editor wants to jump-cut himself to journey's end. Everything should be 'up for manipulation'. Kehlmann teases out the curious affinity between Pabst's talent for cinematic illusion and the fantasy and spectacle of Nazi rule. Trude, his shrewd but cowed wife, comments: 'A state like this is perfectly suited for cinema.' The wizard of camera lens and cutting room, Pabst gaslights his audience. Hitler and Goebbels gaslit Germany – indeed, much of the world. Many books, films and plays have interrogated artists' entanglement – voluntary or coerced – with Nazi or Soviet tyranny. Others have revived the émigré Hollywood of the 1930s, where we meet Pabst as, in fractured English, he spars in the alien sun with back-slapping, bone-headed studio philistines: 'No emigrant survived a flop.' But Kehlmann brings a special set of fictional tools to his task. As a novelist, he loves to tilt angles, change filters, switch viewpoints: hence this story of a rare creative returnee to the Reich. An agile comedian, Kehlmann can wrench bitter laughs from a landscape of moral catastrophe. Goebbels summons the director but (gaslighting again) asks affably why the old lefty desired to see the minister for propaganda. Might he wish to do 'penance' for his radical past? Reality blurs and twists. Befogged, Pabst agrees that he wants to help 'build Germany'. Kehlmann stages such encounters with immaculate cunning and flair. As the director stumbles into collaboration, the comedy of crossed wires and missed connections slides into the tragedy of life-defining guilt. Marooned in the dank 'castle' with Trude and their son Jakob, Pabst endures the embrace of the Reich under the iron fist of his Nazi caretaker, Jerzabek. This janitor from hell is the superbly comic-sinister embodiment of a time and place where power strikes random blows and 'nothing needs a reason'. Oblique, eccentric, droll, the light touch with grave themes may remind you not just of Tom Stoppard – whose Leopoldstadt Kehlmann has translated – but Alan Bennett, whom he much admires. Another icon of British humour adds one more surprise viewpoint to this fresco of ambition and delusion. In Salzburg, the never-named P.G. Wodehouse – a comfortable prisoner-of-war but also the notorious broadcaster of anodyne chats on Berlin radio – watches the premiere of Pabst's 1943 film Paracelsus, about the Renaissance alchemist and healer. With deadpan nonchalance, Wodehouse admires the Gothic frenzy of the movie's disruptive Dance of Death: 'The German expertise in these matters is indeed unparalleled.' Kehlmann has fun with the Wodehouse voice – sardonic, but not silly. His fine translator Ross Benjamin smartly adjusts the register to every shift of tone and timbre. But Wodehouse never saw the Salzburg premiere. As a naive genius likewise ensnared by the Reich, his presence lets Kehlmann view his theme through a fresh lens. Pabst, who believes that 'it's in editing that you make a film', would no doubt have approved of this patchwork of expertly spliced set pieces. The Director offers a hugely entertaining collage of characters, events and ideas. From wise, tough Louise Brooks to that vainglorious bully Leni Riefenstahl, historical figures deliver witty cameo turns. But Kehlmann himself reframes the past. Young Jakob Pabst, an aspiring artist who joins the Hitler Youth, is a fiction; Kehlmann forges the Molander shoot, including those skeletal extras, out of a documentary void. The novel implies that all creators – not just those complicit with dictators – deploy sorcery and alchemy to transform the raw stuff of life. What's beyond dispute is the queasy postwar respect in Germany and Austria for Pabst as an artist who 'held out in the homeland in dark times'. Posterity edits out his shame.
Sydney Morning Herald
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The shocking tale of a filmmaker forced to work with the Nazis
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.
The Age
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The shocking tale of a filmmaker forced to work with the Nazis
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.
Winnipeg Free Press
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Art, morals and power
In this darkly absorbing and deeply intelligent novel, German writer Daniel Kehlmann charts the choices made by the real-life Austrian-born film director G. W. Pabst, a master of the silent and early sound eras. Known as 'Red Pabst' for his empathetic exploration of social issues, he leaves Europe after Hitler's rise to power, joining a community of cinematic exiles in Hollywood. Then, in a seemingly inexplicable turnaround, he returns to Austria — annexed by the Nazis and now called Ostmark — and ends up creating films under the patronage of the Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Clearly, Pabst has struck some kind of Faustian bargain, but Kehlmann's writing is so subtle it's difficult to mark the exact moment at which the filmmaker falls into complicity. Testing the boundaries between art, power and moral responsibility, The Director evokes creative life under totalitarian rule with exacting precision and scathing effect. Heike Steinweg photo Daniel Kehlmann's latest novel traces the movements of director G.W. Pabst, who fled Austria after Hitler's rise to power but voluntarily returned while the Nazis were still in power. Dividing his time between Berlin and New York, Kehlmann has generated buzz in the English-speaking world with such works as Measuring the World and the International Booker-nominated Tyll (translated, as is The Director, by Ross Benjamin). Kehlmann's approach to period stories is idiosyncratic and urgent, cutting the realistic horrors of history with sharp, ironical humour. This is not a comprehensive or conventional biographical novel. Kehlmann uses the outline of Pabst's life but fills it in with passages that are imagined and inventive, sometimes terrifying and sometimes out-and-out surreal. Working in long, loosely connected chapters, many of which function as standalone vignettes, Kehlmann takes us first to 1933, with Pabst somewhat adrift at a Los Angeles party. He's awkward and overheated and his English is poor. Kehlmann also has a running joke about how Pabst is constantly being confused with fellow Weimar filmmakers F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. 'No good coffee anywhere, but the fruit juices are astonishing!' says a cheerful compatriot, but Pabst seems unable to adapt to this sunny paradise — and to his demotion to the cinematic B-list. Not longer after, the novel relocates to France, where Pabst and his wife, Trude, are spending a drunken evening with German refugees in a Paris bar. Desperate for documents and safe passage out of Europe, these actors, writers and critics are shocked when Pabst reveals he is voluntarily returning. (The chapter ends with a sombre listing of these historical characters' fates — who escapes to America, who dies by suicide when a transit visa expires, who is murdered by the Nazis.) Pabst's reasons for going back to Austria remain deliberately opaque. He explains that he must visit his aging mother, but Kehlmann slyly suggests this might just be the first of the director's many rationalizations and self-delusions. Pabst's actual biography has hazy areas, and Kehlmann demonstrates how this haze can be a byproduct of fascism, as people cover over guilt with blurred memories and disputed histories. The Director introduces us to various real-life figures, from Greta Garbo (aloof, imperious) to a comic British writer who is clearly P.G. Wodehouse (humorous, hapless) to Goebbels (whose meeting with Pabst showcases Kehlmann's brilliantly sinister use of doppelgangers and double meanings). Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl is portrayed as an appalling moral monster who is also inadvertently, grotesquely hilarious. Kehlmann also has an Orwellian eye for the kind of totalitarian infiltration that goes beyond controlling citizens' actions to policing their words and even thoughts. Trude attends a book club with the wives of high-ranking Nazis, a supposedly pleasant social occasion where a wayward opinion can have dire consequences. No wonder Trude enters into an 'internal exile' of perpetual drunkenness. The Director In another scene, prisoner-of-war Wodehouse — making a compulsory appearance at a film premiere — learns to his bemusement that the Hitler regime has outlawed criticism. Practitioners of this supposedly 'Jewish and Bolshevik' discipline are now replaced with 'describers.' (They aren't even allowed to say whether a film is good because that would imply that it could be bad.) The demand for 'genuine Aryan cinema' hangs over Pabst's film The Molander Case, based on a book by bestselling Nazi hack Alfred Karrasch. The film was in the late stages of production in Prague when the Soviet army reached the city and remains unfinished and unknown, allowing Kehlmann to turn it into an enigmatic question. Is it as cinematically brilliant as Pabst's (highly unreliable) narrative insists? And even if it is, could it possibly be worth Pabst's deal with the devil? Art remains when the mess of politics is over, Pabst says to Trude in one scene, but she seems to have a clearer sense of the cost. Kehlmann's own responses to Pabst's moral situation — the director's small, incremental compromises and then his sudden, terrible capitulation — are incisive and unsparing, full of absurdities and killing ironies. And they are never didactic, this novel of ideas remaining immediate, entertaining and a really good read. Alison Gillmor writes on film for the Free Press. Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Sydney Morning Herald
28-05-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
A new wave of eateries is elevating South East Queensland's dining scene
Clarissa Pabst has a similar relationship to local produce in her native Stanthorpe. Situated 218 kilometres southwest of Brisbane near the NSW border, this is the Granite Belt region. Almost 900 metres above sea level, it's known for the Euro-inflected wines from producers such as Bent Road and Golden Grove. But pre-pandemic, when Pabst moved back to town, there wasn't much of a food scene to go with it. 'There was no one really matching food to the wine,' she says. Her response in 2019 was to open Essen (2 McGregor Terrace, Stanthorpe), a cosy 20-seat restaurant in an old vine-covered cottage. Not that Pabst pairs wine to her contemporary menu, but a BYO permit encourages diners to explore the surrounding wineries before visiting. The other appeal of opening in the regions? Cost.
