There’s an unspoken rule that if you write a novel about Nazis, the point can’t simply be “the Nazis were evil” or “keeping company with Nazis is wrong.” But judging from the American reception of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel The Director — which has been noted for its “unnerving timing” and described as “curiously prophetic” — you’d think that was exactly the book he’d written.
But while Kehlmann has said he set out to write a novel, which appeared last year, about “complicity,” the book isn’t exactly the prophetic meditation on the new F-word that American critics have made it out to be. There’s something much more nuanced and original going on here, namely, Kehlmann’s depictions of the banality of fascism, which extends the now-clichéd state apparatus of Nazi Germany to Hollywood, the authoritarian vision of great artists, and beyond — even to the author’s own handling of the material.
In The Director, Kehlmann fictionalizes the life of G. W. Pabst, nicknamed “Red Pabst,” the Austrian director who rose to prominence as one of the most influential filmmakers of the Weimar Republic, with socially radical films like Pandora’s Box and The Threepenny Opera. Kehlmann takes notable liberties with Pabst’s biography, inventing characters who become major players in the novel’s events, fiddling with timelines, and reworking historical details to serve the book’s themes. It’s a novel drawing more from Kehlmann’s imagination than from historical record.
The book follows Pabst, after a frustrating stint in Hollywood, as he returns to Nazi Germany — a return presented here not as a political choice, or even an unpolitical choice, but hardly a choice at all. As his wife Trude puts it, it comes down to “a string of misfortunes”: the trip is meant to be a quick family errand to arrange nursing care for his mother, but war is declared, the borders close, and Pabst sustains an incapacitating fall at home.
Pointedly, Pabst is not making a deal with the devil. And yet, this is what some reviewers would have you believe, casting the novel as a drawn-out Faustian bargain. An NPR review titled “A Filmmaker in Nazi Germany Strikes a Deal with the Devil in ‘The Director’” even opens with a reference to the German legend.
This framework is missing the point of what Kehlmann is actually up to. As Kehlmann writes in The Director, “The oldest rule of the art of deception: a large movement makes a small movement invisible.” Focus too much on the big, bad Nazis, and you’ll miss the subtler micro-fascisms the book is rife with.
Hollywood’s studio system is the primest example of tyranny in microcosm; Pabst finds himself with a terrible script, he can’t choose the actors, he can’t control the camerawork, and — even though he’s famous for his editing — he’s denied final cut. And the kicker: when the film is a flop, it’s considered to be his fault, and since “you’re only as good as your last film” — the Hollywood equivalent of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“One people, one empire, one leader”) — his directorial career in America is effectively finished.
Pabst in his filmmaking is portrayed as a despot himself: an actress hears “he hardly paid attention to the script, instead improvising on set, making up scenes, changing plans like a child at play.” A demagogue of sorts, he knows how to manipulate his actors. As his son, Jakob, observes, Pabst uses a certain voice on set “which soothes everyone and gets them to do what he wants.”
This fictional son must contend with the authoritarian structures of school as well as his social circle. He learns the surest way to survive is to demonstrate his own physical dominance, which he does by starting a fight with a boy and striking him repeatedly in the face with a stone concealed in his hand. Pressured by schoolmates, he descends into the lowest depths of the Pabsts’ German country home’s creepy cellar, practically into hell itself, in one terrifying scene. “[S]ince he absolutely can’t let his companions think him a coward, he no longer has a choice,” Kehlmann writes.
Mindful of appearances, Trude joins a book club run by the housewives of high-ranking Nazi officials, which only picks the commercial books written by the (real-life) Nazi hack author Alfred Karrasch. She learns quickly there are to be no dissenting opinions but only praise. Indeed, one of the book club members is rejected by the group for merely going off-topic. (“A circle like this is based on agreement, on harmony,” one of the ladies tells the woman, before she tearfully departs.)
Official criticism is also dead. A once-formidable critic becomes one of the Reich’s “subtlest describers”; in his reviews, he’s even prohibited from saying whether actors are good because, as a Nazi official explains, “it would imply that the actor could be bad. But how would that be possible? The films are produced by the ministry, so how could they be anything but excellent!”
In this way, Kehlmann doesn’t just limit authoritarianism to political systems like Nazism, but shows how this structure of power exists everywhere, from governments and markets to studios and interpersonal relationships.
When he meets with the Minister of Propaganda, the scene takes on a surreal quality: spatial distortions and the Minister’s exaggerated theatricality give it a disorienting, dream-like atmosphere — a literal bureaucratic nightmare. Kehlmann departs from a simplistic Mephistophelian framing, depicting the Minister’s power as so exaggerated as to be symbolic, a force that can’t be negotiated with. With reality thus destabilized, Pabst’s choices become hard to discern and nearly impossible to judge.
So what do you do when you exist in a system that automatically makes you complicit, when every step of the way, it appears you have no choice? That is the nature of these systems — even the seemingly benign ones like book clubs, schools, or marriage. Readers looking to reinforce a clean moral binary won’t find it here. Kehlmann exposes the absurdity of demanding moral perfection from artists in systems they don’t control.
The deadest giveaway of Kehlmann’s refusal to pass moral judgment on Pabst is the novel’s climax, when we learn the (fictionalized) truth behind Pabst’s lost film, The Molander Case, and the nature of Pabst’s downfall. While his assistant director, Franz Lang (a made-up character), is traumatized in over-the-top, cinematic fashion by Pabst’s use of camp detainees as extras, Pabst’s downfall isn’t a consequence of his “collaboration” with Nazis at all. It isn’t the loss of his soul but the physical loss of the film that is his ruin.
When you look at it, Pabst’s philosophy isn’t unreasonable: “The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in.” But while Kehlmann, in his European way, may be skeptical of easy moralizing, he isn’t Team Art-for-Art’s-Sake either; with the film’s disappearance amidst the chaos of war, he shows that artists, no matter how great, can’t create art in a vacuum. Pabst’s mental undoing is not moral in nature; it is a systemic failing. Like it or not, artists, no matter how authoritarian, belong to a system. The very structure of the book, which comprises an enormous cast of characters with their own POVs, argues this.
“All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film,” Pabst says. “Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist.” Sure, but if a great film falls in a forest and no one hears it over the blitzkrieg fire, does its greatness even exist?
For all his nuanced questions, Kehlmann lacks all nuance in his storytelling. In this way, there’s also a whole meta layer to the book — the book’s title seems to refer not just to Pabst but to Kehlmann himself as he riffs on well-established cinematic genres.
Indeed, the book opens and closes with Franz years after the main events of the story, straining to suppress the memory of what happened on the set of The Molander Case — evoking the Expressionist “madness framing device” used in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
After Pabst boards a train back to Austria with Trude and Jakob, the novel slips into horror — the dread rising as every other passenger disembarks from their train and they alone continue into Nazi territory.
Upon reaching their home in rural Austria — the “castle,” as they call it — the family finds that the estate’s caretaker, Jerzabek, has become a leader of the local Nazi group and transformed into a grotesque tyrant. Kehlmann draws here again on the traditions of German Expressionist gothic cinema: the Pabsts become trapped in their shadowy, decaying estate, ruled over by Jerzabek’s watchful paranoia and arbitrary authority, and their plans of making Austria a quick pit stop are thwarted. It’s a portrait of microfascism at the domestic level as well as of the petty men who flourish when a regime gives them license to terrorize.
This is also the moment when Kehlmann’s aesthetic mode — and its potential pitfalls — fully emerges. As Pabst says, “Almost anyone can shoot. It’s in editing that you make a great film.” It is also in editing, however, that you make propaganda. Kehlmann edits history freely; as delightful and entertaining as it is, Kehlmann’s auteur vision is built on “alternative facts,” exaggerations, and the flattening of characters to shape his narrative.
In contrast to the complexity with which Kehlmann examines how ordinary people slide into complicity, other characters like Jerzabek and his family are portrayed as stock villains in a horror B-movie. This is evident when Pabst and Trude hear Jakob screaming and discover him being terrorized by Jerzabek’s daughters:
Jakob stood on tiptoe pressed against a wooden post. He was tied up. Thin straps cut into his neck, his bare arms, his bare belly, his exposed calves; he was wearing nothing but underpants. On the floor of the attic sat the two girls, each with a bird feather in her hair. Their faces were painted with reddish chalk. One of them was holding an ax, the other a gleaming kitchen knife.
While it’s all in good fun — the book was originally titled Lichtspiel (literally, “light play”) in Germany — this stylization risks moral flattening as well. It’s an aesthetic and also conceptual inconsistency that clashes with the novel’s otherwise careful judgment.
And yet, even when Kehlmann is flattening, he can still take you by surprise with an argument for complexity. Take, for instance, the scene where Kehlmann imagines Pabst assisting Leni Riefenstahl on the set of her film Tiefland, a production that, both in the book and real life, used internment camp detainees as extras.
While Pabst is asked for his input, it’s clear the only acceptable contribution is assent. Riefenstahl is drawn in the broad strokes of satire, though the satire seems aimed less at Nazi moral degeneracy than at the corporate world, another example of an authoritarian system rife with complicity. In this exchange, Pabst himself makes the case for resisting oversimplification:
“But what are you putting spotlights on his face from below?”
“To make him look evil!”
“I know . . . a few evil people. And they’re not usually sharply lit from below so you can tell.”
“You don’t say. What kind of evil people do you know, Georg?”
As for the style itself, the book reads like commercial fiction in its prose, so plain and straightforward that at times it borders on utilitarian, not unlike a Hollywood script. Given the nature of his cinematic aesthetic, Kehlmann leans hard into genre conventions. So naturally, the odd cliché or melodramatic flourish pops up now and then — often winking, sometimes not, so far as winks can make it through translation.
We witness “the hint of an involuntary shudder” when Pabst puts his hand on his wife’s shoulder. Franz’s madness and fainting episodes are contrived as over-the-top. And then there’s the matter of Karrasch, whose potboiler Pabst and Franz are adapting, turning up in Prague just while Pabst and Franz are editing their auteur take. Karrasch’s apoplectic outburst (“Utter trash! Filthy, Bolshevik, Jewish, vulgar, pornographic, vile trash!”) borders on farce. In other words, the tropes are, well, tropey. The problem becomes that when you imitate something long enough, you start to become it.
While I may have trouble recommending the book to my literary snob friends, there’s enough self-awareness that the excesses don’t count against it. Kehlmann seems fully aware that he’s implicating himself. It’s part of the point; the cinematic style and narrative control serve as analogues for authoritarianism.
Or, Kehlmann might be suggesting, the depictions of authoritarianism might serve as analogies for the artistic process itself. The novel makes this explicit in Kehlmann’s portrayal of Pabst. He shows us a filmmaker with a one-track mind who can only imagine the world in images, and in doing so, hints at his own artistic predicament. Late in the novel, Pabst reflects on one of his long walks:
And because his imagination, after so many decades, could function no other way, he envisioned films: a crime of passion on the great bridge, a golem rising from a deep cellar, the fiery sign on its forehead, a strange star in the sky heralding the arrival of a new era of deceit, the execution of noblemen on the great square before a mob crying for blood, the old Kaiser Rudolf, half-mad in his cabinet of curiosities, with a long beard and flickering eyes. They would have been somewhat old-fashioned, these films, but the city of Prague conjured such images of its own accord.
Like Pabst, Kehlmann knows his vision is a bit old-fashioned, steeped as it is in the conventions of early cinema, but the guy just can’t help himself. And what choice do we have but to go along with it? He’s the director in this book, after all.
Jesse Relkin is a fiction writer and critic. She publishes The Dreaded Word, a Substack on literature and culture.
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