Making Art Under Fascism

Kai Maristed reviews the new translation of Austro-German author Daniel Kehlmann’s 2023 novel “The Director,” translated by Ross Benjamin.

By Kai MaristedMay 6, 2025

• Fiction

• Film

EVERY SO OFTEN, a work of imagination proves prescient. Consider Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Or Sam Shepard’s Buried Child (1978), heralding the corporate destruction of rural America. Or Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (2017), a Brueghelesque journey through the Thirty Years’ War and its fellow-traveling bubonic plague, published not long before COVID-19 drove us all into our caves.

From the same Austro-German writer now comes The Director, another mining of the past that limns the future. That future being our today, in fact—this 2025 marked by debate about whether it’s overkill to compare the current horror show in Washington, DC, to Hitler’s first 100 days. Is our long democratic “Weimar period” disintegrating? What will come next? Kehlmann’s absorbing novel, a fiercely imagined recreation of the life and times of the great Austrian silent-then-talkie movie director G. W. Pabst, can’t opine on this subject. It simply brings the then back to life and, in so doing, foreshadows our own kneecapped institutions, Orwellian Newspeak, rank corruption, lost lives, lost freedoms, craven capitulation—all fueled by greed, ego, and fear. A world in which prominent and ordinary people alike must make hard, often dangerous choices—artists not excepted.

The Director, published in Germany as Lichtspiel in 2023 and now translated into English by Ross Benjamin, displays Kehlmann’s mastery of the tools of storytelling; he’s a confident painter, employing brushes and color without looking away from the subject. The trick is to make the job look spontaneous, which it never is: Kehlmann revels in dark irony, in hidden clues, in dangling, Poe-like suspense. His biting sarcasm spares no one.

Kehlmann is also a writer that readers enjoy reading. Measuring the World (2005) was the second-best-selling novel of its year globally. Tyll, short-listed for the International Booker Prize, sold more than 600,000 copies in Germany alone. In contrast to many current writers, Kehlmann has no “trademark” theme. Like a billiard ball obeying secret laws of attraction, his focus careens from one distinct world to another—from physics (1999’s Mahlers Zeit) to global exploration (Measuring the World) to the deceptions underlying magic and power (2013’s F) to the Thirty Years’ War (Tyll). But if Kehlmann lacks a brand or genre, he definitely has a recurring, almost alchemical method—namely, to choose a historical figure (e.g., Alexander von Humboldt) and then wind himself deeply into that character’s mind and fate, creating a hybrid of fact and fiction.

The Director is his boldest amalgam yet. It opens with a tour de force chapter that another writer might have spun into a stand-alone novella. A dementia-impaired fellow, Franz Wilzek, tells of being whisked by limo from the old folks’ home in Vienna to a TV studio for an interview. His voice, his moth-eaten memory, his pride and paranoia, his struggles to urinate and zip up while they bang on the WC door because it’s time—all this is excruciatingly real, painful, and wryly funny. “You have to go in. You’ll be live immediately,” one of his handlers barks. Wilzek obeys:

Sitting on the sofa is a huge man with a beard, wearing a loden jacket. Standing next to him is a man I recognize; he’s always on the television in the Abendruh Sanatorium, but I can’t remember his name. At the moment he is singing to tinny music from the loudspeaker, kissing his fingertips again and again. […]

“A special pleasure,” he says in a peculiar singsong, “to have Franz Wilzek here with me, my dear old friend!”

And I don’t even know him. I know I’m a little forgetful, but really, I’ve never met this person before.

Predictably, Wilzek flubs the live session. Didn’t he help Pabst film his legendary lost classic, The Molander Case, the TV host demands to know. “[I]t doesn’t exist!” cries Wilzek, over and over. On the way out, he bids goodbye to the host, who, face contorted with rage, retorts, “Crawl into your shithole and die.” We won’t see Franz again for almost 200 pages.

From there, Kehlmann takes us to Hollywood, the canary-bright movie capital of 1933, where the historical Pabst emigrated with wife and child from a rapidly Nazifying Germany and would remain for three years. Although not a Jew, he was under regime scrutiny as “The Red Pope” for his leftist, class-conscious movies, including Pandora’s Box (1929), from Frank Wedekind’s then-shocking play. (Coincidence: I happened to translate it recently—shocking as ever.) Poolside, wearing a stifling suit, the famous director struggles in vain with his execrable English to interest a producer duo in a new film project. The Yanks are portrayed as braying bullies: on mention of a Pabst film of which there were no copies in the United States, the producer “sat bolt upright, clapping his hands. The picture had knocked his socks off! It had thrown him for a loop, it was absolutely terrific! […] ‘But my favorite,’ said the man, ‘is Metropolis.’ ‘This one is not by me,’” Pabst tells him.

Unable to find adequate work in Los Angeles after his one American film—A Modern Hero (1934), forced on him by producers—becomes the failure he predicted, Pabst retreats to France, joining a community of self-exiled artists seeking new chances. But suddenly, he swerves, deaf to his wife Trude’s pleas and his pals’ advice, into the belly of the Nazi beast, lured by a telegram from his ailing mother (also touched by dementia). Days later, in the family mini-castle in rural Austria, Pabst, Trude, and their son Jakob are trapped when war is declared. Abruptly, their subservient hausmeister and his misbegotten brood morph into triumphant Nazi jailers, driving the semi-starved Pabsts down into the servants’ quarters and literally torturing the boy.

In a scene the expressionist Pabst might well have created, the family’s last-ditch attempt at escape is foiled when the director, despite chronic vertigo, climbs a ladder to retrieve a precious box of keepsakes. The ladder begins to move, then detaches itself from the wall. Pabst looks down to see the hausmeister holding it; the room tilts sideways, until the grinning man lets go—Pabst is in free-fall, then unconscious. He awakes with a damaged hip, and no further hope of escape.

Structurally, the novel resembles a screenplay (a movie is already in the works in Germany). The camera angle shifts from major to minor players and back again, driving the narrative forward. The dialogue, whether witty, enraged, or moving, reveals each individual. Concise, vivid scenes gather to form the three acts, or parts: “Outside,” “Inside,” and “After.” For all its complexity, the story follows basic rules of dramatic development: compelling desires, an inciting incident, advances and reversals, nail-biting suspense, climax, denouement. Occasionally, this passionately readable novel overreaches: Greta Garbo’s internal musings disappoint, suspense drags on despite an increasingly foreseeable outcome, coincidences abound, and not everyone may relish so much minutiae about the difficult process of moviemaking back in the day.

Too bad for them. Cinephiles will feast on The Director, from the earliest brief “lichtspiel” (boxing kangaroos, anyone?) to the pioneering work of directors such as Fritz Lang, D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, and (God help us) Leni Riefenstahl, whose resurrection in the novel is both risible and bloodcurdling. Kehlmann’s father wrote screenplays; he has written plays and screenplays himself. No great surprise, then, that the author would find his next subject crouched behind a camera. But why choose G. W. Pabst? Why a chubby, balding, unromantic, largely forgotten figure who never made it to the pinnacle of German cinema? (That perch belongs to Lang, his bitterly admired archrival.)

My guess is that Pabst was on Kehlmann’s mind long before The Director. Minor evidence is, of course, the underlying weight of research. Books, correspondence, the lives of a sweeping cast of secondary characters. There were films to study, including shorts by Pabst’s son Michael in service of his father’s legacy, but primarily the director’s classics, including The Joyless Street (1925), for which he discovered Garbo, Westfront 1918 (1930), and The Threepenny Opera (1931). These hail from his best, his Weimar period. After the war, he made a few more titles, such as the critically savaged Mysterious Shadows (1949), co-written by Trude; The Last Ten Days (1955), about Hitler; and his final flop, Through the Forests and through the Trees (1956).

But what about Pabst’s survival under the Reich, the core years of the book? Here the day-to-day challenges—moral, monetary, physical—of filming, especially the medieval biopic Paracelsus (1943) and, finally, his go-for-broke masterpiece The Molander Case (1945), are rendered with typical Kehlmannian precision and immediacy. The latter above all, and literally so, as the camera swoops high over a concert audience of emaciated extras in far too large evening attire. Alas, the only reels of Molander, in real life and in the novel, vanished in the maelstrom of the war’s end. Was this an artistic tragedy, as Pabst believed? Without evidence, who can say for sure?

The well-worn trope of the lost masterpiece is central to many tales. But is it motive enough for Kehlmann to fixate on Pabst? Probably not. Think about this, then: suppose you are an acclaimed German writer working today, wondering what you would have done, caught in the rapid breakdown of democracy in the 1930s. Emigrate like your left-wing colleagues, most likely. But suppose the United States rejects your talents, so you take an offer in France, and then detour to your Austrian home, where—boom! You’re trapped. Yet you are immediately wooed by Berlin, in order to make films (no propaganda, we promise!) under the Reich. Name your budget, Herr Cultural Treasure. The alternative, of course, being the camps, for yourself as well as your family.

You might picture being hauled in to meet the minister of propaganda himself (Joseph Goebbels is never named in the novel but is gruesomely unmistakable). Space and time might warp into an expressionist distortion of “normal” perception, as your sanity is shaken by the gulf opening before you. (Kehlmann’s “special effects” in The Director feel like an homage both to the historical Pabst and to Franz Kafka.) You nod. You lift your arm stiffly. You want to vomit. Once the minister has your “Ja,” he mocks and reviles you. Sound familiar, in 2025?

Soon the question becomes, How far will you go along, as the Reich marches from sadistic to unspeakable? What will you compromise, sacrifice, and pretend not to know, for the sake of making art? Can art justify your life-preserving decisions? Is art a value above human life? These are hardly theoretical questions, even today.

These treacherous what-ifs have haunted many postwar German artists. Only recently, Mitchell Abidor reviewed for LARB the playwright Peter Weiss’s passionate portrait of communists and their sympathizers caught between fascism and internal betrayals, The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–81)—a very different take on a never-ending question. In The Director, as Pabst, driven by ambition and vision, enters a vortex of previously unthinkable “arrangements” with his Nazi “protectors,” the what-ifs are tested out step by fateful step. It’s a morality play in which the moral remains elusive. Let the reader be the judge.

To be clear, The Director is not a fictionalized biography but a fictional interpretation of a historical figure about whom much remains obscure. Speaking of morality, this uncertainty can lead to shaky ground. The Pabst family protested over certain unsubstantiated elements in the story and settled with the publisher out of court. Generally speaking, Kehlmann’s depictions of the director himself, his patient alcoholic wife, Garbo, and Louise Brooks (another Pabst discovery, and here his lifelong passion after a one-night stand) follow history, while Franz Wilzek, the demonic housekeepers, and Pabst’s gifted son Jakob, whose heart-wrenching survival shows how a dictatorship can remold a child’s mind, never actually existed. It is Wilzek, though, who emerges as the novel’s most three-dimensional figure, with his shy warmth and dawning insight.

At work on Molander, Wilzek asks, “[D]on’t you find it strange, Pabst, that we’re making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse? Such a … work of art?” Pabst replies: “You say that as if it’s a bad thing. […] Times are always strange. Art is always out of place. […] And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered.” Why, then, does Pabst’s assistant, in doddering old age, insist angrily that the film was never made? The answer emerges, as if in a brilliantly edited film, snip by snip. Accidents merge into inevitability. Editing was always Pabst’s greatest gift.

Wilzek’s do-or-die, sometimes bumbling adoration of the Great Man puts one in mind of Disney’s classic Fantasia (1940) segment “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Which makes Pabst the sorcerer, of course. Or, with only a slight tilt of perspective, a Faust figure in his time, and a warning for ours. The light’s flashing red, see? No entry. No exit. Filming in progress.