It is hard at first to pin down Daniel Kehlmann’s fictionalised account of the Austrian director GW Pabst, trapped in the Third Reich during the Second World War, where he made films at the behest of Joseph Goebbels. Is it an impressionistic novel about memory? A meta-novel about cinema, effected in a cinematic style recalling that of its title character? An historical novel? A mythographic novel about the conjunction of will, fate and pure luck?
The answer is: all these things, and engrossingly so. Above all, we discover, it is a novel about corruption. Corruption, and human fallibility, one of which cannot spread without the other.
Kehlmann’s Pabst is a man both sensitive and weak, full of moral feeling that he will rationalise away whenever it suits him to do so. He has two passions: Louise Brooks, the magnetic actress he discovered, and making films as he sees fit.
The happiness of his wife, the welfare of his son, whatever scant dignity remains to the Nazis’ victims: all of these he sacrifices upon one or the other altar, while persuading himself he has no choice. It is only in the work itself that his conscience shines through.
Kehlmann’s skill allows us to feel both distaste and sympathy for Pabst, and – the repellent Leni Riefenstahl aside – for the numerous fellow corrupted figures he encounters, including a version of PG Wodehouse, here unnamed, captured in France by the Germans and enticed into making soft propaganda broadcasts on their behalf.
“Better them than me” is the unspoken creed that animates each compromised character – and how much more so when not merely professional disappointment but fatal disappearance awaits he who makes a misstep.
Kehlmann immerses us in this world thick with fear, impressing upon us how swiftly it becomes normalised. Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel Mephisto was damning of its eagerly biddable lead character, based on Mann’s former friend, the actor Gustaf Gründgens.
The Director affords us the luxury of historical distance, subtly makes us wonder whether we would in the same place do better than the hapless, self-deceiving Pabst. Its author could not predict Trumpism would plunge the formerly liberal West into an era when many may face just such a question.
The Director
By Daniel Kehlmann, trans by Ross Benjamin
Riverrun
