G. W. Pabst at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (September 28, 1949) | J. D. Noske / Algemeen Nederlandsch Fotobureau / Nationaal Archief / CC0 1.0
The German novelist Daniel Kehlmann has been a major figure in world literature since the appearance of his first novel, Measuring the World, in 2005. A bestselling celebrity in Germany, his novels have been published in 40 languages: He is the rare writer beloved of both the public and critics.
His latest novel, The Director (trans. Ross Benjamin, Simon & Schuster, 2025), a sympathetic yet clear-eyed examination of the fate of the artist under totalitarianism, is based on the curious saga of Austrian filmmaker G. W. Pabst (1885–1967). In 1929, Pabst’s hit silent film Pandora’s Box had launched the career of Louise Brooks, the American actress who played Lulu, the doomed femme fatale. With the coming of sound, Pabst produced a series of renowned movies, including the 1932 film version of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. After making a film in Hollywood, he returned to his native Austria, from which he was unable to flee a second time. Ever the filmmaker, he directed three films, two of them completed and released, the third now considered lost, all of them made under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. This acquiescence to a system he abhorred is the heart of The Director.
Kehlmann now lives in Harlem with his wife and son. He sat and talked with Mitchell Abidor on a sunny day in Central Park.
Mitch Abidor: In historical novels, there’s a pact between writers and readers: You—the author— are free to put thoughts in their heads, but certain basic facts can’t be changed. But at the end of The Director, you say that Pabst didn’t have a son, who is an essential character in the book.
Daniel Kehlmann: That’s not true. What it says, and this is the way the family wanted me to phrase it, is that he didn’t have a son named Jakob. His son was named Peter, who was born the same year as my fictional Jakob, went to the same boarding school, and then, like Jakob, was in the Wehrmacht and was wounded in the war. I read his letters, but of course there wasn’t much material on this young man. So I changed his name to Jakob, just as I changed the mother’s name, in order to make clear that this is a novel. I put in what I think literary critics call “fiction markers.” But the family was really keen on the change, and I agreed to note on the last page that there was no son named Jakob. But there was a son named Peter, and while I’m not saying that I know much about him, those of the basic facts that can be known are actually the same as in the novel.
Abidor: Hans Fallada, the German novelist who was in and out of favor under the Nazis, gets a couple of mentions in the book, and there are extensive passages on a writer who fully supported Hitler, which set me to wondering: Did you ever think of making this a book about writers in the Reich?
Kehlmann: I’ve always thought about at some point writing about the Nazi era, since there’s such a great wealth of material which is available to you, if you’re German. You understand the language, you know the culture, so if you’re a novelist, you always think, This is something I could do. But I always felt that it needs to be something really original, and unusual, because it can’t be just one more mediocre story that we’ve all read dozens of times.
Initially, I thought about writing something completely different, a book set in the twenties, in the silent film industry in Germany, so that’s where Pabst came in. Then I came upon the fact that he’d returned to Germany after making a film in Hollywood, and then made films for the Nazis. I thought this was unbelievable. I’d never heard a story like that.
So I looked into it more closely, and not a lot is known about the circumstances—a little bit, but not a lot—so I felt that this is my entry as a storyteller into the dark world of the Nazis.
I’ve also spent the last few years writing for the movies myself. My father was a director, and many of my friends are directors, so I feel I know how films are made. So two things I’m fascinated with came together here. I thought, I can write a novel about a director and also a novel about daily compromises under a totalitarian system, the one totalitarian system into which I have immediate access as a German and Austrian (because I’m both).
Abidor: Speaking of silent film, the book begins and ends with a demented elderly former collaborator with Pabst. Was that an homage to The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, which has a madhouse as a framing device?
Kehlmann: Yes, it’s a framing device, and it’s like Caligari. I used a lot of the devices and techniques of silent movies. It wasn’t even a decision, it just happened naturally.
If you write about a storyteller—and Pabst was a professional storyteller—then the way that person tells their story shapes the way you tell their story. I feel that’s the way it has to happen. I wrote a TV show about Kafka at the same time I was writing The Director, and it was a similar process. The Kafka TV show had to be shaped and formed aesthetically by the fact that it was about perhaps the greatest avant-garde writer of twentieth-century literature, so it couldn’t be a conventional biopic. In the same way, writing a novel about a great director of silent movies—and later of talkies—had to be shaped by his aesthetic. That’s why when Pabst meets Goebbels in my novel, the whole set goes Caligari. and So there’s a lot of silent movie aesthetic seeping in.
Abidor: Much as I love the Louise Brooks films, my favorite Pabst film is Westfront 1918, his first sound feature, and I also love Kameradschaft, films with progressive themes, about brotherhood and the folly of war. That the man who made these films, not to mention the “degenerate” Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, worked for the Nazis is pretty astounding.
Kehlmann: What there’s not the faintest doubt about is that he didn’t have any sympathy for the Nazis. He went back, and it’s hard, or maybe impossible, to figure out why, so it’s easier to write a novel about it. But the one thing that’s not in doubt is that it had nothing to do with his having any sympathy with them, which is the only reason why the story is interesting. Otherwise, it’s just a story of a Nazi joining the Nazis, which I wouldn’t want to write a book about.
Abidor: There’s a quote in the book that I think applies to Pabst in both Germany and the US. It’s Fred Zinnemann, the exile director, who says to Pabst: “The life here is very good if you play the game.”
Kehlmann: It’s actually the situation for any director, anywhere. A director is never free. Maybe Fellini at the peak of his career, or Bergman, but most directors have to pitch what they want to do and convince people to give them the resources and the money. And for Pabst, the irony of the whole thing is, if you see the two films he made under the Nazis that have survived, they’re so much better than the film he made in Hollywood. He enjoyed more artistic freedom under the Nazis, which is both ironic and insane, but true. Zinnemann, unlike Pabst, made a successful bet in Hollywood. He went on to make better and more important films in America than he had in Europe—but they all had to play the game.
Abidor: It’s been said that German directors who worked in America did far better than French directors. And if you think of the Germans and Austrians who worked and had a certain success in America—Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang—with the exception of the true greats in that bunch, none of them, except for Lang and to a lesser degree Wilder, were as great as Pabst. Did he give up too quickly?
Kehlmann: I think so, yeah. If you ask me about the historical circumstances, it’s entirely unclear. His wife later insisted that Pabst only wanted to make a brief visit to Austria, and then return to America right away, but that he then hurt himself lifting a heavy suitcase and therefore had to stay in Austria. I kind of went with that version. It made sense to me, and it made more sense to the novel I wanted to write. But there’s also another version, of fellow exiles Carl Zuckmayer and Lotte Eisiner, who thought that because he hadn’t had success in Hollywood, he gave up too early. I don’t know what’s true. He never talked about it, but as a novelist I decided to go with the more benign interpretation.
Abidor: I mean, if Edgar G. Ulmer could make a career in Hollywood—an odd one, but even so—then Pabst certainly could have.
Kehlmann: He could have, and should have. If there’s one practical lesson to learn from the whole thing, it’s that if you make it out of a dark dictatorship, and you even manage to get to Hollywood, then stay.
Abidor: We keep saying he made films for the Nazis, but when we talk about morally compromised filmmakers of the era, we never talk about de Sica and Rossellini, who both made films under Mussolini.
Kehlmann: I don’t know the details of the movie industry in Italy; it might be a little bit different, but in Germany the entire movie industry was nationalized. There was no private film production. It was literally a state industry. Every film was produced by the ministry of propaganda under Goebbels. It was more integrated than it was in many other places.
Abidor: The Director came out in America at a time that forces us to read it in a certain way.
Kehlmann: Absolutely. Totally. I’ve seen that.
Abidor: The book raises the question of when the filmmaker or writer has gone over the line and compromised himself.
Kehlmann: I would say that the point of writing a novel and not an essay, as in this case, is that I don’t have a clear answer for that. The novel is set up to make it as difficult as possible to give a clear answer to that question. It’s all a trajectory of very small steps, and every step makes a kind of sense.
As a writer and novelist—even though I think he was wrong in his choices, and that he should have stayed in Hollywood—I have to be on his side. I have to be his lawyer in the way I’m setting up the story. It was a real mistake to leave America, because it was so hard for a European exile to get there. Going back was a real mistake. Other than that, I’m really not sure … He could have taken a stand at any moment, but at any given moment it’s not completely morally objectionable that he didn’t take a stand.
To generalize a bit, it’s the purpose of novels to make clear decisions as difficult as possible.
Abidor: Pabst was on a slippery slope the whole time he was back in Europe. But it was also that he took such pride in his skill, in his art, that no matter what, he wanted to make the best film possible.
Kehlmann: I understand that. I get that. But then again, at some point trying to make the best film becomes morally complicated if you’re using the resources and funds that a genocidal totalitarian dictatorship is providing you. Then again, you could argue that they forced him to make films, so why not make the best films? Which I think makes it clear why I was fascinated with this story.
Abidor: You were definitely true to reality when you dealt with Leni Riefenstahl.
Kehlmann: I think so, but some people were angry, because she still has real admirers, which was surprising to me.
Abidor: She’s just an unbearable human being …
Kehlmann: I agree, and I treat her like a cartoonish villain, and I think you can do that with minor characters in a novel. You shouldn’t do that with your main characters, but you’re allowed to have cartoon villains as side characters. And I think she was pretty much like a cartoon villain.
