by: Charles Francis

‘The Director’
By Daniel Kehlmann
Summit Books, 2025

Garbo to Goebbels, Daniel Kehlmann’s historical novel “The Director” is the story of Austrian film director G.W. Pabst (1885-1967) and his descent down a crooked staircase of ambition into collaboration with Adolph Hitler’s film industry and its Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Kehlmann’s historical fiction is rooted in the world of Weimar German filmmaking and Nazi “Aryan” cinema, but it is a searing story for our challenging time as well.

Pabst was a legendary silent film director from the Weimar Republic’s Golden Era of filmmaking. He “discovered” Greta Garbo; directed silent screen star Louise Brooks; worked with Hitler’s favored director Leni Riefenstahl (“Triumph of the Will”); was a close friend of Fritz Lang (“Metropolis”); and lived in Hollywood among the refugee German film community, poolside with Billy Wilder (“Some Like it Hot”) and Fred Zinnemann (“High Noon”) — both of whose families perished in the Holocaust. 

Yet, Pabst left the safety of a life and career in Los Angeles and returned to Nazi Germany in pursuit of his former glory. He felt the studios were giving him terrible scripts and not permitting him to cast his films as he wished. Then he received a signal that he would be welcome in Nazi Germany. He was not Jewish.

Kehlmann, whose father at age 17 was sent to a concentration camp and survived, takes the reader inside each station of Pabst’s passage from Hollywood frustration to moral ruin, making the incremental compromises that collectively land him in the hellish Berlin office of Joseph Goebbels. In an unforgettably phantasmagoric scene, Goebbels triples the stakes with the aging filmmaker, “Consider what I can offer you….a concentration camp. At any time. No problem,” he says. “Or what else…anything you want. Any budget, any actor. Any film you want to make.” Startled, paralyzed and seduced by the horror of such an offer, Pabst accepts not with a signature but a salute: “Heil Hitler,” rises Pabst.  He’s in.

The novel develops the disgusting world of compromise and collaboration when Pabst is called in to co-direct a schlock feature with Hitler’s cinematic soulmate Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl, the “Directress” is making a film based on the Fuhrer’s favorite opera. She is beautiful, electric and beyond weird playing a Spanish dancer who mesmerizes the rustic Austrian locals with her exotic moves. The problem is scores of extras will be needed to surround and desire Fraulein Riefenstahl. Mysteriously, the “extras” arrive surprising Pabst who wonders where she had gotten so many young men when almost everyone was on the front fighting the war. The extras were trucked in from Salzburg, he is told, “Maxglan to be precise.” He pretends not to hear.  Maxglan was a forced labor camp for “racially inferior” Sinti and Roma gypsies, who will later be deported from Austria and exterminated. Pabst does not ask questions. All he wants is their faces, tight black and white shots of their manly, authentic, and hungry features. “You see everything you don’t have,” he exhorts the doomed prisoners to emote for his camera. Great art, he believes, is worth the temporal compromises and enticements that Kehlmann artfully dangles in the director’s face.  And it gets worse.

One collaborates in this world with cynicism born of helpless futility. In Hollywood, Pabst was desperate to develop his own pictures and lure the star who could bless his script, one of the thousands that come their way.  Such was Greta Garbo, “the most beautiful woman in the world” she was called after being filmed by Pabst in the 1920s. He shot her close-ups in slow motion to make her look even more gorgeous and ethereal. Garbo loved Pabst and owed him much, but Kehlmann writes, “Excessive beauty was hard to bear, it burned something in the people around it, it was like a curse.” 

Garbo imagined what it would be like to be “a God or archangel and constantly feel the prayers rising from the depths. There were so many, there was nothing to do but ignore them all.”  Fred Zinnemann, later to direct “High Noon”, explains to his poolside guest, “Life here (in Hollywood) is very good if you learn the game.  We escaped hell, we ought to be rejoicing all day long, but instead we feel sorry for ourselves because we have to make westerns even though we are allergic to horses.”

The texture of history in the novel is rich. So, it was disappointing and puzzling there was not an original gay character, a “degenerate” according to Nazi propaganda, portrayed in Pabst’s theater or filmmaking circles. From Hollywood to Berlin to Vienna, it would have been easy to bring a sexual minority to life on the set. Sexual minorities and gender ambiguity were widely presented in Weimar films. Indeed, in one of Pabst’s films “Pandora’s Box” starring Louise Brooks there was a lesbian subplot. In 1933, when thousands of books written by, and about homosexuals, were looted and thrown onto a Berlin bonfire, Goebbels proclaimed, “No to decadence and moral corruption!” The Pabst era has been de-gayed in “The Director.”

“He had to make films,” Kehlmann cuts to the chase with G.W. Pabst. “There was nothing else he wanted, nothing more important.” Pabst’s long road of compromise, collaboration and moral ruin was traveled in small steps. In a recent interview Kehlmann says the lesson is to “not compromise early when you still have the opportunity to say ‘no.’” Pabst, the director, believed his art would save him. This novel does that in a dark way.

This article was originally published on the Washington Blade.