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THE DIRECTOR<\/strong>, by Daniel Kehlmann; translated by Ross Benjamin<\/p>\n Movie stars and Nazis are irresistible ingredients in any book. \u201cThe Director,\u201d Daniel Kehlmann\u2019s smartly entertaining new novel about the great Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, offers both, detailing their once intimate, often symbiotic ties. Here, Greta Garbo and Joseph Goebbels have just two degrees of separation between them.<\/p>\n Pabst (1885-1967), along with Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, was one of Weimar cinema\u2019s big three \u2014 the most cosmopolitan as well as politically engaged of the trio. Considered a leftist, Pabst achieved renown for a series of socially conscious and sexually frank silent movies, including \u201cSecrets of a Soul\u201d (1926), which fiddled with Freud, and \u201cPandora\u2019s Box\u201d (1929), the film that established its star Louise Brooks as the era\u2019s most devastating flapper.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Red Pabst, as he was called early in his career, made a brilliant adjustment to sound with the antiwar film \u201cWestfront 1918\u201d (1930) and \u201cThe Threepenny Opera\u201d (1931). But he was a bad fit in Hollywood, where, speaking little English, he arrived by way of France after the Nazis came to power. He then haplessly returned to Austria, now part of the Reich, perhaps to visit his ailing mother. Trapped by the outbreak of war, he remained there, making several apolitical \u201cprestige\u201d films for the Nazis and forever compromising his reputation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Pabst was \u201ca precise and exacting artist,\u201d according to the film scholar Eric Rentschler, as well as \u201can extremely private person who did not readily divulge his thoughts.\u201d Kehlmann<\/a>\u2019s Pabst is a gifted psychologist when it comes to directing actors but a stranger to himself in all other matters, a genius who thinks in motion pictures but is unable to direct the flow of his own life.<\/p>\n The novel\u2019s German title, \u201cLichtspiel\u201d (\u201clight play,\u201d a term for movies), evokes its fluid phantasmagoria: \u201cThe Director\u201d is a book of dreams and of dreams within dreams. Indeed, beginning with a chapter in which Pabst\u2019s fictional assistant director is hustled into a disastrous TV interview to reminisce about his former boss, the novel careens from nightmare to nightmare. Some, like the opener, are absurd. Others, like Pabst\u2019s complete inability to navigate a Hollywood party, are painfully comic. Still others, once Pabst and his family return to the Reich, are terrifying.<\/p>\n Was Pabst an opportunist, a victim of circumstance, a cowardly practitioner of anticipatory obedience<\/a> or simply a solipsistic accommodationist? Although he failed to comprehend Hollywood, he learns the rules of the Reich when summoned to the office of propaganda, led in the novel by the unnamed \u201cMinister.\u201d (Suave, menacing and hideously self-assured, Goebbels handily directs the director.)<\/p>\n Elsewhere on the culture front, Pabst\u2019s wife, Trude, experiences the era\u2019s new groupthink when she is invited to join a book club run by haute Nazi housewives and entirely devoted to the best-selling fiction of the (real-life) Nazi hack Alfred Karrasch. Pabst\u2019s (fictional) young son, Jakob, figures out his own accommodation strategies as a matter of schoolyard survival.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In addition to inventing a chilling interview in which the Minister toys with Pabst, Kehlmann imagines the director getting the Hollywood brushoff from his own discoveries, the megastar Garbo and a foundering Brooks. An even more alarming reunion with the actress turned filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl<\/a>, who starred in Pabst\u2019s Alpine spectacular \u201cThe White Hell of Pitz Palu,\u201d occurs on the set of her would-be magnum opus, \u201cLowlands.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Kehlmann, the author of other reimagined histories like \u201cMeasuring the World<\/a>\u201d and \u201cTyll<\/a>\u201d (the latter also translated by Ross Benjamin), bases key scenes on real life: Riefenstahl not only directed this wildly expensive project but also played, with her complexion darkened, a Spanish dancer some 15 years her junior. Infamously, the movie\u2019s attempt at authenticity involved importing over 100 Roma adults and children from two concentration camps for use as extras (and shipping them back perhaps to their doom).<\/p>\n As the production was beset with problems, Riefenstahl requested her old director\u2019s help. The account of their collaboration found in her monumentally self-serving 1987 memoir<\/a> is blithely contradictory to Kehlmann\u2019s. Attributing Pabst\u2019s changed personality to time spent in Hollywood, Riefenstahl describes Pabst as \u201ccold\u201d and \u201cdespotic\u201d \u2014 which is pretty much how Kehlmann depicts her<\/em>. His Pabst is, by contrast, confused. If the author takes some liberties in bringing his characters to life, his nasty portrait of Riefenstahl is certainly plausible. So too is his idea that Pabst, bewitched by Brooks, carried a lifelong torch for her. (This differs from the analysis of \u201cMr. Pabst\u201d that Brooks provided in her wonderful memoir \u201cLulu in Hollywood<\/a>,\u201d but how would she have known?)<\/p>\n Elsewhere, Kehlmann freely adds secondary characters and carefully tampers with chronology: For dramatic reasons, \u201cThe White Hell of Pitz Palu\u201d (1929) and Fritz Lang\u2019s \u201cMetropolis\u201d (1927) are given near-simultaneous premieres. But in playing with the historical record he largely hews to it. The novel has a scholarly subtext, name-checking the beloved actress Henny Porten, here a star member of Trude\u2019s book group, and the young director Helmut K\u00e4utner, who offers Kehlmann\u2019s Pabst some friendly advice. Each managed in some way to resist the regime. Porten refused to divorce her Jewish husband; K\u00e4utner flew beneath the radar with unpretentious humanist films, then blossomed in postwar West Germany.<\/p>\n Most knowingly, Kehlmann also sprinkles his text with delicious hypotheticals. The wartime premiere of Pabst\u2019s 1943 film \u201cParacelsus\u201d is recounted through the eyes of the British comic novelist P.G. Wodehouse, a (privileged) prisoner of war who, in Kehlmann\u2019s telling, is trotted out by the Reich to give the crowd some \u201cinternational flair.\u201d Riefenstahl, a fellow guest, strikes Wodehouse as \u201ca peculiarly spine-chilling creature\u201d with skin seemingly \u201ccast from Bakelite.\u201d But he quite enjoys the movie.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A stodgy medieval biopic about a legendary Swiss physician (played by Dr. Caligari himself, Werner Krauss), \u201cParacelsus\u201d inexplicably erupts into a bizarrely stylized St. Vitus\u2019 dance sequence<\/a> that has been read as Pabst\u2019s anguished comment on Nazi rule. \u201cFor a moment I doubted whether this was something I had actually seen,\u201d Wodehouse muses in the novel. \u201cCould I have dreamed it?\u201d Indeed.<\/p>\n \u201cParacelsus\u201d allowed Pabst to direct on a scale and with a freedom he could never have enjoyed in America. While his Hollywood experience may not have been as humiliating as Kehlmann makes it, it doubtless wounded his vanity. Most of the other refugees from the German film industry were Jews who adapted out of necessity (some quite remarkably); Pabst alone had the option to return and entertain the possibility that he might regain his former eminence.<\/p>\n The novel\u2019s wildest hypothetical concerns Pabst\u2019s lost film \u201cThe Molander Case,\u201d an adaptation of a Karrasch novel no less, shot in Prague as bombs were falling on Germany. Likely never completed, the movie disappeared in the rubble. Thus, Kehlmann is free to imagine it as an expressionist, anti-Nazi return to Pabst\u2019s Weimar roots.<\/p>\n Pabst\u2019s attempt to transport this supposed masterpiece back to Vienna is the culmination of a tragic slapstick farce, one lived rather than staged. \u201cThe Director\u201d itself is a marvelous performance \u2014 not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing.<\/p>\n THE DIRECTOR<\/strong> | By Daniel Kehlmann | Translated by Ross Benjamin | Summit | 333 pp. | $28.99<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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