How to Make Art Under the Nazis (Without Losing Your Soul)

THE DIRECTOR, by Daniel Kehlmann; translated by Ross Benjamin

Movie stars and Nazis are irresistible ingredients in any book. “The Director,” Daniel Kehlmann’s 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.

Pabst (1885-1967), along with Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, was one of Weimar cinema’s big three — 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 “Secrets of a Soul” (1926), which fiddled with Freud, and “Pandora’s Box” (1929), the film that established its star Louise Brooks as the era’s most devastating flapper.

Red Pabst, as he was called early in his career, made a brilliant adjustment to sound with the antiwar film “Westfront 1918” (1930) and “The Threepenny Opera” (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 “prestige” films for the Nazis and forever compromising his reputation.

Pabst was “a precise and exacting artist,” according to the film scholar Eric Rentschler, as well as “an extremely private person who did not readily divulge his thoughts.” Kehlmann’s 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.

The novel’s German title, “Lichtspiel” (“light play,” a term for movies), evokes its fluid phantasmagoria: “The Director” is a book of dreams and of dreams within dreams. Indeed, beginning with a chapter in which Pabst’s 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’s complete inability to navigate a Hollywood party, are painfully comic. Still others, once Pabst and his family return to the Reich, are terrifying.

Was Pabst an opportunist, a victim of circumstance, a cowardly practitioner of anticipatory obedience 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 “Minister.” (Suave, menacing and hideously self-assured, Goebbels handily directs the director.)

Elsewhere on the culture front, Pabst’s wife, Trude, experiences the era’s 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’s (fictional) young son, Jakob, figures out his own accommodation strategies as a matter of schoolyard survival.

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, who starred in Pabst’s Alpine spectacular “The White Hell of Pitz Palu,” occurs on the set of her would-be magnum opus, “Lowlands.”

Kehlmann, the author of other reimagined histories like “Measuring the World” and “Tyll” (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’s 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).

As the production was beset with problems, Riefenstahl requested her old director’s help. The account of their collaboration found in her monumentally self-serving 1987 memoir is blithely contradictory to Kehlmann’s. Attributing Pabst’s changed personality to time spent in Hollywood, Riefenstahl describes Pabst as “cold” and “despotic” — which is pretty much how Kehlmann depicts her. 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 “Mr. Pabst” that Brooks provided in her wonderful memoir “Lulu in Hollywood,” but how would she have known?)

Elsewhere, Kehlmann freely adds secondary characters and carefully tampers with chronology: For dramatic reasons, “The White Hell of Pitz Palu” (1929) and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (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’s book group, and the young director Helmut Käutner, who offers Kehlmann’s Pabst some friendly advice. Each managed in some way to resist the regime. Porten refused to divorce her Jewish husband; Käutner flew beneath the radar with unpretentious humanist films, then blossomed in postwar West Germany.

Most knowingly, Kehlmann also sprinkles his text with delicious hypotheticals. The wartime premiere of Pabst’s 1943 film “Paracelsus” is recounted through the eyes of the British comic novelist P.G. Wodehouse, a (privileged) prisoner of war who, in Kehlmann’s telling, is trotted out by the Reich to give the crowd some “international flair.” Riefenstahl, a fellow guest, strikes Wodehouse as “a peculiarly spine-chilling creature” with skin seemingly “cast from Bakelite.” But he quite enjoys the movie.

A stodgy medieval biopic about a legendary Swiss physician (played by Dr. Caligari himself, Werner Krauss), “Paracelsus” inexplicably erupts into a bizarrely stylized St. Vitus’ dance sequence that has been read as Pabst’s anguished comment on Nazi rule. “For a moment I doubted whether this was something I had actually seen,” Wodehouse muses in the novel. “Could I have dreamed it?” Indeed.

“Paracelsus” 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.

The novel’s wildest hypothetical concerns Pabst’s lost film “The Molander Case,” 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’s Weimar roots.

Pabst’s attempt to transport this supposed masterpiece back to Vienna is the culmination of a tragic slapstick farce, one lived rather than staged. “The Director” itself is a marvelous performance — not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing.

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