The Director

Kehlmann is widely considered to be among the leading contemporary German writers of fiction. He is particularly known for historical novels that distill eternal human dilemmas into everyday experience, all rendered in concise and accessible prose. His books are at once sad and funny, heady and chatty, realistic and absurdist, cynical and uplifting. The Director tracks the historical case of G. W. Pabst, one of the greatest filmmakers of the Weimar era, the period in Germany between the end of World War I in 1918 and the rise of the Nazis in 1933. Unlike his compatriots Fritz Lang and Fritz Murnau, Pabst rejected émigré life in Hollywood and, despite his communist sympathies, returned to Europe from the United States in the 1930s. After first swearing never to collaborate with the Nazi regime, he ended up directing films for its propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels. In banal yet often painful detail, Kehlmann reimagines the mix of pressure, vanity, humiliation, and resignation that can lead a great artist to ignore ethical imperatives and become complicit with authoritarians—a theme that feels especially timely today.