We have no critics!

Ionce shared​ a green room at a literary festival with an elderly American actor who said he didn’t know where he was, why he’d been invited or what he was supposed to do. I felt uncomfortable listening to him and the organisers were in a panic: how would he handle being interviewed on stage? The situation was farcical but I imagined that if anyone took the risk and wrote about it comically, even as fiction, the Bad Taste Police would be on to them.

At the start of The Director, Daniel Kehlmann takes that risk and gets away with it. ‘Why am I in this car?’ the narrator, Franz Wilzek, asks en route from the Abendruh Sanatorium for a television interview. He’s late on set because of a mishap in the bathroom, doesn’t recognise the presenter and struggles under the glare of the spotlights. Worse, when asked about working with the film director G.W. Pabst, to whom he was an assistant and trusted ‘acolyte’, he vehemently denies that a film they worked on during the Second World War, The Molander Case, was ever shot. Afterwards, the presenter is furious that ‘this ancient shithead’ with ‘half his marbles’ has been allowed on the show. But Wilzek, only half-aware of what a disaster it has been (‘I remember something without quite knowing what’), imagines that everyone back in the sanatorium, watching him on television, will be sick with envy.

It’s an enjoyable set piece, well worth the risk, but why does Kehlmann begin a novel about Pabst – a real-life director who worked with Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks and Maria Callas – with an elderly, befuddled minor player? First, because The Molander Case is central to the novel, though why its existence or non-existence is such an issue won’t be revealed until the final chapter, three hundred pages later, when Wilzek resumes his narrative. Second, because the chapter establishes a tone of implausible comedy that will recur throughout. And third, because confusion – emotional, political, aesthetic – defines Pabst and his reputation as a director. ‘Pabst found himself at a complete loss,’ one chapter begins, and it could be any of them.

In his early career he was known as rote Pabst. ‘We need films with political commitment,’ he said in 1931, as vice chair of the Association of German Film Directors. He restated his communist sympathies three years later: ‘Film must free itself from all ties to special interest groups and economic powers, from all forms of supervision – only then can it achieve its full potential. This liberation from outside influence will make film what … it was destined to be – the property of the masses!’ During the war, however, he was persuaded to make films for the Third Reich. They weren’t Riefenstahl-like propaganda and he used delaying tactics to avoid making more than two of them. But The Comedians (praised by Goebbels) represented Germany at the Venice Film Festival in 1941 and won Pabst the gold medal for best director. As for Paracelsus (which plays a significant part in Kehlmann’s novel), it’s hard not to see the titular hero as an embodiment of the Führerprinzip. ‘You can murder me but you can’t destroy me,’ he says, ‘for I am immortal.’

In Germany The Director was published as Lichtspiel, an old-fashioned word for film that also refers to a ‘play of light’. The English title misses out on the playfulness that’s integral to Kehlmann’s portrayal of Pabst’s confusion and the confusion of those around him; even the clatter from the wheels of a train (‘why do you think, I don’t know, why do you think, I don’t know’) sounds like ‘a conversation between two confused people’. In Hollywood in the 1930s, he’s repeatedly mistaken for Fritz Lang. He has a great idea for a film set on a luxury liner, but, unable to woo producers or take charge of final edits, he makes a flop instead. He’s in love with Brooks, with whom he once spent a night (‘Actually it wasn’t even a night,’ she says, ‘it was more like an hour’), but stays married to Trude. Invited to return to Germany and make films there, he angrily refuses. But in 1939, a fake telegram lures him back to the family home in Austria for a supposedly brief visit to his mother, who is ‘weak in the head like a dairy cow’. Pabst has the necessary visas and a first-class Atlantic passage booked; nothing can go wrong, he thinks.

The house in Austria, the Dreiturm Castle, doesn’t even have one tower, let alone three, and it’s ruled by a family of servants, the Jerzabeks. The father, Karl, a bullying party loyalist and rabid antisemite, treats the Pabsts as intruders and forces them to live in the caretaker’s apartment, with Trude doing all the housework, while his family takes over the living quarters. An invitation to make films for the Reich offers an escape which Pabst resists, just as he’d done years earlier. But in the next chapter he’s in Berlin, in a ministry building that ‘seemed larger on the inside than on the outside’, and though he tries fobbing off the culture minister (unnamed but evidently Goebbels) he leaves with the script of The Comedians, ‘entirely apolitical’ he’s told, yet intended to ‘touch the German hearts of good, deep, metaphysical people’. Before you know it he’s also working with the cartoonishly loathsome Riefenstahl, whose ‘skin seemed to be cast from Bakelite’. He just about avoids falling out with her (‘Let it go, he thought, remember that she can put you in a camp’) but it’s still a shock for him to realise that the gaunt extras on the film are from Maxglan, a detention camp.

The chapters are self-contained, almost short stories in their own right, and aside from Wilzek’s (narrated in the first person) they’re written in free indirect speech, alternating Pabst (who has the largest share of the chapters) with Trude, his mother, Erika, his son, Jakob (in reality the Pabsts had two sons, neither named Jakob), Garbo, Brooks and a German cultural functionary called Kuno Krämer. One of the longest and funniest sections features P.G. Wodehouse (never named), who’s invited to a screening of Paracelsus. Wodehouse was arrested by the Germans in 1940 at his villa in Le Touquet and you can see how tempting it is for Kehlmann to bring them together: GWP meet PGW. The two don’t talk about their complicity with Nazism or, to put it more gently, their misfortune in being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Indeed, Wodehouse spends more time talking to Trude, whose English is better than her husband’s. Still, having begun with low expectations (‘an entire film’s opening credits, and not a Levy, Cohn or Fischer among them: surely, this could hardly bode well’), he thinks the film a masterpiece. ‘In his films,’ Wodehouse tells Trude, ‘your husband has more freedom than any director I know.’ And he doesn’t mean it ironically.

By the time of the screening, Wodehouse has done three of his five infamous German radio broadcasts. Aimed at his American readers, the broadcasts made light of the experience of internment (‘He talked about the prison camp as if it were a summer camp for boy scouts’). ‘I naturally feel a damned fool,’ he said later, ‘but I hope I have made it clear that there was never anything in the nature of a bargain with the Germans … there was never any idea that my freedom was dependent on my broadcasting.’ Kehlmann offers a less innocent version of events. ‘You forced me!’ Wodehouse protests to his Nazi minder, Krämer, complaining of having been ‘under duress’. Krämer disputes this (‘“Duress” is a strong word. You were requested’), but it’s he who suggests the format (‘light-hearted chats where you talk about how we Germans are also humans, not monsters’) and he admits that if Wodehouse hadn’t agreed he’d still be in prison rather than enjoying the comfort of a hotel. It’s the same kind of pressure that’s put on Pabst to make films: ‘We would be deeply honoured if’ means ‘Do it or else.’

In the Reich, Wodehouse learns, film critics are now called ‘describers’. ‘Critics? We have no critics! Criticism is a Jewish genre that no one needs. Instead we have art appreciation … The films are produced by the ministry, so how could they be anything but excellent!’ He also meets the middlebrow writer Alfred Karrasch, who tells him he would never read a book of his on principle. ‘I understand perfectly,’ Wodehouse responds. ‘If I could write them without having to read them, I’d never go near them either.’

Ross Benjamin, the novel’s translator, deftly captures the Wodehouse manner. Or perhaps that’s down to Kehlmann, who has an affection for British humour, history and literature. The eponymous hero of his previous novel, Tyll (2017), may be a German magician, tightrope-walker and trickster, but for a time he serves at the court of the ‘winter queen’, Elizabeth (wife of Friedrich and daughter of James VI of Scotland), who’s a theatre enthusiast and consoles Shakespeare on the death of his son Hamlet. (‘Hamnet,’ he corrects her.) Shakespeare turns up again in The Director when Pabst is first pushed to make a film for the Reich’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. ‘Do you want to direct that?’ Krämer asks, seeing a copy of Hamlet. ‘But Shakespeare is English,’ Pabst protests. ‘On paper,’ Krämer replies. ‘He’s German at heart … Our best actors embody his characters so truthfully, so … profoundly that it should make England blush with shame.’ Later, when two men in leather coats come to remove the screenwriter Kurt Heuser, they banter like Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

‘What’s this about?’ Heuser asks.

‘Everyone asks that,’ says Karsunke.

‘Always,’ says Basler.

‘Always, always, always,’ says Karsunke.

‘And yet we never answer that.’

‘We just say “Come with us!”’

‘If you have nothing to hide, you don’t need to be afraid.’

‘It can be quite harmless. That happens too.’

‘Not usually, though.’

‘No, not usually. Shall we go?’

The crux of The Director is whether it’s weakness or necessity that makes Pabst compromise. On the one hand, he’s disgusted by swastikas and Hitler salutes; on the other, his need to make films overrides other considerations. Defending himself against his wife’s accusation that he has been bought off too easily by the Reich, he says: ‘The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in.’ The Borgias were patrons of great artists; even Shakespeare had to make accommodations: ‘All this will pass. But art remains … Paracelsus will still be watched fifty years from now, when the nightmare is long forgotten.’ Trude’s not convinced: doesn’t the art ‘remain soiled? Doesn’t it remain bloody and dirty?’ And Kehlmann, not so enamoured of Pabst as to dodge the moral conundrum, keeps returning to it, as in this exchange with one of the actors:

‘But don’t you find it strange, Pabst, that we’re making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse? Such a … work of art?’

‘You say that as if it’s a bad thing.’

‘More like a strange thing.’

‘Times are always strange. Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered.’

Pabst’s determination to make a great film comes through when they’re shooting The Molander Case. The source material – a novel by Karrasch – is awful but he’s undeterred. A flashpoint comes when the eight hundred soldiers delegated to form a concert audience in the film are called up for war. Replacements can’t be taken ‘off the street’, but after his experience with the Riefenstahl film Pabst knows where they might be found and tells the production manager, not in so many words, to make the necessary arrangements. This time it’s Wilzek who’s shocked by the gaunt faces of the extras. ‘No one,’ Pabst reassures him, ‘Not a single person. Will be harmed because of us … The film must be finished.’ And it is, with the reels smuggled out of Prague in dramatic circumstances, including a crowd scene so massive that it makes Pabst think of D.W. Griffith.

Kehlmann’s three-part structure for the novel, Outside, Inside and After, neatly summarises the director’s career: first the exciting work outside the Reich, then the compromise within, then the damage to his reputation and morale (and a retreat into near silence) afterwards. The rotating viewpoints allow Pabst to be seen as others see him and ensure that it’s more than his story; after all, he reflects ruefully, a director has to work with a host of others, all ‘more capable than oneself’, to the point where they could probably do without a director altogether. Plenty of space is given to Trude, whose intelligence and writing ambitions are stifled but whose conscience persists even after she takes to heavy drinking. Still Pabst is the main show, with his corpulence, thick glasses and talent for getting the best out of his actors: ‘To one, he gave commands; with another he pleaded; to a third he gave explanations in a dryly serious tone; with another he laughed until they could no longer stay upright and fell into each other’s arms.’ He’s even sharper when he edits. ‘Almost anyone can shoot,’ he says. ‘It’s in editing that you make a film.’ The editing he does with Wilzek is exhaustive but so is his work on set. As a director he’s tangible; as a man less so. His son sums it up: ‘When he was directing, he always knew what people had to do. But he himself never really knew what he was supposed to do.’

One of Pabst’s real-life sons spoke of his keeping a diary but it has never emerged. Still, there is plenty of writing about him; a collection of essays edited by Eric Rentschler in 1990 (the only full-length critical book in English I’ve come across) has a long bibliography. As a novelist, Kehlmann prefers to invent, and he had the films to draw on as well as accounts by people Pabst worked with – including Riefenstahl, who wrote in her memoirs that she suffered under his ‘despotic direction’ and that ‘our collaboration became increasingly unbearable.’ The acknowledgments say that The Molander Case, which was being edited in Prague when Soviet troops entered the city, ‘is considered lost’; other sources suggest that some material relating to it is held in the Czech national film archives. Either way, the novel’s epilogue has a more arresting story to tell about the missing reels – that’s if Wilzek can be trusted.