Daniel Kehlmann’s historical novel about real-life Austrian film director G.W. Pabst, who is summoned home from pre-World War II Los Angeles to attend to his ailing mother, looked to be just my cup of tea with my strong interest in the Third Reich and artistic expression in whatever medium.
And while the novel had its engrossing moments for me, such as when the family experiences anxious moments aboard a train stopped for passport control or when they're menaced by their Nazi-leaning caretaker or when their son, Jakob, is tied up by the caretaker's daughters or when Pabst meets for the first time with Goebbels and is given to understand exactly what will be required of him in making films for the Reich or when a film he has poured heart and soul into turns up missing, for all those and other arresting moments, the novel proved oddly uninvolving for me – partly, no doubt, due to my general unfamiliarity with German cinema as well as my admittedly faulty memory that has always made historical texts vexing for me with all their names and dates and places.
So more perhaps just an individual thing with me, my finding the novel not so overall engaging, though a matter of true concern was finding out in an afterword that the son, Jakob, was a fabrication – a matter of real concern, I would think, in any novel purporting to be about real people and events (though not, apparently, so rare in historical fiction, such fabrication – witness N.J. Mastro’s recent “Solitary ‘Walker,” about Mary Wollstonecraft, in which we’re also told in an afterward that a principal character was a fabrication or a composite).
Overall, though, a vivid and arresting depiction of art under pressure from totalitarianism, Kehlmann’s largely absorbing novel.

"The Director" is, on the one hand, a fictional biography/memoir of the German film director G.W. Pabst's time in Germany and Austria during the Nazi era. However, it's more about the compromises people make to survive in the face of evil, and then justify to themselves..

When the book begins, Pabst, a celebrated film director, has moved to Hollywood from Germany to work at one of the studios. When he's assigned to direct a film he considers beneath him, and it fails, he moves his wife and son to France, not yet under Vichy rule, to direct films, rather than serve time as an assistant director. The decision that baffles everyone there. Why, they ask him, would anyone leave the comfort of America to return to a war zone? For Pabst, it's about his integrity and artistic vision.

When his mother falls ill, he returns to Austria to take care of her, finding it firmly under Nazi control, with the caretaker of his house now a local Nazi bigwig. As his life begins to fall apart, he receives a visit from Kramer, a man he met in Hollywood and for whom he had contempt, now a Nazi propaganda officer. Rather than face punishment, Pabst, to his wife's horror, agrees to make films.

This is where the theme of compromises takes root. The man who wouldn't compromise his vision in Hollywood now does so, not only to survive but to make the movies he wants, excusing his collaboration under the guise of art. The rest of the characters, from his long-suffering wife to his son to Wilzek, his assistant director/cameraman, look with horror at his behavior while also trying to find their own way to survive.

Thanks to Net Galley and Simon Schuster for providing me with an advance reader copy in exchange for this honest review.

Daniel Kehlmann’s novel based on the life of film director G.W Pabst is mainly set around his time in Austria during WW2 making films for the Reich. It feels like he has captured the feeling of what it was like to live in those times having to juggle moral dilemmas with the need to survive.

Born in 1885, he grew up in Vienna, where he studied drama to become an actor and in 1910 worked as an actor and director at the German Theater in New York. Trapped in France at the start of WWI, he started a theatre group in his POW camp directing plays in French. After his release he directed several successful films working with actresses such as Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo and Leni Riefenstahl, before moving to the USA in 1934. However, in 1939 he was called back to Austria by his sick mother, and was once again trapped by the start of war, despite having visas to return to America.

It is this period the novel brilliantly captures when Pabst, faced with becoming a POW again, is coerced by the German Department of Propaganda, headed by Goebbels into making films that would showcase Germany’s modern cinematography. Often darkly satirical, it is also moving, as brings to life the knife edge people often had to navigate to survive, being careful with what they say and criticise and not commenting on those who suddenly disappear between two Nazi guards never to be seen again. I didn’t feel I got to know Pabst well or his wife Trude, a writer and an interesting character in her own right, but otherwise this was an engrossing historical novel and I enjoyed the details about how films were made in that era.

Is Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director a farce, a comedy, or a tragedy? The Director eludes simple labelling: it’s a remarkable historical novel about G. W. Pabst and his colleagues, essential to understanding the history of interwar German language film.

G. W. Pabst was already a successful director when he emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in the early 1930s, with his The Joyless Street starring Greta Garbo well received. In the U.S., his Warner Brothers A Modern Hero was met with mixed reviews. He returned to Europe in the mid-1930s, only to find himself conscripted by Germany to make films.

The best of The Director is Kehlmann’s exploration of Pabst’s psyche: his unrequited love for Louise Brooks; his devotion to his art; his commitment to his wife and son. Most important, and best portrayed, is Pabst’s emotional deterioration during the WW2 years.

Four stars.

I would like to thank Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced reader’s copy of The Director.

The Director, Daniel Kehlmann's latest novel, translated by Ross Benjamin who also translated Kehlmann's International Booker Award nominated Tyll, is a clever and intriguing fictional biography of the early Austrian film director G. W. Pabst. as he flees The turmoil of prewar Europe to the America only to return to Germany since he cannot gain artistic freedom in the U.S. Thanks to the team at Simon & Schuster and Netgalley for this Advance Reading Copy. Stylistically, The novel has a cinematic feel with scenes depicted much in the way a filmmaker would stage and shoot them and filled with literal descriptions that capture film techniques Pabst made popular. Also sure to delight to film buffs, Kehlmann has imagined cameo appearances of greats like Great Garbo, Leni Riefenstahl, and Louise Brooks, plus offers nods and references to cinema history as for example his use of a running joke where people recognize Pabst but try to attribute to him films of other famed directors. Characters are not limited to film and we see interesting portrayals of a certain German propaganda minister and a British P.O.W author manipulated into making radio broadcasts for the Nazis. All these varied characters are blended into a marvelous story that I won't spoil for you here but can say it deals with themes like what an artist should/will do for art; what happens when art is dictated; or to what degree are we complicit in accepting what is dictated when trying to pursue our own path, and the reader cannot help but see many refences to the world today. I recommend the novel and hope a film producer picks up on the work Daniel Kehlmann has started. I would rate this 4 1/2 stars.

Daniel Kehlmann's The Director is a book for our times. It's also a book made for a lover of Hollywood history, and anyone who appreciates a good story uniquely told. The Director is inspired by the life of the great German filmmaker G.W. Pabst. Kehlmann has reached in and found the voids in what we know and filled in the blanks for us, while creating and then devolving the character of Pabst and those who surround him.

The first and last chapters are exceptional, written, as they are, in the first person of an elderly character with some sort of memory issues. Kehlmann uses this device both to suck us into the core of the tornado that is the story to come, and to seed just enough backstory to pull us forward into the novel.

The Director is set during the Nazi era, and each character has a different relationship with the regime, but all of them are clouded by personal needs, the artist's desire to work, fear, and the wraiths of mediocrity that haunt those who know they're not measuring up. There are Nazis and there are "good Germans," but when it comes right down to it in a devastating scene towards the end, they are all one and the same, artistry notwithstanding.

Kehlmann tells the story from a variety of points of view, a style that's especially suited for this story -- he doesn't take the screenwriter's hero's journey, but builds an ecosystem to hold his story, and his meaning. Recommend.

yes, I began this novel with some nervousness. Given that TYLL is one of the most intense and upending and revelatory reading experiences of my 21st century reading life--nearly 25 years of it, now--how could this novel ever match it? Wasn't I about to be disappointed? Never mind. By the end of the first chapter I already knew that I was about to read another life-changing work. Here is this same discernment about humanity. Here is this same, true mix of absolute empathy with cold-hearted clinical truth-telling about people's motivations, and desires, and vulnerabilities. The novel is nothing like TYLL except in all the ways that matter. As I read I felt the same cascading wave of revelation upon revelation about the human condition that I did with TYLL, however different this story may be, and, okay, I'm very sorry for the way I sound like a blurb crammed full of hyperbole at the moment, but yeah, this book, this is why I read.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the advance read in exchange of an honest review. Renowned German director GW Pabst arrives in 1930’s Los Angeles ready to make his mark on the film world. Unfortunately, both literally and figuratively, his artistic talents don’t translate to Hollywood moviemaking and he makes the fateful decision to return to a Europe not only on the brink of war but under the control of the Nazi regime. There, as he makes a pact with the devil, he is able to continue directing. Kehlmann’s novelization of (mostly) true characters and events is extremely compelling and, at times, horrifying. His writing weaves reflection, fantasy, and insinuation into an engrossing read. I found myself Googling names and events and rereading early passages once a later reveal shed light on an early allusion. Highly recommended.

“Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself.”

“He had his own theory of film editing. That a cut must always be based on a movement, creating an unbroken flow from the first shot to the last.”

Movies, first a fairground attraction, soon started to tell short stories. George Wilhelm Pabst, bitten by “the acting bug” convinced his father, a stationmaster for the Austrian Eastern Railroad to give him one year to “make it” as an actor. He became enamored with directing while being held in a French prison camp on an island near Brest. When the camp authorities approved a drama club, Pabst discovered that in lieu of acting, “he knew better than anyone where people should stand, from which side they should enter, how lines should be delivered.” After the Great War ended, he pursued film, “a new and disorderly medium, a change from the 1920s Silent Cinema.

Traveling to America after the war, Pabst hoped to share his unique directing techniques with Hollywood. Instead, he was given a terrible script for “A Modern Hero”. He was told that he could not pick the actors, place cameras in his chosen filming locations nor access the editing room after the final cut. The entire production was a total flop. Since one is only as good as one’s last film, Pabst was now demoted to assistant director.

Although safe in America, he was summoned back to Austria (now renamed Ostmark) as WWII was commencing. A telegraph: Oma was gravely ill. “Every day…every goodbye is forever-that’s the nature of time…”. It was never expected that the borders would close, trapping Pabst and his family. Fellow train passengers described others who paid a Reich Flight Tax or surrendered jewelry and were still forced off the train and onto the train platform by indifferent inspectors.

Dreiturn Castle, where Oma lived, had been drastically altered after Austria was annexed by the Reich. The caretakers, the Jerzabeks, now exercised their clout as party members by moving into Oma’s living quarters while Oma occupied the caretakers downstairs apartment. Noting Oma’s health challenges, Pabst determined that it would be prudent to move her to a good sanatorium in Austria. After all, the Pabst family had entry visas for Switzerland, French transit visas and an open-booked-first class passage and visas to enter the United States. When Germany invaded Poland, transport stopped and the borders closed.

“At a time like this, people belong to their homeland…everyone does his part.” Pabst was summoned by the Minister in Berlin. Films were no longer being imported but cinemas still needed to be filled. Pabst was unable and/or unwilling to make any more films. A warning was issued. He must apologize and seek peace and forgiveness. Upon this apology, he would be offered any budget, any actor, any film… he was still free…not under arrest, not on the way to a concentration camp. He must comply, cooperate and make idealistic films “that touch the German hearts.” From the chaos of material…gathered under the most absurd circumstances…you pieced together something that…must seem a solid and necessary unity…it’s better than being on the front.”

Georg Wilhelm Pabst encountered many challenges as his directing style was stymied. “Actors need good direction…directors depend on good actors.” There was always the danger that any verbalization could be reported to the Gestapo with the resultant fear of being sent to a camp. Pabst had made a humiliating and troubling Faustian Bargain.

Director Pabst, as imagined, is presented in three sections by author Daniel Kehlmann. The first part, “Outside” is related through the recollections of his assistant director, Herr Wilzek, a current resident in the Abendruh Sanatorium. Wilzek references a movie called The Molander Case filmed in the last months of the war in Prague. The movie was considered to be lost. He states The Wolander Case was never made. “Inside” describes Pabst’s time in Germany working for the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The final section “After” talks of the plight of a missing masterpiece.

Pabst was an exacting, detailed-oriented director who arguably concentrated on facial expression more so than physical movement. His early silent films showcased Greta Garbo. Actress Louise Brooks was the girl of his dreams. He was a contemporary of Fritz Lang. It did not bode well with Pabst that he was mistaken as having directed Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic masterpiece “Metropolis”. An excellent read of historical fiction enhanced by descriptions of filmmaking progress from silent to sound cinema. Highly recommended.

Thank you S&S/Summit Books and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I remember, years ago, seeing Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, starring Louise Brooks and directed by G. W. Pabst. They were strange films, but compelling and unforgettable. Pabst discovered Brooks and Greta Garbo, and was celebrated for his innovative film editing and supportive way of working with actors.

Pabst had been a prisoner of war in France during the Great War, and he worked in both France and the United States. He was unhappy with his treatment by the Hollywood studio system during the 1930s, and returned to Europe. He was compelled to stay in the Reich when World War II broke out, and was persuaded by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to make films under the auspices of the Reich Propaganda Ministry.

In the novel, and in real life, Pabst’s wife Gertrude (“Trude”) is with him during his time in the US and back in the Reich. She speaks excellent English and, in the book, is desperate to find a way to leave the Nazi realm, for herself and her family, including the Pabsts’ teenage son, Jakob. (In real life, the Pabsts had two sons, one of whom, Peter, was 15 when World War II began, similar to the fictional Jakob.) Neither G.W. nor Trude seems to be aware that Jakob enjoys being in the Hitler Youth and can hardly wait to join the Wehrmacht and fight for Germany.

Bookended by the tortured memories of Wilzek, Pabst’s assistant director, much of the rest of time, the novel lives in Pabst’s mind, as he navigates a homeland that has transformed itself thoroughly and nightmarishly. The low-class peasant who is the caretaker of Pabst’s country estate has become a local Nazi functionary and is alternately fawning and threatening. Pabst had formerly directed and mentored Leni Riefenstahl, but now that she is the celebrated director of Triumph of the Will and Olympia, she treats him with disdain and thinly veiled threats. Pabst tries to wriggle out of the clutches of Goebbels, but gives in when presented with the choice between directing big new movies or possibly going to a concentration camp.

Pabst fully immerses himself in filmmaking, convinced that art is all that matters and that it will survive no matter the historical conditions in which it is produced. His delusion, during his last wartime film, The Molander Case, leads him to cross lines that appalled him when he assisted Leni Riefenstahl soon after his return. And it is all naught, when the film’s reels go missing in the chaotic final days of the war in Europe. Though he continues to work after the war, he is obsessed with that film.

This is a brilliant and nightmarish story of how a corrupt regime stains the lives of all who come into contact with it.

I am in love with this book. Finished it in one day. It is absolutely brilliant. Thank you for the ARC.

A very different sort of book about filmmaking because it's more about the choices we make. I was not familiar with Austrian director GW Pabst before reading this fictionalized account of his life and work under and for the Nazis. This is complex and takes a bit of patience at times- and you might fund yourself looking up the people he meets along his journey. Pabst makes a deal not only with the devils but also with himself. It's a cautionary tale that remains relevant. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. For fans of literary historical fiction.

🔉Thank you to Daniel Kehlmann, Simon & Schuster/ S&S Summit Books, and NetGalley for this arc of The Director, out May 6, 2025!

📜Quick Summary: During the onset of World War 2, Austrian director G.W. Pabst is on the way to having a career in film. As the Nazi’s took power, he decided to flee to California, take his chances in Hollywood. But as his elderly mother gets sick, he is forced to come home to Austria. This choice causes his family to see the awful ways of the regime, which now is coming after his artistic abilities. Can he hold strong? Or will he give in and create films that would benefit the dictatorship?

❣️Initial Feels: I enjoy reading historical fiction; it’s for sure a top three category for me. As difficult a subject as WW2 and Nazi regime is, I am enthralled in learning more about that part of our history. I can tell this will be a heavy read,but the depth of his writing is evident in all the pages.

👀Trigger Warnings: Nazi era, war

📖Read if you want: history of cinema, art, WW2, complicated relationships and friendships, different point of view chapters

💡Final Sentiments: This is my first novel that I’ve read that has been translated from another language. I’ve heard about Daniel Kehlmann’s works, and I was thrilled to receive an arc of this novel, The Director. When the novel first opens up, we meet Pabst’s aging former assistant, who is losing his mind and memories. When questioned about a lost film, he remains adamant that it was never filmed. Franz Wilzek sure makes a show of himself on the show itself, and he becomes such a vital piece to the unraveling of Pabst as a character. There were a lot of names, a lot of German names, places, etc to keep track of. At times I felt overwhelmed reading, and found myself rereading certain parts a second time. Trude was a great character and I wish I had more time with her. Be prepared to fully invest your thoughts and time on this read! I think if you are familiar with this time period, are invested in history and don’t get as confused as I am…you will truly love this. I don’t think I was the perfect audience for this novel, but that’s a me problem, not an author issue.

🌟Overall Rating: 4 / 4.5 stars

This novel was provided by the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.

Yes, Kehlmann brilliantly recreates the ww2 period in Europe and the moral dilemmas facing the artist..in this case..a film director. But, in my opinion, he fails to bring to life G.W. Pabst and the surrounding characters. Pabst et al function more to bring the period and dilemmas to life than as people one gets to know and cares about. Additionally, there were times when I was confused as to who the first person character was, the time period and place. Of course, this may be intentional on the author's part. . Since I am a film buff I was totally fascinated by the detailed sections dealing with film making. But, a
non-film buff may decide to skip these sections. Needless to say my recommendations will contain all of the foregoing caveats.

Daniel Kehlmann's new novel is a dark and moving portrait of the famous Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst (1895-1967), about a lost film and about working as an artist under an authoritarian regime, told in cinematic language. If you are interested in the history of cinema, this is fascinating.

The opening chapter of the book, a flash forward, is one of the most intriguing I ever read: years after Pabst's death, an elderly and forgetful former assistant of his is interviewed for Austrian television, about his cooperation with Pabst during the war. He unexpectedly gets a question about the film 'Der Fall Molander' which was shot in Prague under difficult circumstances in the final months of the war. The film is lost, but the assistant vehemently insists it was never shot.

Then we go back in time to the 1930s and the focus shifts to Pabst, who had first escaped Nazi Germany to Hollywood (like Fritz Lang and other colleagues) but makes a terrible miscalculation and moves back to the Reich for family reasons. He ends up trapped there when the war starts.

The book has everything I love from Daniel Kehlmann: an original historical topic (I always wonder how he comes up with his topics), smart dialogue (I had to laugh often despite the disturbing circumstances), a good plot to get immersed in (much of it invented I suspect, because it is a novel, not a biography) and raising interesting moral questions. Tyll will remain my personal favourite, but this is an incredible novel too.

And now starts a period of another 3-4 years of waiting for his next...