The Novel That Refuses to Judge Its Nazi-Era Filmmaker
Daniel Kehlmann's novel The Director fictionalizes the life of G. W. Pabst, the Austrian filmmaker behind Weimar-era landmarks like Pandora's Box and The Threepenny Opera. The book, originally published in German as Lichtspiel, follows Pabst's return to Nazi Germany after a frustrating stint in Hollywood. American critics have seized on its "unnerving timing," reading it as a straightforward parable of artistic complicity with fascism. Jesse Relkin, writing for the Metropolitan Review, argues they have it wrong.
Relkin's central claim is that the novel is not a Faustian bargain story. Pabst does not choose to collaborate with the Nazis. He goes back to Austria for a family errand, war breaks out, the borders close, and he is injured. There is no devil to strike a deal with. Reviewers who frame it that way, Relkin contends, are importing a moral simplicity that Kehlmann deliberately avoids.
The oldest rule of the art of deception: a large movement makes a small movement invisible.
That line from the novel captures what Relkin sees as Kehlmann's real project. Focus on the Nazis and you miss the authoritarianism threaded through every other institution in the book.
Fascism in Miniature
The review maps out a catalogue of "micro-fascisms" that Kehlmann embeds across the novel's sprawling cast. Hollywood's studio system denies Pabst creative control over script, casting, camerawork, and final cut, then blames him when the film fails. Pabst himself is a despot on set. His fictional son Jakob navigates the authoritarian hierarchies of school by beating a boy with a concealed stone. Pabst's wife Trude joins a book club run by wives of Nazi officials where the only permitted opinion is praise.
A circle like this is based on agreement, on harmony.
That is how one of the ladies dismisses a member who commits the sin of going off-topic. Even professional criticism is neutered. A once-formidable reviewer becomes one of the Reich's "subtlest describers," forbidden from suggesting an actor could be bad because, as a Nazi official explains:
The films are produced by the ministry, so how could they be anything but excellent!
Relkin argues that Kehlmann is doing something more interesting than a simple indictment. He is showing that authoritarian structures exist in governments, markets, studios, book clubs, schools, and marriages alike. The question the novel poses is not whether Pabst is guilty but what anyone does when the system automatically makes them complicit.
The Director as Auteur and Authoritarian
One of the review's sharpest observations concerns the meta layer. Kehlmann is not just writing about a director. He is being one. The novel's title refers as much to Kehlmann himself as to Pabst, and Relkin traces how the author borrows freely from German Expressionist cinema. The opening and closing frame evokes The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The family's return to their Austrian estate becomes gothic horror, with the caretaker Jerzabek transformed into a grotesque petty tyrant.
Almost anyone can shoot. It's in editing that you make a great film.
Relkin turns that line against the novel itself. It is also in editing that you make propaganda. Kehlmann edits history freely, inventing characters, rearranging timelines, flattening some figures into stock villains while granting others deep complexity.
The scene where Jerzabek's daughters tie up Jakob in the attic, their faces painted with reddish chalk, one holding an ax and the other a kitchen knife, reads like a horror B-movie set piece. Relkin does not shy from calling this an inconsistency. Characters like Jerzabek get the cartoon treatment while Pabst receives careful moral ambiguity. That unevenness is a real weakness in an otherwise thoughtful book.
Art, Complicity, and the Lost Film
The novel's climax hinges on the fate of Pabst's fictional lost film, The Molander Case. Relkin emphasizes that Pabst's downfall is not moral but material. It is not the loss of his soul but the physical loss of the film that destroys him. His philosophy is stated plainly:
The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in.
Kehlmann neither endorses nor condemns this. He shows instead that artists cannot create in a vacuum. The film vanishes in the chaos of war, and with it goes Pabst's mind. The system that enabled the art also consumed it.
Pabst tries to justify using camp detainees as extras by telling his assistant Franz:
All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film. Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn't exist.
Relkin's rejoinder is pointed: if a great film falls in a forest and no one hears it over the blitzkrieg fire, does its greatness even exist? That question hangs over the entire novel.
Style as Substance, and Its Limits
The prose itself, Relkin notes, reads like commercial fiction, plain and utilitarian, not unlike a Hollywood screenplay. Genre conventions get leaned on hard. Melodramatic flourishes pop up. A Nazi hack author named Alfred Karrasch erupts in apoplectic fury:
Utter trash! Filthy, Bolshevik, Jewish, vulgar, pornographic, vile trash!
Relkin calls this what it is: tropey. The winks are sometimes visible and sometimes not, a distinction muddied further by translation. The concern is that when you imitate something long enough, you start to become it.
Still, the review grants that Kehlmann seems aware of this risk. Late in the novel, Pabst reflects on his own old-fashioned imagination:
And because his imagination, after so many decades, could function no other way, he envisioned films: a crime of passion on the great bridge, a golem rising from a deep cellar, the fiery sign on its forehead, a strange star in the sky heralding the arrival of a new era of deceit.
Kehlmann knows his cinematic mode is a bit dated. The self-awareness saves the novel from its own excesses, at least for Relkin, who admits she would have trouble recommending it to literary snob friends but finds enough substance to justify the ride.
One could push back on Relkin's charitable reading here. If a novel about the dangers of aesthetic control over truth is itself built on "alternative facts" and character flattening, the self-awareness defense only goes so far. Acknowledging a problem is not the same as solving it.
Bottom Line
Relkin's review makes a persuasive case that The Director is a more ambitious and stranger book than its American reception suggests. It is not a moral fable about selling out to fascism. It is an examination of how authoritarian structures replicate themselves everywhere, from the Propaganda Ministry to the editing suite to the book club. Kehlmann refuses to judge Pabst, and Relkin refuses to judge Kehlmann for refusing. The meta layers are genuine and interesting. The stylistic gamble of writing a novel in the idiom of early cinema pays off more often than it does not, though the uneven characterization remains a legitimate flaw. For readers interested in how complicity works as a system rather than a choice, this is essential reading about essential reading.