By Peter Craven
FICTION
The Director
Daniel Kehlmann
Hachette, $34.99
Daniel Kehlmann is the German writer who is found thrilling wherever he is read. Now he has written a novel about inspired by the life of G.W Pabst, the great filmmaker of Pandora’s Box with Louise Brooks, the one who not only fled the Nazis for Hollywood but actually came back. Here is his sketch of Pabst’s meeting with the great lord of Nazi propaganda who remains nameless but we know we are in the presence of that uncanny monster Joseph Goebbels with his “famous high-pitched voice with the Rhenish accent … in his gaunt strangely youthful face …”
Goebbels within a few moments is a great monster forcing Pabst into a blurted, terror-struck confession of his communism, of his sins, forgivable because of his weakness.
The Director is a dazzling and compelling pseudo-biography which rides the deathly riderless horse of what it was like for an artist of great talent to get into bed with a culture of iniquity. The impossible conundrum he tries to ride is the insinuated and insidious myth that the Nazis, as represented by Goebbels, were interested in entertainment and therefore potentially in film that was art, where Stalin’s Russia was a mere propaganda machine.
The account of Pabst working on film in Nazi Germany is enthralling, credible and ghastly. There are portraits of the ones who got away, of Fritz Lang, Fred Zinnemann, Greta Garbo.
Pabst leaves Germany for the US when the war begins, but returns to Austria with his wife to find a nursing home for his mother. They’re headed for Switzerland when war traps them in Germany. What follows is a devastating depiction of how the human face of art can survive in a regime corrupt at every level, oscillating between mediocrity and the riddling abyss of evil. There is a Nazi caretaker who can’t even speak proper German but the words that roll in his mouth are sinister beyond belief.
Author Daniel Kehlmann.
So we get book club talk, opinionated women chattering under the aegis of the swastika. Then again we get Pabst saying lucidly enough that art is the one true thing that remains in the face of the horror of the world that always in practice has to deal with moral ghastliness, as Shakespeare had to deal with Elizabeth I.
The Director is a brilliant portrait of a terrible but intimately recognisable society told in scintillating streamlined sections. There’s Pabst’s teenage son, who works out you’ve got to be cruel if you want to make it at school, and who becomes a frisky young Hitler youth, happy-go-lucky with his mates and keen to enlist.
There is a dazzling chapter from the perspective of an English writer – I assume P.G. Wodehouse (who was stuck with the Germans during the war and broadcast innocuously). He attends the premiere, in Salzburg, of Paracelsus – Pabst’s film about the great doctor which the Englishman thinks is not only a masterpiece but a retrieval of the great German tradition of Expressionism.
But there is the hideously unnerving revelation – which brings Pabst’s closest associate to the edge of leaving him – where people from concentration camps are used as enforced extras, piteous and foul smelling.
There is also the prolonged drama of Pabst trying to hang on to the prints, the heavy plates, of his last film.
This is an impassioned scarifying book sometimes schematic, sometimes moody, always shimmering with misgiving and ambiguity. Pabst emphasises that it takes hundreds of people to make a film and this inevitably suggests it as a paradigm for the collective responsibility at a time when society is tottering into a moral abyss.
But The Director is a blindingly bright performance. The ambiguity of the very title is disturbing. This is a probing meditation on how talented and sensitive people can lose their moral compass. But it has a knife-edge energy as Kehlmann faces the vexed horrors of the world he invokes.
In one way The Director is a set of short stories etched in the vicinity of horrifying dilemmas. Along the pursuit of this dark path there is a jungle of horrors and predations. But one of the most disconcerting aspects of the book is the gallivanting sportiness of the leather coated thugs who whisk people away to concentration camps. Kehlmann’s suite of terrible stories has a powerful sense of reality even where it is most fantastically configured.
It is a comic strip cartoon of Nazism. Kehlmann is a master of the dark clouds of malevolence that are not separate from the small jokes and ironies of attempting in a bad time to earn a living.
But no one has ever captured the menacing caress of schadenfreude with such a light touch and with such power of invention.
The enigma of Pabst going back to his addiction to art is traced with all its tragic shadow lines. At the same time, The Director is a set of brilliant gestures towards a towering masterwork which can only be shown in snatches.
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