Heil Hollywood

There’s an unspoken rule that if you write a novel about Nazis, the point can’t simply be “the Nazis were evil” or “keeping company with Nazis is wrong.” But judging from the American reception of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel The Director — which has been noted for its “unnerving timing” and described as “curiously prophetic” — you’d think that was exactly the book he’d written.

But while Kehlmann has said he set out to write a novel, which appeared last year, about “complicity,” the book isn’t exactly the prophetic meditation on the new F-word that American critics have made it out to be. There’s something much more nuanced and original going on here, namely, Kehlmann’s depictions of the banality of fascism, which extends the now-clichéd state apparatus of Nazi Germany to Hollywood, the authoritarian vision of great artists, and beyond — even to the author’s own handling of the material.

In The Director, Kehlmann fictionalizes the life of G. W. Pabst, nicknamed “Red Pabst,” the Austrian director who rose to prominence as one of the most influential filmmakers of the Weimar Republic, with socially radical films like Pandora’s Box and The Threepenny Opera. Kehlmann takes notable liberties with Pabst’s biography, inventing characters who become major players in the novel’s events, fiddling with timelines, and reworking historical details to serve the book’s themes. It’s a novel drawing more from Kehlmann’s imagination than from historical record.

The book follows Pabst, after a frustrating stint in Hollywood, as he returns to Nazi Germany — a return presented here not as a political choice, or even an unpolitical choice, but hardly a choice at all. As his wife Trude puts it, it comes down to “a string of misfortunes”: the trip is meant to be a quick family errand to arrange nursing care for his mother, but war is declared, the borders close, and Pabst sustains an incapacitating fall at home.

Pointedly, Pabst is not making a deal with the devil. And yet, this is what some reviewers would have you believe, casting the novel as a drawn-out Faustian bargain. An NPR review titled “A Filmmaker in Nazi Germany Strikes a Deal with the Devil in ‘The Director’” even opens with a reference to the German legend.

This framework is missing the point of what Kehlmann is actually up to.