Kehlmann, Daniel. The Director. Simon and Schuster, New York 2025. F;5/25.

This historic novel deals with the creative and political life of famous Austrian film director G W Pabst. In 2020 Kehlmann published Tyll, another novel which impressed me and which would have been a tough act to follow. This story is very good for what it is but I think the fit for this writer isn’t quite as comfortable.

Here Pabst starts out in Hollywood in the early 20th century where in fact he spent relatively little time, following a flash-forward to maybe the 1960s where on an American broadcast he is dementing and makes a fool of himself. Back in the early 30s he asks Greta Garbo to play a lead in a film and she refuses. Then with his young son and wife he returns to his native Austria to care for his failing mother. There they all get trapped as the Nazis invade and Pabst reluctantly agrees to make propaganda films with Leni Riefenstahl, one of Hitler’s favourites and an actress and propaganda director as well. She is portrayed here as a manipulative martinet bitch with no talent.

In Nazi Germany uncomfortably working in the brutal war bureaucracy his family including his son have to to adapt to hypocrisy and viciousness as the war progresses. The boy learns how to survive in the boys’ school which reflects the prevailing zeitgeist. A friend,

Johann Megelwand, who fears heights, was overpowered, tied up, and hung from a thick rope out the window of the top floor. Even the teachers who found and freed him in the morning could barely suppress their laughter, and because Johann had pissed his pants while hanging up there, less out of fear than simply because it had been so many hours, he also spent four days in detention, because a German boy must not wet his pants, no matter what. When you’re scared, the one important thing is that no one finds out.

We understand Pabst is a great film director who even working in Nazi Germany he invents shooting sequences and editing artistry that become usual procedures as far away as Hollywood. He also knows how to get the best from actors. Making a film using mediocre performers, after shooting a scene many times with an actor named Hinz who was close to expressionless, he takes the man to a pub where

they ate and drank until the evening curfew forced them back to the inn, where they said goodbye with a long embrace. They were now on a first-name basis. The next morning Hinz delivered his lines as if for the first time. He spoke as if each word came to him the second he said it; he spoke as if he weren’t an actor but actually a prosecutor among colleagues, slightly distracted, friendly, without any pretense. He spoke softly and seriously, as one does to another person in a small room, personal and sincere.

This director’s skill is finally stretched to the limit with improvisation, pulling together enough extras using the army to make a theatre scene, skilfully cropping and editing until a (fictional) masterpiece emerges toward the end of the war. He and a colleague escape with the film print in heavy metal cans, but the film is lost in an exchange on the train as they scrape through escaping Germany apparently to safety.

Historical fiction is an awkward hybrid and the best stories manage to respect facts while spinning a graceful creature of the imagination. One of the characters in this book says

(w)as it possible that none of it had happened? Could one decide it hadn’t happened? Could one have been mistaken, imagined it, could one decide to have imagined it, could the memories be false, or could one decide they were false, simply because one wanted them to be?

However lightly that speaker may be breaking the fourth wall it’s a theatrical and creative trick to graft something wonderful onto banal historical “ facts”.

In Kehlmann’sTyll the writer seemed to find freedom to develop a character, much more fictional than Pabst although in a historic setting, who leaps off the pages in metaphysical proportions with his daring performances and sceptical irreverence. Kehlmann’s Pabst is also a fine performer in a threatening environment but for me he didn’t quite, in the magic of the imagination, escape the constraint of a very real and relatively recent situation.

There’s a lot to like in this story but I’d say if you want to read Daniel Kehlmann at his best (and he is very impressive) skipThe Director and find a copy of Tyll. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

8.7/8.8