The Director

Because it starred Hayley Mills, one of my earliest obsessions, I probably begged my mother to take me to In Search of the Castaways, a 1962 Disney film, while my father was stationed in France. Although I can't remember if we went, the prospect elicited some shocking information about another cast member that Mom no doubt had picked up from the movie magazines she enjoyed perusing at the beauty parlor in El Paso:  "Maurice Chevalier collaborated with the Nazis," she asserted.  Not long after we were re-united in Orleans, Dad took me to a Paris museum which documented the atrocities of the Holocaust. Kindly Maurice was dead to me, thereafter, although he lived another decade.  

Ah, if only life was that simple! Novelist Daniel Kehlmann brilliantly explores being caught in the vise of history through the late career of GW Pabst, the Austrian who directed Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks (Pandora's Box) in his early silent movies.  The book begins in the recent imagined past, when Franz Wilzek, a not-quite-senile nursing home resident who worked for Pabst and eventually became an undistinguished director himself, is invited to appear on a Sunday morning talk show by a young Jewish producer.  His appearance is part of a plan to sabotage the host, the personification of a jolly German, at least on camera. When asked about Molander, his mentor's lost film of the Nazi era, Wilzek insists it was never shot, ruining the interview.  As the confused old man leaves the television studio, the young producer cryptically tells him that his father survived, a revelation that Wilzek doesn't understand, or perhaps pretends not to.  Ultimately, it makes no difference; Kehlmann is primarily interested in how far someone is willing to go to make art, or to salve their conscience.

Each chapter of The Director is written like a scene in a riveting biopic told from various perspectives, including those of Pabst's long-suffering wife, Trude, and their young, sensitive son, Jakob, who matures during Nazi rule.   Kehlmann further embraces multiple genres, including comedy, romance, thriller and horror, and vividly sketches many of the era's famous principals, who also include the stomach-turning, self-tanning Leni Riefenstahl and the much more palatable Marlene Dietrich.

She was eating a cannelloni with a spoon. I found her frightfully German, in the most endearing way. If one had had holes in one’s socks, one felt she might have reached into her mink and pulled out a pair of darning needles. But glamorous, glamorous of course!

We first meet Pabst at a Hollywood party hosted by Fred Zinnemann, which Kehlmann narrates as fluidly as a roving camera.  Trude, delighted to have escaped Europe as the second World War brews, spots Billy Wilder wearing a cowboy hat. Both men will remain in America and thrive; Pabst, who barely speaks English, does not. Based on his reputation, studio executives, who confuse him with Fritz Lang, have given him a movie to direct but he knows it's a turkey. Worse, both Greta and Louise refuse to star in the topical film he's conceived about international passengers on a cruise ship who mistakenly believe war has been declared.  

Also present at the party is a German "nobody" who invites him to return to his former glory making films for the Third Reich.  "Red Pabst" screams his refusal, although the man eventually becomes his handler due to circumstances beyond the director's control.  After his mentally deteriorating mother summons him to their spooky ancestral castle for a final visit, Germany invades Poland and the borders close, marooning Pabst and his family on the wrong side.

The Director becomes even more compelling as its actual theme emerges.  As skillfully as Kehlmann has evoked the Hollywood milieu, he's even better in demonstrating how fascism infects every aspect of society and the moral choices people are confronted with as a result.  At home, a servant who belongs to the local Nazi party literally turns the tables on the Pabst family; at work, where the only films Pabst can direct must be approved by the party; and most chillingly at school, where the impressionable Jakob, a talented artist who successfully confronts a bully, takes away the wrong lesson, at least in this environment.

Jakob realized that killing has something in common with painting—both work best when you forget that things are more than just color and shadow. Both are best done when you think away the inside. 

Nor are book groups or nursing homes immune, but that doesn't entirely mean that fascism, at least among the Nazis, was not without its benefits for a talented director.  In Paracelsus, Pabst manages to get away with biting the hand that feeds him.  Here's what Pabst's handler has to say about reviewers who might once have exposed the obvious meaning behind his film's silent parable.

“Critics? We have no critics! Criticism is a Jewish genre that no one needs. Instead we have art appreciation! Look."  He stopped a tall, bespectacled man and said "May I introduce you? Guido Merwetz.  Once a feared.  Now one of our most subtlest describers."

Despite the catnip Hollywood angle, I resisted picking up this incredibly fine novel, superbly translated by Ross Benjamin, because I thought it might be too highbrow after reading Tyll, an earlier work by Kehlmann about the Thirty Years War.  Instead, The Director accessibly combines formal brilliance, biography, metaphor and fiction to explore human behavior and the pursuit of art under the most extreme circumstances.

I owe an apology to Maurice.