Review of “The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann; translated from the German by Ross Benjamin
by Michael Quinn
A director has an idea for a screenplay: wealthy passengers aboard a luxury cruise ship find their peace of mind poisoned by rumors of an impending war. Trust erodes, factions form, conflict escalates. Then, news arrives from a distant shore: there was never a war at all. But the blood onboard has already been shed.
That imaginary film sits at the heart of “The Director,” the new novel by German-Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. The author, who divides his time between Berlin and New York, has been popping up around the city not just for readings, but for screenings tied to the silent film era. Kehlmann’s book reimagines the life of Weimar-era filmmaker G.W. Pabst (1885–1967). Pabst launched the patent-leather-bobbed Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box” and revealed Greta Garbo’s star power in “The Joyless Street.”
The real-life director’s leftist sympathies early in his career earned him the nickname “Red Pabst.” After fleeing Nazi Germany for Hollywood, he was courted by studios. When his first picture flopped, he was condemned to make films with bad scripts and lousy actors. He returned to Austria as WWII began and ended up directing for the Reich. He became a man whose art and conscience fatally diverged.
Kehlmann’s fictional director follows a similar descent. When he returns to Vienna with his wife, Trude, and young son, Jakob, he asserts the move is to care for his elderly mother, not to avoid making another crummy picture. The family moves into the crumbling castle he once bought as a symbol of pride and success. The crude caretaker, his wife, and their terrifying children slobber over the family obsequiously. Once war breaks out, they gain the upper hand and begin tormenting them. Trude withdraws into numbness. Jakob, eager to fit into the local schoolboy hierarchy, becomes a different kind of war casualty.
Kehlmann’s prose—energetically translated by Ross Benjamin—renders the strangeness of the times with arresting images. When we see, after a restless night, the director’s “socks bunched up into little snails under the bed,” we know exactly what that looks like.
The author captures the small betrayals that pave the way for larger ones—the moments when complacency feels easier than resistance. “Times are always strange,” the director reflects. “Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made and later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered.” This may be true—but it also sounds like a justification.
In the world Kehlmann portrays, complicity rarely begins with ideology. It begins with fatigue and the wish to stay comfortable. This exacts its own toll on the spirit. One character observes that while on set the director “laughed a lot, but when the lights went out, he often looked emptied out like a costume that no one was wearing.”
Years after the war, an elderly man, once the director’s assistant, returns home from a disastrous TV appearance where he was grilled about the director’s lost work. Overcome by memories of a different kind of betrayal, he doesn’t reflect on what kind of person this makes him: “I kick off my shoes and put on my slippers. Everything feels better. What a difference slippers make!” Creature comforts are both balm and bind.
Throughout the war years, the director keeps returning to his idea for that unwritten film—the cruise ship, the rumor of war, the panic that consumes everyone. He’s too taken by his idea for this nightmare scenario to comprehend the reality he’s actually living. He’s so absorbed by his craft that he sails straight into a storm of his own making.
