Rewriting Biography: Daniel Kehlmann's The Director (2025)
Film historians consider G.W. Pabst one of the four most accomplished German film directors of the first half of the 20th century, along with Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, and F.W. Murnau. But Pabst has also always been a highly contested figure. Extravagantly praised for his silent films, The Joyless Street (1925) and Pandora’s Box (1928), films in which we discovered Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, respectively. In between, Pabst produced films, like the now lost Man spielt nicht mit der Liebe (1926) and Abwege (1928), the latter with the ice-cold Brigitte Helm, which left many critics and the public puzzled. Inconsistencies plague Pabst’s cinematic chronology. Pabst literally disappears in the co-directed Dr. Arnold Fanck film, The White Hell of Piz Palü (1929), a film with a proto-fascist iconography and Pabst’s first but not last encounter with Leni Riefenstahl, where he coaches her and Luis Trenker in the finer points of acting.
His first sound films, Westfront 1918 (1930), The Three Penny Opera (1931), and Kameradschaft (1931) earned him the moniker, “Der rote Pabst/The red Pope;” the leftist Pabst was praised for his realism and his social engagement. Theorist and historian Paul Rotha famously called him “perhaps the one great genius of the film outside Soviet Russia.” He then inexplicably ends the Weimar period with The Mistress of Atlantis (1932), a phantasmagoric tale of the lost city of Atlantis that forsakes any kind of realism for fantasy. Exile from Hitler’s Germany followed in 1933, Pabst at sea producing a series of “unsuccessful” films in France and Hollywood. Yet, as Rick Rentschler argues in his reevaluation, The Films of G.W. Pabst (1990), the “emigration trilogy” consisting of Don Quixote (1933), High and the Low (1933) and Shanghai Drama (1938) explores the problematic of exile, “a cinema of extraterritorial uncertainty in which characters exist on dangerous ground… where utopian dreams betray above all a will to renounce the real.” (p. 17)
However, it was his ultimate return to Nazi Germany to work for Joseph Goebbels’ nazified UFA that ruined Pabst’s international reputation. While Komödianten (1941) may appear to be apolitical or at least politically ambiguous, Paracelsus (1943) is an historical epic that is firmly rooted in the fascist ideology of the visionary genius, a symbolic stand-in for Hitler. Why had Pabst, who like Fritz Lang was a hero of the anti-Fascist German exile world, acquiesced to returning to Nazi Germany? Certainly, Pabst had his excuses: his mother was sick in Austria, he had to take care of his “Three Towers” property in Austria, he already had tickets for the “Normandy,” leaving Cherbourg for America. But Lotte Eisner, herself a Jewess from Berlin who survived the Holocaust in occupied France, never forgave Pabst. As she told him, “the man with the perfect alibi is always the guilty one.”
In the post World War II era, Pabst’s reputation went into deep decline, a decline hardly helped by the series of indifferent films he would produce post 1945. Yet, Rentschler’s analysis of Pabst’s film career as extra-territorial, has done much to rehabilitate Pabst’s critical reputation, shedding light on previously neglected films, while making no excuses for the director’s undeniable weaknesses. Despite having been one of the inventors of invisible editing in the 1920s, despite his string of acknowledged masterpieces, Pabst had come increasing under fire as a man of surfaces, an artist who flitted from Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit to psychoanalysis to political melodrama to aestheticism to women’s melodrama to Nazi propaganda, a director without convictions or a consistent style, never explaining himself, unknowable. Rentschler quotes Louise Brooks: “None of us who knew Pabst well felt that we ever knew him at all,” then calls him “film history’s ultimate nowhere man.” (p. 1)
Reading Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, The Director, originally published in German as Lichtspiel, one wonders whether the novelist was drawn to Pabst because his inconsistencies created spaces for play. His characteristic vacillation and uncertainty, the incongruities and gaping holes in his biography, gave the novelist free reign to fill in the gaps. Indeed, the climax of the novel concerns the production of The Molander Case (1945), an unfinished film, based on a novel by the Nazi author Alfred Karrrasch, which Pabst shot in Prague at the Barandov Studios in the waning days of the war. The production was completed, but post-production, including a final cut was halted when the Russians entered the city in May 1945. Given that the film was never completed and is now considered lost, virtually no historical evidence of the film survives, other than a few bits of publicity and some star photographs. The negative may have been destroyed by Czech film workers at the studio in the immediate post-war period, since an inquiry at the National Film Archive has confirmed that no material has survived in their vaults, although they hold nitrate prints and negatives on numerous other German films. That “weisser Fleck” (blank area) on Pabst’s creative biography gave Kehlmann ample opportunity to speculate not only about the production of the film and Pabst’s culpability in the Holocaust, but also about how that experience helped shape the steep decline in Pabst’s post World War II career.
However, as numerous reviewers have pointed out, Pabst remains a cipher in Kehlmann’s fiction, his motivations are rarely explained. At best, Kehlmann allegorizes the role of the artist who must compromise his integrity when faced with a ruthless Fascist regime, as in Nazi Germany. Kehlmann, creates a fictional biography, that like an edited film, juxtaposes moments from the director’s life work, emphasizing the director’s need to create, regardless of the cost to himself, with the toll it the takes on his family and others. So, we must ask whether, as some theorists have postulated, there are ethical boundaries, especially when creating an historical novel with real people that touches on the Holocaust.
Historical fiction is nothing new, and creating fictions from the lives of real historical personages is a literary practice that has gained acceptance, especially during the period of German exile literature, when anti-fascist writers such as Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, and Alfred Neumann published historical novels, which allegorized the reality of the Third Reich. Interestingly, Feuchtwanger in his “Waiting Room” trilogy analyzed the Hitler Putsch, the Nazi takeover, and his own exile, but used pseudonyms, whereas in his more temporally distant historical novels, like Jew Süß and Goya, he employed real names. Likewise, Heinrich Mann in his massive fictional biography of Henry IV and Alfred Neumann in his novels about Cesar and Queen Christina, felt free to use real historical figures, allowing them to allegorize the contemporary reality of the Third Reich, but developed fictional characters for their contemporary novels. In what follows, I will attempt to unpack some of the issues raised by Kehlmann’s historical fiction, as well as discuss the novel’s critical reception which has consistently blurred the line between the real and the fictional G.W. Pabst, leading to what I see are some ethical dilemmas.
The novel opens with a TV interview decades after the war with an aging Franz Wilzek, Pabst’s fictional assistant – indeed the only principal character who is not real - who denies The Molander Case was ever filmed. The interview is a train wreck, a farce, setting the tone for other parts of the novel. Kehlmann is interested in Pabst’s theater experiences during his first American sojourn in World War I, then glosses over Pabst’s film beginnings in Vienna, skips his greatest period of achievement from 1925 to 1932, and jumps to Pabst’s residency in Hollywood, before zeroing in on the three Pabst Nazi films, The Comedians (1941), Paracelsus (1943), and The Molander Case. Kehlmann’s Pabst attempts to maintain his dignity throughout, convincing himself that his films are aesthetically credible, thus supposedly outwitting Goebbels. The novelist gives us a film auteur completely broken by his experience of exile, his compromises under German fascism, and his regrets about family choices, rendering him virtually catatonic by the end of the novel. The direction of his woman’s melodrama, Mysterious Depths (1949) is mostly handled by wife Trude, which may be close to the historical truth, according to a new documentary, Pandora’s Legacy (2024), which focuses on Trude Pabst.
It is unclear why Kehlmann purposely constructs some obvious historical inaccuracies, unless he sees them as a kind of Brechtian distancing device, a postmodern literary strategy in his amalgamation of violent shifts in point of view, and in tone, from farce to thrillers, melodramas to literary memoirs. The premiere of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (3/1927) is placed two weeks after The White Hell of Piz Palü (11/1930), a seemingly silly juxtaposition to highlight Lang’s prominence vis à vis an annoyed Pabst. A rewriting of Pabst’s biography has particularly irked surviving Pabst family members, namely Kehlmann’s characterization of Pabst’s teenage son, Jakob, who becomes an ardent Hitler Youth with tendencies towards violent bullying, thus marking him for Nazi leadership. The director’s actual son, Peter, is the same age as the fictional Jakob, but was never in the Hitler Youth. But, Kehlmann’s narrative regarding Jakob reads more like the anti-Nazi films, Hitler’s Children (1943) and Women in Bondage (1943), the cliché propagated there being that the Nazis turned children against their parents, creating little monsters who denounced their democratic leaning parents in a heartbeat for the Führer. That might be the point, to juxtapose popular culture clichés as elements in historical fiction.
Indeed, Kehlmann’s hidden agenda seems to be to present Pabst’s trajectory as a metaphor for the history of German cinema as conceptualized by a postwar generation of film critics, like Enno Patalas and Ulrich Gregor: That conventional narrative saw German cinema trace a trajectory from its artistic heights in Weimar to its fatal compromises under Nazism to its utter mediocrity in the early Federal Republic, before rising again with New German Cinema. It is a master narrative of art cinema that though potent has been largely reconceptualized by the last two generations of film historians, who understand German cinema as conflicts between art and genre, commerce and politics, realism and the avoidance of reality.
The Director’s German title is Lichtspiel, which translates as light play, but also as cinema or film. As noted above, this is the key to Kehlmann’s narrative method, juxtaposing spatially and temporally fragmented scenes with rapid changes in perspective from various witnesses, moving from semi-realism to surrealism, to slapstick, to melodrama, to satire. Kehlmann traffics less in psychologically developed characters than in stereotypes and outright caricatures, which is part and parcel to his method of creating a postmodern pastiche. For example, the Hollywood chapters are reduced to a Warner Brothers studio hack named Jake repeatedly telling Pabst over the latter’s objections what a wonderful film A Modern Hero (1934) will be, while Pabst obsessively pushes to make a film about a world war breaking out on an ocean liner. Pabst actually wrote that war script for Paramount after he had left Warner Brothers before A Modern Hero failed at the box office. However, as I argue in my essay, “G.W. Pabst in Hollywood or Every Modern Hero Deserves a Mother” (Rentschler, 1990, pp. 154-166), A Modern Hero (1934) was unpopular in America because it failed to conform to Hollywood conventions; rather it reflected Pabst’s European view of capitalism and gender relations; it was exactly the film Pabst wanted to make: dark, psychologically perverse, with intimations of incest, anti-capitalist, nowhere near the Horatio Alger myth Warner Bros. had ordered.
Once Pabst returns to Austria, ostensibly to say goodbye to his mother, Kehlmann’s narrative turns darker, a masterfully drawn horror show of Swiftian proportions that vacillates between surrealism and nightmare. There is the Nazi janitor in Pabst’s castle “Three Towers” who after Pabst unexpectedly returns to Austria literally banishes the Pabst family to the basement, while he moves into the master’s quarters after physically threatening the sickly Pabst.
Another kind of threat occurs in the palatial offices of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Like contemporary descriptions of the Propaganda Ministry and their visualization in such anti-Nazi films as Enemy of Women (1944), Pabst must traverse endless corridors which suddenly turn at right angles to the left and right before being led to an unmarked door. The room behind it is the size of a football field, but only holds a huge carpet, a desk in the distance, two chairs, a telephone and a giant portrait of the Führer. After an endless walk, he arrives at the desk where Goebbels is already sitting and greets him with a “the red Pabst” taunt. Goebbels proceeds passive-aggressively to brow beat Pabst, asking him what he wants, accusing him of producing communist propaganda, repeatedly telling him he is giving the wrong answers, threatening him with incarceration in a concentration camp, until Pabst withdraws his desire to retire from filmmaking because of his many health issues, and exclaims, he is willing to help “with the building of Germany… Heil Hitler”
In the following chapter titled “Deutsche Dichtung,” Kehlmann brilliantly satirizes the penchant of all authoritarian dictators, whether Hitler or Stalin to privilege trashy literature, simply because it conforms to the dominant ideology. Pabst’s wife, Trude, is forced to attend a literary circle of the wives of Nazi bigwigs, including Heidrun Hippler, the wife of Fritz Hippler, President of the Reich’s Film Chamber under Goebbels and director of the notorious propaganda film, The Eternal Jew (1940), thus experiencing her own noirish nightmare. During the Kaffeeklatsch the ladies discuss the novels of Albert Karrrasch, an outspoken Nazi hack who rose to stardom in the Third Reich, thanks to his fascist propaganda novels, Stein, gib Brot –! Eine Chronik aus dem Kampf unserer Tage (1933), and Parteigenosse Schmiedecke (1934). Trude who has not read Party Member Schmiedecke is pressured into expressing her admiration for the “masterpiece,” but then describes Karrasch’s The Star Violin (1938), which her husband will soon adapt as The Molander Case, leading to a moment of embarrassed silence as the Nazi ladies stare.
In what is preparation for Kehlmann’s big reveal in his chapters on The Molander Case, the author’s next chapter speculates that Pabst was forced to help direct the actors in Leni Riefenstahl’s production, Tiefland (1940-53). Kehlmann portrays Riefenstahl as an arrogant, self-centered, utterly talentless director who directing herself in Tiefland is unwilling to take any suggestions from Pabst, even threatening him, if he interrupts her. Pabst realizes that Riefenstahl, who is the only director in Germany with total independence from Goebbels, can afford to feed her crew real food with meat and not just the potatoes served on the set of Pabst’s Komödianten. Pabst asks the camera assistant Wilzek about the extras, who have repeatedly asked for water and who disappear after a brief shoot, learning that they are from Max Glan, a concentration camp near Salzburg. Although he doesn’t spell it out, Kehlmann is referring to the documented historical fact that Riefenstahl had utilized over one hundred Sinti and Roma adults and children as extras during the production of Tiefland, then had knowingly shipped them back to KZ camps, where most eventually found their death in Auschwitz. The German filmmaker Nina Gladitz published that story, including interviews with survivors as early as 1982 in her film, Time of Darkness and Silence. Riefenstahl sued, forcing Gladitz to remove the reference that the director knew what fate awaited her doomed extras. More recently, photographs have surfaced of Riefenstahl witnessing mass executions of Polish citizens in Konskie on 12 September 1939, shortly after the Nazis invaded Poland. Kehlmann’s description of the Tiefland production becomes the template for the wholly fictional speculation about Pabst’s misuse of Jewish KZ inmates as extras during the production of The Molander Case.
The novel’s climactic chapters focus on the production of Der Fall Molander, which was shot at the Barandov Studios in Prague in the months before the Soviets liberated the city. Pabst becomes manically obsessed with finishing the film, as the Russians draw ever closer, convincing himself that this is his greatest masterpiece. He initially uses German troops as extras in a theatre scene, which also had a historical precedent. In 1942, director Rolf Hansen had surrounded the star Zarah Leander in the film Die Grosse Liebe (1942) with a pyramid of angels, wrapped in feather boas; the angels were actually members of the elite SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, dressed in drag. Veit Harlan also commandeered German soldiers from the front to shoot the battle scenes in his epic, Kolberg (1945), even though by that point the Germans were badly losing the war. In The Director, the Wehrmacht troops are sent back to the front, so Pabst orders his assistant Wilzek to find extras somewhere, anywhere, at whatever the cost. On the appointed morning of the final day of shooting, the extras arrive by truck, guarded by SS men with machine guns, who remain just out of camera range, when Pabst starts filming. Kehlmann makes it clear these are concentration camp inmates: “They sat motionless, row after row, multiplied by the mirrors so the seemed innumerable. They were gaunt, their faces emaciated, a heavy smell hung over them, but they wore their costumes, even though the collars were too wide, and the jackets baggy.” (p. 268) Wilzek, who knew where they are coming from, “realized that he didn’t want to know what he knew, so much so that his thoughts ceased…” (p. 267) recognizes his former Jewish doctor from Vienna among the extras and wonders, “what could have brought him to Bohemia?” (p. 272) Though not stated expressis verbis, the extras are Jewish inmates from the KZ Terezin, located only 38 miles northeast of Prague. Theresienstadt was a German designed Jewish ghetto and transfer camp, before inmates were shipped to Auschwitz, made famous by the Nazi documentary film known as The Führer Gives the Jews a City (1944), directed by the German film star and director Kurt Gerron, who was subsequently gassed in Auschwitz.
Kehlmann understands he is creating a fiction, but the accusation that Pabst was – like Riefenstahl - directly complicit in the Holocaust, raises the bar in terms of the ethical standards governing historical fiction. There is no evidence that Pabst had Jewish victims brought into the Barandov studios for the production of The Molander Case or had knowledge of the mass murders. While most filmmakers in the Third Reich supported the Nazi regime, whether they made outright propaganda films or not, at least two of them, while not implicated directly in the Holocaust, remained culpable, even if they were never successfully prosecuted after the war. The most notorious was Veit Harlan, whose film Jud Süß (1940) is a vicious piece of anti-Semitic propaganda that was repeatedly screened for SS troops before they were assigned to concentration camps or to rounding-up Jews in occupied territories; it was also screened in occupied countries to local nationals to prepare them for the removal of Jewish citizens. The other example was Wolfgang Liebeneiner whose Ich klage an (1941) melodramatically argued for the euthanasia of physically and mentally challenged German citizens, before and after which the Nazi’s T-4 Program gassed, poisoned, or starved to death as many as 180,000 institutionalized Germans. In any case, Kehlmann’s exploitation of the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust for his own sensationalist purposes raises the question regarding the degree to which the life of a historical personage, especially one whose relatives are still with us, can be fictionalized. They have protested vigorously in the media.
Are readers treating The Director as fiction or as biography? A look at the reception of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel reveals that most critics seemingly conflate the real historical figure with a fictional history, even if they clearly indicate they are reviewing a novel. In Germany, Lichtspiel was a huge success. It reached 1st place in Germany’s bestseller list in October 2023, almost immediately after being published, probably because G.W. Pabst is still a famous director. To quote one reviewer of many who fails to differentiate between the historical and the fictional, Carsten Otte writes in SWR Kultur (15 Oct. 2023): “Kehlmann not only gives us a portrait of the legendary film director (with silent films like The Joyless Street and Pandora’s Box), but also a parable of artistic work in a totalitarian regime.” Meanwhile, as of August 2025, Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director has not appeared on major American bestseller lists, like The New York Times. It has received positive reviews from American critics, and while not commercially popular, the novel is being read by Americans: e.g. the book has more than 150 holds at L.A. Public library in late August 2025.
Since G.W. Pabst is a less well-known name in the United States, except among film buffs who treasure the classic silent films and adore Louise Brooks, American reviewers of The Director cannot help themselves but to juxtapose Pabst’s biography and film work with Kehlmann’s invention. In doing so, they invariable downplay, minimize or ignore the novel’s accusation that Pabst was a willing, direct participant in the Holocaust. J. Hoberman in The New York Times (6 May 2025), continually spot-checks Pabst’s real chronology against that of the novel, while noting that Kehlmann “sprinkles his text with delicious hypotheticals.” However, other than characterizing the chapter on The Molander Case as “the novel’s wildest hypothetical,” Hoberman is silent on both Riefenstahl and Pabst’s possible culpability in the Holocaust. In fairness, Hoberman may be following the unwritten rule of reviewers, not to mention any spoilers.
Citing E.L. Doctorow’s novel, Ragtime as precedent, David Denby in the New Yorker (23 May 2025) writes, “Kehlmann draws on well-known situations and relationships, and then invents according to his fancy.” Denby mentions the relevant scenes from the Riefenstahl and Molander films, but downplays their moral implications, as do many other reviewers: “He is so excited, so determined, that he calls to the set a group of extras just as exhausted and damaged as those corralled into Riefenstahl’s film.” Even the reviewer of the London Times, Blake Morrison (10 July 2025), who names Max Glan in reference to Riefenstahl, trivializes the act by merely referring to a detention camp, then notes that it is Wilzek who is shocked by gaunt faces on the Barandov set. Maureen Corrigan, an NPR reviewer (8 May 2025), likewise only mentions a “detention camp” when discussing Riefenstahl, and never mentions The Molander Case at all. I could cite other examples, but I think the point is clear. While treating The Director as fictionalized history, few reviewers wish to address the moral implications of what in some quarters may be considered slander and an abuse of the dead.
Clearly attitudes to historical fiction vary. Some critics may give a wide berth to novels which fictionalize actual historical figures, seeing the novel’s history as a narrative construction, like history itself. A novelist must at the same time ask him/herself the ethical question—what right do I have to imagine someone’s private life? It becomes an even more burning question when dealing with the Holocaust. It is certainly ethically questionable to impute Holocaust complicity without archival evidence, which in the case of Pabst simply does not exist, in contrast to the historical record for Riefenstahl. Kelhlmann’s blurring of fact and fiction can be extremely misleading and ethically challenging. To understand this better, we can look at how Saul Friedlander and Paul Ricoeur both pose limits on fictionalizations of the Holocaust. Holocaust history requires extra care.
In his “Introduction” to Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (1992), Saul Friedlander states in reference to the challenges of writing the history of the Holocaust and by extension any historical fiction of the Shoah: “This record should not be distorted or banalized by grossly inadequate representations. Some claim to truth appears particularly imperative. It suggests, in other words, that there are limits to representation which should not be but can easily be transgressed.”(p. 3) He goes on to note that special care must be taken in narrativizing history because of the ethical dangers inherent in fictionalization which can distort or trivialize the victims’ experience, thus disrespecting them.
In the case of Kehlmann’s historical fiction, it is not a question of distorting the memory of the Jewish victim’s trauma, but rather of creating a non-existent memory, which the author uses to illustrate the repression of the Holocaust by an ordinary German, G.W. Pabst, who is both a bystander and a passive perpetrator. Pabst makes the excuse that none of the extras have come to harm by appearing on set, but that is a false illusion, because Pabst, Kehlmann, and the reader know that the “gaunt figures” are next heading to their own annihilation.
Paul Celan, who wrote the narration for Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1956) famously noted in reference to the survivors of the Holocaust: “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen”/“No one witnesses for the witness,” i.e. no one speaks up for them. The subjects of the Holocaust portrayed by Kelhlmann, whether Sinti and Roma in the Riefenstahl chapter or Jews in the Molander chapter, are almost completely silent, they are victims of forces beyond their control, they have no agency, they are objectified as physical bodies without voices. A Roma man asks for water, but the gaunt faces in Pabst theatre only stare. One may at least ask, whether it is legitimate and ethical for the novel to use them in this way for what are purely narrative ends.
In History, Memory, and Forgetting (2004), Paul Ricoeur stresses the ethical imperative of being faithful to memory and the victims of history. He discusses the challenges of representing traumatic events like the Holocaust, while emphasizing the importance of truthfulness in historical narratives: “The duty of memory is not restricted to preserving the material trace, whether scriptural or other, of past events, but maintains the feeling of being obligated with respect to others… in the sense of an appeal to conscience that proclaims itself to be speaking for the victims’ demand for justice.” (p. 89-90) In rewriting the history of an actual person and invoking the memory of the Holocaust, Kehlmann may be disrespecting the victims. In exploring the relationship between memory, historical representation, and identity, Ricoeur repeatedly advocates for a nuanced understanding of the past that respects the experiences of survivors, rather than using them as props for a sensationalist scene. Historical fictions, even those that attempt to be playful, ultimately also contribute to historical knowledge, as Ricoeur writes: “For example, representation as narration does not simply turn naïvely toward things that happened. The narrative form as such interposes its complexity and its opacity on what I like to call the referential impulse of the historical narrative”(p.237) In a real sense, then, fictional narratives of history slide into the historical record, communicating factual information and ideology.
Daniel Kehlmann probably would not have us read his novel as history, but only as an aesthetic reimagining of a historical tale, so my reservations about the novelist’s intentions or aesthetics are only meant as food for thought, an appeal that we take his novel as not just a pleasant entertainment about a long dead historical figure, but as a narrative that has consequences, if only for the surviving family members.