The spark of inspiration for “The Director,” Daniel Kehlmann’s new historical novel about a filmmaker toiling for the Nazi regime, came during the first Trump administration. Kehlmann noticed Americans taking special care about what they said and to whom they said it. The self-censorship faintly echoed stories he’d heard from his father, who was a Jewish teenager in Vienna when the Third Reich came to power.
The word “Austria,” for example, was banned by the regime. Suddenly, everyone lived in Ostmark.
Kehlmann, a boyish 50-year-old born in Munich, has long been fascinated by the ways that citizens accommodated Hitler’s dictatorship. He centers his novel on the largely forgotten G.W. Pabst, an Austrian film director who gained fame in the era of silent movies and flamed out in Hollywood in the 1930s.
Through an unfortunate happenstance — he’d returned to Austria to check on his ailing mother just as war broke out — Pabst was stuck when the Nazis slammed shut the borders. Eventually, he worked for the German film industry, which was overseen by the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
In Kehlmann’s telling, this was both a nightmare and a golden opportunity.
“That’s the crazy irony here,” he said. “Pabst had more artistic freedom of expression under Goebbels than he did in Hollywood. And that’s what I really wanted to write about. A world where everybody is forced to make compromises all the time. And eventually, those small compromises end in a situation that is completely unacceptable, completely barbaric.”
Kehlmann is surprisingly buoyant and sunny given the darkly comic pickles he regularly creates for his characters. During a three-hour conversation at a small kitchen table in his Harlem apartment, he held forth on his work, his life and on politics, which became unnervingly relevant to his latest novel when Donald Trump was re-elected.
He spent four years researching and writing “The Director” (published in Germany in 2023), splitting his time between Manhattan and Berlin with his wife, an international criminal lawyer, and their 16-year-old son. He dug into film archives and libraries, studying the career of one of the great auteurs of the Weimar Era. Pabst peaked early. He helped make Greta Garbo an icon with “The Joyless Street” in 1925 and four years later launched Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box,” which Quentin Tarantino has called one of his favorite films.
To understand how the left-leaning Pabst ended up as one of the Nazis’ marquee directors, Kehlmann read deeply about Germany’s slide into autocracy. Now he sees chilling parallels between what happened then and what has unfolded since Trump’s second inauguration. Eroding the rule of law, persecuting “enemies,” elevating incompetents and extremists to top jobs — it all comes from the same playbook.
“I’m not surprised it’s happening,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’m surprised it’s happening this fast.”
His message comes across like a scholar’s sober warning about the future, and it would provoke pure dread were he not such a surpassingly gifted storyteller. Among his big influences are the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. Like them, he is a master at depicting decent people making terrible choices, with results that are both droll and catastrophic. An atmosphere of moral queasiness permeates “The Director,” and the author is in perfect control of the barometric pressure.
Kehlmann is best known for “Measuring the World,” which reimagined the adventures of two real-life 19th century scientists and established him as one of literature’s foremost ironists. The novel, planted at the top of the German best-seller list for 37 weeks, became a career-maker in 2005.
Twelve years later, he published “Tyll,” the story of a court fool and tightrope walker who pranks his way through the Thirty Years’ War, leaving a trail of patrons and spectators in his wake, some injured, others amused. It didn’t sell very well, but it developed a base of fans so ardent that they occasionally approach Kehlmann and weep as they discuss it.
Though fame has so far eluded Kehlmann in the U.S., he’s achieved the kind of renown in Germany that is rare for writers.
“I was once on this tiny boat in Gambia with some Germans and I didn’t know what to say to them, so I mentioned that I knew Daniel and it was like, they went insane,” said the writer Zadie Smith, a longtime friend who blurbed “The Director.” “I think he’s sold a book to everyone in the country.”
Kehlmann’s interest in film started in childhood. His father, Michael, survived a few months in a Nazi labor camp when he was 17 years old and went on to direct movies, television and theater. The younger Kehlmann would gravitate to historical novels through an interest in the way minds are rewired by culture and circumstance.
In “The Director,” he unpacks what is “total” about totalitarianism. Nazism warps every interaction and every opinion, and social status is no longer determined by talent. Gifted people on the wrong side of the ideological divide are persecuted. Hacks are elevated and praised.
There is no record of a meeting between Goebbels and Pabst, one of the artistic liberties taken in “The Director.” But the minister really did demand high-quality movies and micromanaged what became known as “Hitler’s Hollywood,” a studio system that produced more than 1,000 films, including screwball comedies and musicals.
American and British productions had been banned, and Goebbels wanted polished features to prove the cultural superiority of German art. He also needed to fill theaters to feed pro-Nazi newsreels to the masses.
Volker Schlöndorff, the director of “The Tin Drum,” which won an Academy Award in 1980, remembers meeting directors in the 1960s who had worked for the Nazis. Many were under the mistaken impression that they’d fooled the system by making escapist fare.
“They had played right into Goebbels’s plan,” Schlöndorff said in a phone interview. “He didn’t want straight propaganda. He wanted something more devious than that. Many of the actors and directors had no idea they were helping the Nazis.”
In the novel, Pabst starts off physically repulsed by the mere idea of working for the Reich, but gradually comes around. It beats life in a concentration camp, his other option, and the regime places his mother in a comfortable home for seniors. He and his family eat well. He gains cachet.
As the war ends, Pabst has made two films, “The Comedians” (1941) and “Paracelsus” (1943) — yes, those are real movies — and he has devolved into a state of moral derangement. Scrambling to finish “The Molander Case,” which was filmed in Prague, he desperately demands extras to serve as the audience for a scene set at a classical music venue. The next day he is directing a startled group of starving Jews, ferried in from the nearby Theresienstadt transit camp, who have been quickly fitted with appropriate costumes.
“The Molander Case” is real, too, though it went missing and has never been shown. As Kehlmann says in an afterword, little is known about its production, so the appearance of these doomed extras is an invention of the novel. What’s certain is that camp prisoners appeared in other Nazi-era films, one of which Pabst co-directed with Leni Riefenstahl, a Hitler favorite.
“The studios in Berlin and Prague were surrounded by barracks filled with prisoners, and the film industry used slave labor on the sets, with kids as young as 10 years old,” Kehlmann said. “Pabst must have used 10-year-old slave laborers. I don’t see much difference between that and what happens in the novel.”
Moral and financial corruption were endemic in the Reich. Kehlmann’s paternal grandparents survived because a Nazi official swung by every month and left with a piece of furniture, a bribe just large enough to get their file regularly placed at the bottom of a pile. Most of Kehlmann’s relatives perished in the Holocaust.
We met the day after Germany’s parliamentary elections, in which the hard-right Alternative for Germany party had over-performed, winning 20 percent of the vote.
Kehlmann greeted the news with equanimity. The AfD would not join the ruling coalition, he predicted — correctly, it turned out — because there remains in his home country a powerful social stigma against extremist politicians, something he finds alarmingly absent in the U.S.
At a dinner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art not long ago, he sat next to a man who proudly identified himself as a major Trump donor. By Kehlmann’s lights, the Republican Party is now demonstrably more dangerous than the AfD. Deep-pocketed members of the party are mixing in the highest echelons, he said, even though they support an administration posing an existential threat to democracy. “Everybody says that society here is too polarized and too fractured,” he said. “But maybe on the level of the really wealthy, it’s really not fractured and polarized enough.”
American friends tell Kehlmann that he’s being alarmist. But if you grow up in a country where the guardrails failed, he said, you appreciate the fragility of guardrails.
“For us visa- and green-card holders, free speech is already practically suspended,” he said. “Lawyers are advising us to not go to demonstrations, and the media is telling us to delete all messages not favorable to Trump from our phones before we try to enter the U.S., otherwise we might be turned back or even disappear into detention.
“Immediately I’m thinking, can it be bad for me to say something like this to The New York Times? Which, I think, proves my point.”