Blake Morrison · We Have No Critics! Daniel Kehlmann’s Pabst

Blake Morrison · We have no critics! Daniel Kehlmann’s Pabst

The crux of Daniel Kehlmann’s Director is whether it’s weakness or necessity that makes G.W. Pabst compromise. On the one hand, he’s disgusted by swastikas and Hitler salutes; on the other, his need to make films overrides other considerations. Defending himself against his wife’s accusation that he has been bought off too easily by the Reich, he says: ‘The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in.’

Reeled in by the Reich • Philippa Hawker

Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin, is a deft, dark, densely packed tale of compromise and capitulation. Kehlmann depicts choices made in the grimmest of circumstances, sometimes in the name of art. His central figure is G.W. (Georg Wilhelm) Pabst, the Austrian-born filmmaker probably best known for Pandora’s Box, the remarkable 1929 silent movie starring Louise Brooks as a wilful object of desire who bri…