The Director by Daniel Kehlmann review – the author’s best work yet

This portrait of German film-maker GW Pabst and his moral struggles under the Nazis has the darkness and ambiguity of a modern Grimms’ fairytale

Georg Wilhelm Pabst was one of& the most influential film directors in Weimar Germany, probably best known on the international stage for discovering Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. His radical approach earned him the nickname of “Red Pabst”, and when Hitler was elected to power in 1933, Pabst reacted by taking his family to& the United States. He intended to emigrate permanently, but what was supposed to have been a brief trip back to Austria to visit his sick mother saw Pabst detained inside the Third Reich for the duration of the second world war. This unfortunate turn of events had a dramatically detrimental effect, not only on Pabst’s immediate situation but on his entire postwar career.

Daniel Kehlmann has frequently used historical events as the basis for his fiction, most famously in his breakout 2005 novel Measuring the World, which draws on the work of the& German explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt, and more recently in 2017’s Tyll, which brings to& life the capricious exploits of the legendary jester Till Eulenspiegel during the thirty years’ war. But Kehlmann’s works are so much more than fictionalised biographies, and his& new novel The Director is as imaginative and bold in its use of editing as Pabst’s own movies.