The Director

Daniel Kehlmann

€ 35.99

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From 'one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today' (Jeffrey Eugenides), a visionary tale inspired by the life of the 20th century film director G.W. Pabst, who left Europe for Hollywood to resist the Nazis and then returned to his homeland with his wife and young son and began making films for the German Reich.

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An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.