I think what I dislike about Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director is precisely what makes it work. At its core is a set of moral questions about oppressive rule, complicity, guilt, and the ethical status of art. Within the framework of historical fiction, Kehlmann explores the life and work of G. W. Pabst, real-world Austrian director of The Joyless Street, Pandora’s Box, Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and, under Nazi rule, The Comedians, Paracelsus, and The Molander Case—a film that was never released, lost when the Soviets came to liberate Prague, and a large focus of Kehlmann’s novel, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
There’s something enchanting about stories around lost media and the possibility of what might have been. At the outset of the book, World War II hasn’t started yet but the antisemitic context is well underway. Pabst has an idea for a film in which a group of people from different walks of life are on a boat when war is announced. The ship descends into madness; the passengers hurt one another, torture one another, and at the climax of the film it is revealed that the announcement of war was false, an illusion. Slowly, a man starts to play an old song on the piano and the group returns to normal, as if the previous hours had never happened. It’s a compelling premise that Pabst pitches unsuccessfully several times and seems to reflect his concern with a society that ignores its collective trauma with the illusion of art. By the end of the book, Pabst couldn’t possibly conceive of the idea.
Essentially, Kehlmann’s novel shows us that story through a glass, darkly. One of Kehlmann’s strengths is switching the focal point strategically to give us perspective for the plot’s effect on his characters. There’s a certain filmic sensibility switching between characters, predominantly showing us Pabst, but also switching to his infant son’s point of view as we return to Austria, Pabst’s wife Trude at her book club, his dementia-ridden mother in her sanatorium, and flash forwards where we hear directly from Pabst’s assistant Franz Wilzek. There’s one passage about Jakob, the son, enjoying art class. Kehlmann describes how Jakob breaks down the whole into pieces: “The trick is to look at a thing as if it weren’t a thing and as if you didn’t know what it was” (119). He then describes the art process as “a collection of surfaces” where “white and black” are at play. This cubist abstraction has a depersonalizing effect, and indeed Jakob becomes a Nazi presumably by the same process. Leaping between these characters has a disorienting effect, particularly at the start of the novel, but aids in creating the ‘fog of war’ effect to obscure the implications of Kehlmann’s story beats. At the same time, it gives us a hint to their full characters rather than as just “white and black” playing on surfaces.
For some additional context, I’ve been reading the shortlisted books for the International Booker Prize 2026. Of the three I’ve read so far, The Director is a more conventional novel, driven by its story and cast of characters. While less experimental in its form, it still creates a reasonably compelling narrative, even if there’s a pervasive unsettling ambiguity.
Essentially, the book explores the viability and human cost of art produced under a fascist, totalitarian regime and the ways in which people are rendered complicit. Kehlmann reminds us several times throughout that filmmaking requires a team—lighting, camerawork, actors, extras, a director, production, distribution, and so on. At least two or three times, Pabst talks about the ‘rules’ of editing, which he prides himself in. One motion must always follow another. If we see a car drive off left, the next shot needs to start with a motion from right to left. There’s a sense of coherence in his perspective of editing, but more sinisterly a sense of inevitability. The idea that one motion must follow another is strangely close to the idea of people just following orders, of getting swept up in small concessions to Nazism and by necessity escalating to unimaginable atrocities. Perhaps it’s for these reasons that I had a Freudian slip more than once where I called The Director, mistakenly, The Dictator. At the end of the book, Pabst and his wife are examining a cave painting that depicts violent acts seemingly under the direction of a being whose head is comprised of red speckles and a set of eyes. Following Pabst’s rule for editing that the juxtaposition of images necessarily creates a resonance, the couple then discusses their old Nazi groundskeeper and suggest that it wasn’t Hitler or Goebbels who ruled, but men like their groundskeeper. It seems to me another statement on the ‘banality of evil’ as popularized by Hannah Arendt.
But it gets more complex. More ambiguous.
At the beginning of the novel, Pabst is living in Hollywood but is having trouble getting work as a director, relegated to terrible titles. He is called back to Austria to care for his ailing mother (although this ‘excuse’ is called into question by several others—why did he bring his whole family, including his son, for example?) and then remains because he’s injured on the eve of their departure at the hands of their groundskeeper Jerzabek (but was he? His wife denies that Jerzabek pulled the ladder from under him and that he was injured at his own hands). His motivations are unclear, but then Pabst is ‘coerced’ into the Propaganda Minister’s office under the premise that he can have great film projects that are ‘art’ and ‘not political.’ The scene is compelling, funny, and disturbing because the conversion is rooted in what cannot be said openly. Pabst is turning down the opportunity (indeed, he had previous run off and threatened to hit a Nazi that approached him in Hollywood about making films), but he’s not allowed to say no. The Minister gives Pabst the words to use to maintain decorum and avoid the threat underlying the conversation: this Communist, left-wing director is being offered the opportunity to work at making films for Germany or be sent to a concentration camp. The Minister has asked him there, but insists that Pabst asked for the meeting. Pabst tries to say his health reasons are preventing him from making films; the Minister says that Pabst is there to apologize for making Communist propaganda, being sympathetic to Jews, and so on. The Minister says he’s “unforgivable,” but here he is being forgiven all while being coerced into saying he’s sorry. A collective illusion.
As a brief aside, there’s a great scene that takes place in the sanatorium after Pabst’s mother has been placed there. She is genuinely suffering from dimentia, often mistaking her son for her husband and her grandson for her son. She starts saying some things that could be construed as being against the party and it’s revealed at the end of the chapter that many of the elderly there are able to get away with things because they’re seen as infirm. One of her fellow patients tells her privately, “We’re safe here, our confusion is tolerated, but you musn’t take that for granted” (172). Essentially, the elderly are able to escape the collective illusion: “I had to do a great deal to be allowed here. Outside they would have come for me long ago. But no one is looking here. After all, we’re very old. Our brains are fragile. Thankfully, we are the most uninteresting people” (172). The chapter ends with their delusions running together: for the man, intentionally, for Erika Pabst, genuine—it’s an open question as to which is better.
The most challenging part of the text is when Pabst is working on his final, lost film The Molander Case. Midway through the book, we see Trude at her book club, where they always read bland, sensationalized novels by the same Nazi author every time. Eventually, Pabst is enlisted to make the film adaptation of the novel. One of the things that perplexes me is how and whether he resists Nazi rule via the film. For example, he casts the same actor as the ‘good’ prosecutor and the ‘bad’ prosecutor—giving direction to act, essentially, like a Nazi official in one of the roles. It seems to be implied that Pabst recuts and edits the film to disrupt the original story and part of me thinks that casting the actor in a villainous Nazi-coded role would allow him to engage in commentary. When the author of the original work storms in, demanding to see the film (before it’s even cut), he sees one minute before getting into a rage and saying that he’ll have the director sent to the camps. Given that he’s a staunch Nazi, it feels like a moment where Pabst is onto something subversive—he even comments something to that effect; the more the author hates it, Pabst says, the more likely it is that they’re onto something really special. In one part of the film, Pabst uses presumably Jewish extras in a crowd scene in which people are watching a virtuoso violinist play, somewhat reminiscent of the film Pabst had earlier proposed. Pabst has some of the extras do horrific rictuses. For instance, one of them is instructed to bite her lips harder and harder until she bleeds. He says he’s going to intersperse the images for a second into the crowd shots. When his assistant says nobody will see it, Pabst says that’s part of the point—there’s just enough to make them doubt, to make them think about what they saw. It feels like he’s up to something subversive, like he’s trying to prove Walter Benjamin’s observation that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The artistry of the violin is undercut by the horror we barely see.
So, there are lots of seeming virtues for the film. Pabst even defends the film, telling his assistant, “All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film. Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist” (270). Years ago, I remember seeing an interview with Chris Hannah that bad political contexts are good for art—it’s not worth the cost. Here, Pabst is committed to making his masterpiece in spite of, or perhaps within the context of, totalitarianism—but he does seem to be trying to do something good.
But.
But.
At the opening of the book, we are witness to a talk show where a confused man is interviewed about being Pabst’s assistant. The talk show host starts asking about The Molander Case and the assistant, whom we know a little better by the end of the book, starts protesting that the film was never shot. He’s under the pressure of the surveillance:
“I look at the screen. See myself looking off somewhere—of course, the monitor isn’t the camera, you have to look into the camera to see yourself looking out from the monitor, except then you obviously can’t see yourself because you’re looking into the camera, not at the monitor. And now the monitor, even though it’s showing me, is showing something else at the same time, and to avoid seeing it, I close my eyes, but that doesn’t help, and I still see them: black-and-white people in a concert all. From high above I’m looking down on them, as if I were flying, a crystal chandelier is shining brightly, I’m sitting next to the camera on the arm of a long crane. They’re all facing forward, because they’re not allowed to look up” (13-14).
This early moment points to the disjointed nature of perspective. He’s trying to see himself, but he can only see himself from the angle of the camera. He never gets a full perspective of himself, and in the latter half of the passage we see his compulsion towards repression. He’s trying to avoid seeing what he can see and he’s taken back to the filming of The Molander Case, which he pretends was never shot. It’s because the movie, for all its seeming good intentions, is tainted by its context.
Before Pabst starts filming The Molander Case, he’s working on another project produced by, if I remember correctly, Leni Reifenstahl. It’s a difficult shoot. It turns out that the extras for the film are brought in from Maxglan—a concentration camp for Sinti and Roma people as a stop en route to Auschwitz. When filming, Pabst makes a comment about one of the extras, more or less, saying that he looked like he’d experienced the traumas of life and that’s what he wanted from the actors. When we get the reveal of where these extras are from, Pabst can’t stop ruminating on the comments he made, haunted by the implications.
So, it makes it harder to justify his change of heart when filming The Molander Case. Pabst is placed in an impossible position where he has to finish the film within three days, but the extras can no longer make it. To get a massive crowd shot, he brings in, presumably, inmates from a concentration camp. It’s complicated because it feels like maybe it’s meant to make a statement, especially with the interspersed shots of their suffering (or is it meant to suggest they are barbarous?!), but the move is exploitative. Sickening. Pabst’s assistant Franz is particularly affected; he sees his old pediatrician, one of the inmates. It’s the most obvious example of Pabst making art on the back of the most inhumane conditions possible and really casts a shadow on his project. The shroud of ambiguity is also there; I had the impression that maybe those extras were all killed in a fire immediately after the filming—I think there’s description of the sky blackening. It’s not definitive. Worse, Franz is devastated and when he tries to talk about it with Pabst, the director tells him he’s mistaken and that it was all soldiers who had been brought in.
The final turn of the book is even more complex. We see Pabst after the war, completely devastated and adrift after his film reels were mistakenly swapped for an identical bag of horseshoes. His wife is making a film that parallels them and shows, actually, a little bit of emotional nuance. Trude can’t forgive him for what he’s done—everything else, maybe, but not for bringing their son with them. She is haunted by his enthusiasm for joining the Hitler Youth and has long ago stopped loving Pabst. Pabst never saw his film again—but there’s a final twist. In the concluding chapter of the book, we return to Franz, now infirm and struggling with his memory (but how much of our memory is unintentional, the book asks, and how much of our memory is edited like a film?). It is revealed that Franz actually did have the reels returned to him from the horseshoe man but never came forward to give the film back to Pabst, despite his decrepitude. He also publicly denies the film ever existed before returning home and stashing it away in a closet. The fact that he refuses to acknowledge the film and operate in a sense of denial causes some ethical quandaries, especially because it’s not as though he destroyed it. He’s hoarding it, never to be seen.
The book is a challenge to our ethics. It makes us think about how complicit we are in the creation and enjoyment of art that’s built on the lives of others. It’s a consideration of our role within a bigger system. The ambiguous ethical position is frustrating, but important. For example, one of the chapters refers to how book critics no longer exist—only art appreciators. They are great at describing books and films, but they do not offer judgment, even positive judgment. You can’t call someone a good actor because that implies the existence of bad actors, or the possibility of a bad actor. Kehlmann clearly implies that we ought not be so passive, but also that the lines of involvement are often hard to grasp in the moment. There are three moments in the text where Franz experiences or remembers his pediatrician talking to him. The book ends on a reprise of their conversation: “Then the doctor would come. ‘Franzl, are we sick?’ His cool hand on my forehead. And then I thought, he’s not sick, Dr. Sämann, so why does he say we? Only I am sick” (331). This idea that we are all implicated together is what makes this novel so haunting, so perplexing.
One passage I see as critical is the description of the director as a profession. It encapsulates so much of how collective guilt functions. Pabst narrates:
“Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money. And that was why one only rarely made films, the rest of the time one talked to people and went out to lunch and wrote letters and gave lectures and tried to convince someone. And again and again one secretly wondered when all the people working on a film together would realize that they could do it without a director too, if only they agreed. Because the actors could certainly act on their own, the camera operator could easily film them, the architect could build a stage for them, and the editor could select and assemble the best footage afterward. But because everyone simply believed that a director was necessary, the whole thing was not undertaken without a director” (64-65).
The passage has a strange distancing effect. On the one hand, the director is seen as having created nothing. In that sense, perhaps Pabst is devoid of culpability. He has the plausible deniability that it’s other people causing the harm, not him. This would all happen without him. In a twisted vision of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, we see that all of the agents capable of independence except the director. The idea that artists can operate independently, but the director requires collaboration. He’s necessary and unnecessary at the same time, necessary only because of a collective illusion, a collective belief that a director is guiding all of them. It recalls the scene in which Pabst and Trude recognize that Hitler and Goebbels didn’t have the power: it was their groundskeeper. It’s hard not to see these positions as being mirror images of one another.
I’ll admit that, so far, this isn’t my favourite book in the International Booker Prize 2026 shortlist, but it does give me a lot to think about, or perhaps more appropriately, more to be haunted by. There are some pretty clear parallels to our current situation when it comes to injustice, guilt, collective responsibility, and the awful origins of great art. It’s worth the read, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Happy reading!
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