In German legend, Faust signs a contract with the devil, exchanging his immortal soul for large knowledge and other terrestrial awards. It is a cut and dried transaction.
In Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel, The director, Demonic competition is more troubled, more stretched. Little by little, a series of compromises is consuming like the acid with the integrity of an formerly large artist. Not only is Kehlmann’s rendering of the Faustian negotiation is more psychologically plausible than the original, but it is inspired by a true story.
The director is a historical novel based on the life of GW Pabst, the first director who worked with actresses like Louise Brooks, Lotte Lenya and Greta Garbo. Pabst’s career movements have been diverted and confusing – which makes him a tasty subject of historical fiction. He was born in Austria and worked at New York Theater as a young man; Then, after the First World War, he became one of the most influential directors in Germany.
Pabst went to Hollywood in the 1930s and was a temporary and less successful member of this colony of emigrants of filmmakers who included Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang. During a trip to France in 1939 to make a film and visit his mother, Pabst was blocked by the start of the war and returned to Nazi Germany. Enter the Devil in the form of the Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
In Kehlmann’s reimagination, Goebbels sorely exercises a stick and a carrot: he alternates the accusation that Pabst was a communist who belongs to a concentration camp with calls to the Pabst ego, bruised by Hollywood treatment of him as a Highbrow hack. In Germany, Goebbels’ promises, Pabst will make: “Artistic films. Sublime films. Films that touch the German heart of good, deep and metaphysical. … to oppose the cheap American commercial trash with a non -resounding.”
This is an offer that Pabst thinks he cannot refuse.
As a novel, The director He himself joins the pleasures of “commercial” fiction with the moral weight of a novel of ideas. Kehlmann clearly has fun to invoke a Hollywood festival cut in the sun where Billy Wilder Cavorts in a cowboy hat and studio leaders confuse the emigrant filmmakers with casualness.
But the comedy becomes sinister and surreal in subsequent sections where Pabst and his family return to their castle in Germany where the goalkeeper – now the local Nazi party leader – relegates them to the basement. And then there is the absurd scene where Pabst directs the closure of the confidant of Hitler Leni Riefenstahl in an imagined film. While the extras – shipped from a nearby detention camp – look, Riefenstahl insists that Pabst takes up the scene about 21 times. Whenever Riefenstahl is terrible, but Pabst quickly catches that it is dangerous to tell him anything but, it’s “perfect. … Just perfect again.”
Perhaps Kehlmann’s greatest success is that he manages to raise the more important themes through compact dialogues. Here, for example, is a conversation on the art and morality which he evokes between Pabst and his wife Trude, who was actress and writer:
“(A) ll it will pass (Pabs said to Trude). But art remains.
“Even if it remains (Trude asks) art … Isn’t it going sali? Isn’t that bloody and dirty? …”
Pabst responds in this way: “And the Renaissance? What about Borgias and their poisoning, what about Shakespeare, who had to make housing with Elizabeth.” Later, he adds: “The important thing is to make art in the circumstances in which we are …” Referring to his film Paracelsus, Pabst says: “Paracelsus will always be looked at in fifty years, when this nightmare has been forgotten for a long time. “”
When do compromise turn into sustainable capitulation? How much accommodation can do with evil before they themselves make part of the evil? Do we forget nightmares or is the story just relive it again and again? The director Do not answer these questions, cannot answer them; But that lets them shake in our minds like a roulette machine that never stops turning.
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