‘The Director’ by Daniel Kehlmann     (2023) – 331 pages               Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin

‘The Director’ is a novel about making movies under the worst possible circumstances, in Nazi Germany during World War II. It centers on G. W. Pabst who had already achieved world fame for the movies he directed in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was the director who discovered Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks.

Pabst and his family had already fled Germany for the United States in 1933. He hoped to continue his career. When G. W. Pabst arrives in Hollywood, he is praised profusely by nearly everyone. Then he is handed a script, “A Modern Hero” and was told this would be his first American movie. Pabst reads the script and tells them the script isn’t very good. They tell him “Yes, it is”. He films the movie, and it bombs.

In 1939 Pabst and his family go back to Austria, then called Ostmark, for what is supposed to be a short stay to visit his ailing mother. However while they are visiting, Germany invades Poland, starting World War II. The Pabst’s cannot leave.

The caretaker in the house where the Pabst family and his mother live during this time is a full-fledged Nazi who has total disdain for Pabst and his family even though Pabst is not a Jew. The caretaker insults and spies on the Pabst family and reports their activities to Berlin. Hitler’s cruelty gave all of his followers permission to be as cruel as they want to be.

“Politeness was interpreted as weakness; he had been back in Germany long enough now to know that.”

In his various vignettes, Daniel Kehlmann covers many aspects of this creative family’s forced return to an cruel authoritarian dictatorship that they both absolutely detest. Separate chapters are written from the father’s, the mother’s, and the son’s point of view.

At one point Pabst is assigned to be an assistant to the woman director Leni Riefenstahl, famous for her Nazi propaganda movies. Riefenstahl got her start as an actress in Pabst’s movies, but now the Nazis have given her complete control over him. Riefenstahl is also an actress in this movie. He is supposed to give Riefenstahl advice on saying her lines. He tries, but she is quick to take offense.

“Let it go, he thought, remember she can put you in a camp.”

The extras used in this picture are concentration camp inmates.

The author Daniel Kehlmann gives us several different vantage points from which to watch this family who are stuck in Germany during World War II. First there is the famous director himself G. W. Pabst who hates what the Germans are doing but paradoxically finds that he has more freedom to make the movies he wants in Germany than he had in the United States. Then there is his wife Ilse who has difficulties handling the fact that they are constantly being watched by the German authorities and other informers. Then there is the son Jacob who wants to fit in with the other boys his age and wears his Hitler Youth uniform to fit in as do all the boys.

In one chapter we have a sort of prisoner of war (according to the New York Times, English novelist P. G. Wodehouse) watching the grand opening of one of the movies Pabst directed in Germany during the war, ‘Paracelsus’.

‘The Director’ is another engaging novel by Daniel Kehlmann especially for those interested in the making of movies.

At one point someone questions how Pabst could make movies under these Nazi circumstances.

“But don’t you find it strange, Pabst, that we’re making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse? Such a…work of art?”

“You say that as if it’s a bad thing.”

“More like a strange thing.”

“Times are always strange. Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered.”

Grade:   A

‘You Should Have Left’ by Daniel Kehlmann   (2016) – 111 pages                   Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin

Since I am a big fan of the four previous Daniel Kehlmann novels that I have read, ‘Measuring the World’ and ‘Fame’ and ‘F’ and ‘Tyll’, I must warn you not to start with this novella ‘You Should Have Left’ as your first Daniel Kehlmann read. It does not represent his real talents.

In ‘You Should Have Left’, our narrator writer is working on a screenplay, a comedy called “Besties 2” about two young teenage girls Jana and Ella. It’s a sequel. Our young writer is on Alpine holiday with his wife Susanna and four year-old daughter Esther, but he’s also here to work on that screenplay.

The novella starts out warm and playful as Kehlmann works usually do, and I started out really into reading it. Of course the screenplay he is writing is typical bad Hollywood fare, but he has to go through with it.

“In a movie it’s funny when a life falls apart, because the people say clever things while it’s happening, but in reality it’s only dismal and repugnant,”

Lives fall apart. That’s what actually happens in this novella. Soon things aren’t at all warm and playful. Our narrator surreptitiously listens to the messages on his wife’s cell phone, which, I suppose, is always a terrible thing to do. His wife Susanna leaves.

Then we have scenes of quiet horror, strange men showing up unexpectedly in rooms, pictures on the wall that weren’t there before, a woman shouting “Get away quickly” as he drives by in his car. However to me these edgy scenes were unconvincing, because they didn’t fit the warm beginning or lead anywhere. One time after he leaves his daughter’s room, he sees a strange man in his daughter’s room on the child monitor and then realizes it is himself, and the camera must have a time delay.

Although parts of this novella were effective and fun to read, it ultimately left me lost as to what was going on. It is too fragmented. I am not sure what really happened or what point the author was trying to make. It starts out lighthearted, but the later parts containing elements of horror seemed out of place.

Grade:    B-

‘Tyll’ by Daniel Kehlmann  (2017) – 342 pages                     Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin

‘Tyll’ is brilliant. But don’t take my word for it. Let me quote this Good Book:

“A dragon that had been sighted would be a dragon that did not possess the most important quality of dragons – that of making itself undetectable. For this very reason one must treat all reports of people having sighted dragons with extreme skepticism, for a dragon that let itself be sighted would be recognized a priori as a dragon that is no real dragon.”

Olearius rubbed his forehead.

“In this region, evidently, a dragon has never before been witnessed. Hence I am confident that there must be one here.”

The perfection of this reasoning is why I read novels.

Above all, ‘Tyll’ is a playful fiction which was fun for me to read.

‘Tyll’ takes place during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), an especially grim and superstitious era of European history. An estimated 8 million people died from battle injuries, starvation, or disease. Most of the war took place in what is now Germany, Czech Republic, and Austria. The war started out as a religious war between the Catholics and the Protestants but got all mixed up. Frederick II as Holy Roman Emperor tried to impose the Catholic Church on even the Protestant states of northern Germany. The war started in 1618 with the Defenestration of Prague when the Bohemian Protestants threw the Emperor’s representatives out of a window. Later Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden descended into Germany with his mercenary army and won some major battles before he himself was killed. Even though France was mainly a Catholic country, they sometimes fought on the Protestants side against their old enemies of the Holy Roman Empire. The war ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. The result of all this war was inconclusive.

There are two main characters in ‘Tyll’. The first is Tyll Ulenspiegel. He is a tightrope walker, a juggler, an actor, and an all-around trickster. He and his girl friend Nele keep popping up everywhere, performing for the beleaguered peasants as well as the displaced royalty. Tyll and Nele also dance for their audiences:

“We could dance fairly well, we celebrated often, but none of us could dance like them; watching them, you felt as if a human body had no weight and life were not sad and hard. We too could no longer keep still, and we began to bob, jump, hop, and spin.”

The other main character is Elizabeth Stuart the Winter Queen or as she is known here, Liz. Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of English King James I, winds up the Queen of Bohemia through marriage. The terms Winter Queen and Winter King are derisive because Frederick V was only King of Bohemia for about one season, and now they are wandering around central Europe trying to find someone to intercede for them, and they are considered a joke. However I suppose Elizabeth Stuart had the last laugh as her progeny ruled England as the House of Hanover for over 200 years.

‘Tyll’ consists of set pieces which all fit together into an attractive puzzle.

It is most of all a sometimes light, sometimes black comedy which entirely suits the Thirty Years War. This novel is fascinating at the sentence level, a real accomplishment for both the author and the translator. Daniel Kehlmann brings a smart playful quality to his fiction that makes his writing well nigh irresistible.

Grade:    A+