literature
Director in the twilight: Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel
In his new novel, Daniel Kehlmann tells the story of an artist’s life under a dictatorship. photo
© Annette Riedl/dpa
From Germany to Hollywood and back again. Kehlmann tells the colorful life of the great director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who failed in America and then succumbed to the temptations of Goebbels.
The Nazis’ “seizure of power” abruptly ended the careers of many famous directors in Germany. Some like Fritz Lang managed a new start in Hollywood. Others, however, suffered shipwreck there. This also applies to Georg Wilhelm Pabst, a native Austrian who was one of the best-known UFA directors in the 1920s and who supported Greta Garbo, who was not that big at the time.
Pabst was somehow considered left-wing because of his socially critical films, but he was not Jewish. After his failure, Joseph Goebbels made him an attractive offer – and the filmmaker succumbed to the siren songs of the Nazi propaganda minister. Since then, Pabst has been a man in the twilight. As a character in a novel he is definitely attractive, and so it is Daniel Kehlmann deals with its contradictory role in the Third Reich in his new book “Lichtspiel”.
The mystery of a mysterious film
Kehlmann is particularly interested in Pabst’s mysterious film “The Molander Case”, which was lost in the last days of the war. The question of an artist’s attitude to a dictatorship is undoubtedly a timeless and serious topic. The writer succeeds in telling this heavy subject not only in a differentiated way, but also in an extremely humorous way. The fairly freely interpreted story about the lost film also creates some tension.
The framework story, which takes place more than 30 years after the war, sets the tone. The already very confused Franz Wilzek is picked up from the “Abendruh Sanatorium” and driven to a television studio. In a live broadcast, the old man is interviewed about his life by a sleazy presenter. As a director, Wilzek once made a few insignificant films with Peter Alexander.
The real highlight of his life was a long time ago. As an assistant director, he accompanied Georg Wilhelm Pabst on the filming of the film “The Molander Case” in 1944. Contrary to what the moderator claims, Wilzek suddenly vehemently denies that the film was ever made, and a scandal occurs in front of the camera. Suffice it to say, the mystery surrounding the mysterious film will only be solved at the very end of the novel.
The scene described from the perspective of the demented old man is a comical and tragic beginning to the novel. Kehlmann achieves something similar in another scene that takes place in America in the 1930s. In it he shows in a humorous, slapstick manner how Pabst fails there because of his catastrophic knowledge of English. The fact that the proud, world-famous director has to submit to ignorant producers in Hollywood is another nail in the coffin for him. When he was then forced to make the hated film “A Modern Hero” and, as he predicted, it was a tremendous failure, his career in the USA was over.
A follower defends himself
The illness of his mother, who remained in Austria, brought him back home, where he was then trapped by the outbreak of war. He justifies his cooperation with the Nazis with his love of art: “The important thing is to make art under the circumstances that you find yourself in. These are my circumstances now. And you know, they’re not that bad!” he defends himself to his wife, who condemns his followership.
Pabst doesn’t make propaganda films, but rather entertainment in the broadest sense, but of course he is not free. So he has to submit to the imperious Nazi diva Leni Riefenstahl, who he considers to be a miserable actress. Despite all this, this Pope created by Kehlmann is not unsympathetic, and yet one cannot have pity for him, he deceives himself too boldly. He actually believes that in his last Nazi film he heroically sabotaged the lying message imposed on him. It’s just a shame that this particular film is lost.
Kehlmann is a great storyteller. He writes quickly and artfully like Pabst’s ingenious editing technique, then again dream-like, crazy and displaced like the world of people with dementia. Elsewhere it becomes surreal and evil, for example when it comes to the rule of a nasty Nazi caretaker or a grotesque propaganda author. And often it is simply wonderfully amusing and funny. There’s just one thing that “Lichtspiel” definitely isn’t: a nice, harmless historical novel.
Daniel Kehlmann: Lichtspiel, Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, 480 pages, 26 euros, ISBN 978-3-498-00387-6