Can art be separated from the circumstances of its production? In The Director, Daniel Kehlmann offers an intriguing and imaginative series of responses to this age-old question. The novel features a fictionalised version of the Austrian film director G W Pabst, who directed Nazi-sponsored films during the 1940s. We first meet him in the mid-1930s in Hollywood, where he is struggling to find work. Despite achieving success with such silent films as The Joyless Street (1925) and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), which launched the careers of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, Pabst finds himself an outsider in Hollywood. Even the actresses he ‘discovered’ won’t help him, and when a film he agrees to direct out of desperation predictably flops, he faces the embarrassment of becoming a mere assistant. 

During an encounter at a Hollywood party, Pabst rebuffs an approach from Kuno Krämer of the Reich Ministry of Public Entertainment and Propaganda. But soon after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Pabst receives a telegram from his ailing mother and decides to take his family home to Tillmitsch. When he arrives, he finds that Jerzabek, the grotesque caretaker of his estate, has recently been appointed leader of the local branch of the Nazi Party. Jerzabek consolidates his power through eavesdropping, threats and manipulation. At one point, he apparently shakes Pabst off a ladder, causing injuries that force the director to remain in Austria, although the hallucinatory description of the event invites us to doubt Pabst’s recollection of it. When Krämer returns, Pabst accepts an invitation to the ministry: ‘he had to make films.’

The narrator offers a range of perspectives over the course of the novel. As a result, the reader is neither consistently close to nor consistently distant from the central figure. At various points, Kehlmann draws on the devices of filmmaking, with obtrusive and surreal effect. When Pabst visits Goebbels’s office,