In the early 1930s, Georg Wilhelm Pabst returns to his native Austria (renamed Ostmark by the Nazis). He had spent an uncomfortable period in Hollywood where his lack of English shuffled him to lesser roles in the studio. His pride as one of Germany’s great film directors damaged, he, his wife Trude and his son Jakob (not his real name) arrive at the family home to find that the caretaker has embraced Nazism. Hitler has seized full power.
The people are enthralled by his promise to make Germany great again. Thin walls suddenly have ears. Neighbours betray neighbours. Sons turn on their fathers. Pabst’s former world has been turned upside down. He cannot go back to America. He cannot go forward to make artistic films of great merit.
The people are enthralled by his promise to make Germany great again. Thin walls suddenly have ears. Neighbours betray neighbours.
Author Kehlmann describes the threatening atmosphere, but Pabst can do nothing about it. His sick mother prevents them from leaving Germany. They must remain in what has been transformed into a society of treachery, murder, thievery and deceit. Pabst must find work in a film industry now controlled by a character surely based on Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
In a chilling scene in Goebbels’s immense office, Pabst is forced to accept the directorship of several Nazi films. Calling him “the Red Pabst,” the minister says “You are here to plead for peace and forgiveness.” Pabst, nonplussed, says he has no intention of making films again. “Wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer,” replies the minister. Clearly, Pabst is being goaded into accepting a role in the 1000-year Reich.
Other equally chilling scenes take the reader to the core of a 1984 world. No one is safe. Everyone, including Pabst and his family, is vulnerable. People associated with Pabst are seized by the Gestapo and never heard from again. A questionable fall from a ladder keeps him at his editing desk.
A scene with Hitler’s filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl is perhaps most illustrative of the political trap ensnaring Pabst. While he once directed her as a young actress, she is now a director herself. Triumph of the Wills has been celebrated by Hitler and his followers as a great film achievement for its portrayal of Nazi power and greatness. Her filming of the 1936 Olympics has also been lauded for its innovative techniques.
Pabst had taught her acting subtleties as he did others like Greta Garbo, star of Pabst’s 1925 silent film The Joyless Street, and Louise Brooks, the American star of Pabst’s 1929 silent Pandora’s Box. From these and other films, Pabst gained his reputation as a director who knew what the camera wanted and how to get it from his stars. He was also recognized for his focus on the plight of women.
But now Riefenstahl is in charge and the Fuhrer has her back. She and Pabst are reunited on the film set. She mocks him but also needs him to “do the faces.” She puts Pabst in his place during a demeaning dialogue but he must accept her supreme authority if he is to continue making films. He has made a pact with the devil.
It is easy to forget that this is a novel; much of its factual content parallels what we know of Pabst. Some German references will be obscure to many North American readers and yet using them takes us closer to the moment when Germany was being upended by bullyboy brown shirts masquerading as police officers.
It is easy to forget that this is a novel; much of its factual content parallels what we know of Pabst.
This is an intense work that situates us at the periphery of the horror that was Nazi Germany. We follow the life of Pabst, a respected and relatively well-off Austrian. We get hints of what is happening as Hitler promulgates his “Final Solution,” but Kehlmann solicits our historical imaginations to see it seeping like poison into ordinary people’s lives. In one imagined film-making scene, Pabst is so driven by his passion that he uses concentration camp victims as extras. Kehlmann builds the horror superbly by explicitly describing the malnourished, barely clothed extras.
As I read to the end, I felt immersed in an inhuman world controlled by vicious evil-doers. True, it was a fictional world, or perhaps, more correctly one of creative non-fiction. But as Kehlmann describes Pabst’s obsession with making Nazi-sponsored films into art, I began to feel as if I too was immersed in Pabst’s dilemma.
I was watching him deconstruct Nazi-approved scripts scene by scene and transform them into the story he wanted to tell. The detailed descriptions of Pabst’s meticulous editing thrust me into the moment where the novel met the film. The artforms collided. I was no longer a reader, I was a member of the audience. Pabst, meanwhile, is seeking refuge in his own mind. And yet he is part of the madness, employed by it.
Eventually, the war ends, but Pabst’s carries on, but his heyday was silent film. He gets lost behind great European expat filmmakers like Fritz Lang (Metropolis), Ernest Lubitsch (Ninotchka) and Fred Zinnemann (High Noon). Pabst died in Vienna at the age of 81 on May 29, 1967.
Kehlmann has crafted a vividly nuanced story about the horrors of Nazism. Why did he choose to write about Pabst? Was it because it offered an opportunity to portray a police state ostensibly through an imagined camera lens? And why now? Could Kehlman have had his eye on a democratic country rapidly being transformed into one that looks increasingly like the one Pabst inhabited?
Why did he choose to write about Pabst? Was it because it offered an opportunity to portray a police state ostensibly through an imagined camera lens? And why now?
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975. His novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. He currently lives in Berlin and New York.
Ross Benjamin is an award-winning translator of German-language literature. His translations include Franz Kafka’s Diaries (Schocken, 2023), and Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (Pantheon, 2020) and You Should Have Left (Pantheon, 2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The Nation, among others.
Publisher: Summit Books (May 6, 2025)
Hardcover 9″ x 6″ | 352 pages
ISBN: 9781668087794
Ron Verzuh is a writer, historian and book reviewer. His most recent book is Smelter Wars: A Rebellious Red Trade Union Fights for Its Life in Wartime Western Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022). His other books include Radical Rag: The Pioneer Labour Press in Canada and Underground Times: Canada’s Flower-Child Revolutionaries. His work has appeared in academic journals, magazines, newspapers and on web sites.
