The Director
The Director
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Daniel Kehlmann on The Director
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The story that inverted everything he expectedKehlmann had been circling the Nazi era for years, convinced he needed an angle genuinely unlike what the subject had already produced. The single biographical fact that unlocked the project arrived when he was researching the 1920s German silent film industry for an entirely different purpose: G.W. Pabst, one of the era’s most celebrated directors, had left Europe for Hollywood and then, inexplicably, gone back.
It’s like the normal, regular story of the refugee fleeing the Nazis, fleeing prosecution turned on its head. And I thought, this is an amazing story. I have to look into that and I have to turn that into a novel.
The subject of small-scale accommodation under a dictatorship had long interested him more than the history of its architects and mass murderers. Pabst’s return handed him a character who had to learn the regime’s rules from scratch, arriving as an outsider, which let Kehlmann build the novel’s world through the incremental logic of compromise rather than ideology.
I was interested in writing about everyday life in dictatorship, and complicity…not the big huge criminals, the people who are mass murderers, other people have written about them, very, very important and very good books. I wanted to write about the small compromises, the compromises in the workplace, the compromises of being in a reading group and reading a [Nazi propaganda] book.
Beyond the historical puzzle, there was a private pressure. Kehlmann’s father, born in 1927, had been classified as half-Jewish under the Nazis, expelled from school, and held in a labor camp near the end of the war. Kehlmann grew up hearing those stories directly, and by the time he was working on this book he felt the weight of having not yet written from them.
It’s quite unusual in my generation of writers to still have had a parent who was a victim and a witness to the Nazi era. And I felt at some point I had to write about that.
Pabst’s story solved both problems at once. It gave him the strange, original angle he insisted on before approaching the subject, and it opened a door, as he put it, into his own family history.
How he wrote it
Directing on paper, researching in the gapsHis early drafts used an invented director with a different name and a constructed parallel film industry, including a great Danish actress standing in for Greta Garbo. The exercise produced what he later called a strange, lifeless parallel universe. The solution was accidental: one day he typed Pabst’s real name, and the material opened up. He kept the label “a novel” on the cover, but he could now use the actual films, the actual history, and the actual people directly. His working principle across the project was to stay inside what he described as a zone where invented scenes remain plausible given everything that is documented, neither confined to the archive nor allowed to contradict it.
I used a lot of the devices and techniques of silent movies. It wasn’t even a decision, it just happened naturally. If you write about a storyteller—and Pabst was a professional storyteller—then the way that person tells their story shapes the way you tell their story.
Pabst’s letters, held at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, were Kehlmann’s primary archival source, but they were useful in an unexpected way: they were, in his description, strangely devoid of any reflection. They revealed a man’s texture rather than his inner life. The historical record on The Molander Case, Pabst’s lost final film, was even thinner, little more than a title. Kehlmann could not simply reference it as a plot device. He had to make it exist as a creative object.
I felt like to a certain extent, I had to shoot that movie, like I had to write these scenes on set so that the reader feels they have seen part of that movie. So I was, in a way, directing it on paper.
Research into 1940s film editing proved unexpectedly resistant to ordinary methods. Kehlmann needed the technical reality of how a film was cut in that era to drive the scenes on Pabst’s set, but the specifics were too obscure for standard searches. He ended up tracking down people who still had direct memory of the equipment and workflow. One invented scene presented a different kind of problem entirely, this one moral rather than logistical: he wrote Jewish prisoners being used as extras on the Molander Case set.
I was thinking very hard about, am I allowed to do that morally? I mean, legally, there’s no question about it. Legally, I’m allowed to do that. We looked into that. The main reason I felt I could do it is because in the Nazi era they did it for other films.
The personal thread
A father’s history, a son’s reckoningKehlmann grew up on film sets because his father, after surviving the war as a classified half-Jew, became a director. That background gave him practical knowledge of filmmaking from childhood, and it also gave him a specific moral lens on Pabst’s story. He came to see what Pabst did to his own son, Jakob (the name Kehlmann gave the fictional version), as more damning than any film Pabst made for the Reich.
his son is a free, gifted, intelligent kid who goes to a school in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, and then he sends him to a boarding school in Nazi Germany, subjected to the full pressure of the system... and it breaks him in the way that he becomes a perpetrator himself. [paraphrased from audio]
The logic he drew from that: the clearest way to show what totalitarianism actually does is to show what it does to the children caught inside it.
His sense that artists carry real responsibilities, not just aesthetic ones, had shifted as he aged. He described holding a much freer view when he was younger, one that placed art outside the reach of moral accounting. What changed it was a combination of watching events in the world and the accumulated weight of having grown up hearing his father’s direct testimony.
When I was younger, I had this very strong feeling that there is no responsibility in what artists do. But then also, with getting older and also with seeing what happens in the world, I felt more and more of that responsibility.
On what the book is wrestling with
The mechanism of acceptable compromiseThe novel’s central moral question, when does accommodation tip into complicity, is one Kehlmann chose not to resolve. He was explicit that the novel’s form was the point: an essay could take a position, but fiction’s job here was to make the question feel as genuinely difficult as it would have felt to the person inside it.
I would say that the point of writing a novel and not an essay, as in this case, is that I don’t have a clear answer for that. The novel is set up to make it as difficult as possible to give a clear answer to that question.
He wanted readers to feel complicity as a process rather than a single decision. The novel is structured so that each step Pabst takes feels, in isolation, defensible. Kehlmann described that accumulation as the actual mechanism of how people under authoritarian regimes move from discomfort to participation without ever feeling they have crossed a line.
People could tell themselves that this is still OK. What we’re doing here is still morally acceptable. And then, when you go down that road, it’s always — there’s always the next step, which still feels acceptable, and another step which still feels acceptable.
At the 92nd Street Y, Kehlmann was asked directly whether great art can emerge from a fascist state. He had been building toward this point throughout the novel’s argument about what totalitarianism costs the imagination, and his answer at that event was categorical.
I don’t think it is... empirically there is no great art that was created under fascism... the lie permitted just everything all the time, and you didn’t have any space to think free, to feel free, to be a human being. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
The road that never announces itself as hellKehlmann finished the German edition of the novel in early 2023, at a moment when he thought a second Trump presidency was unlikely. He watched the book receive its most intense attention in countries experiencing authoritarian pressures. The lesson he draws from Pabst is not abstract: it is a precise description of when a person still has room to refuse.
it never presents itself to you as the big pact with the devil. It is a road of really small steps that will lead to hell. So the one thing we learn from his story is you have to not compromise very early when you still have the opportunity to say no. [paraphrased from audio]
That early window, before the steps accumulate and the exits close, is what Pabst squanders. Kehlmann built the novel so readers feel themselves moving through the same window, step by step, before it shuts.