The Director is a fictionalized biography of Georg Wilhelm Pabst (1885-1967), a real and highly influential Austrian film director. In the years following World War I, German cinema flourished, despite the Weimar Republic’s fragile economic and political situation. Hundreds of films were made each year, and as these pictures were still silent, actors from all over Europe and even the United States starred in German films. G. W. Pabst rose to international fame during Germany’s Weimar Republic as a leading figure of the New Objectivity art movement, known for its social realism. His silent films of this era, such as The Joyless Street (1925) and Pandora’s Box (1929), are landmarks of the period, and his innovations in regard to editing had a great influence on the developing film industry. Pabst also became well-known for discovering actresses like Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, who both appear in The Director.

When the Nazi party took power in 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, seized control of Germany’s prolific film studios and transformed cinema into a powerful tool for propaganda and indoctrination. The most infamous example is Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 documentary Triumph of the Will, which mythologized the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. This political takeover forced a mass exodus of the industry’s brightest talents. Hundreds of artists, many of them Jewish, fled into exile. Directors like Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder, along with stars like Marlene Dietrich, emigrated to the United States, forming a community of German-speaking expatriates in Hollywood. As Kehlmann depicts in the novel’s “Outside” section, these artists often faced immense professional and cultural challenges. G. W. Pabst planned to emigrate to the United States but quickly became frustrated with the creative limitations he faced in Hollywood. He directed the commercial failure A Modern Hero (1934) and then made the fateful decision to return to Austria in 1939, shortly after its annexation by Germany.

For artists like Pabst, who returned, working in the Third Reich meant navigating a system where art was inseparable from propaganda, a dilemma that forms the core of The Director. Pabst spent the war years making films for the Nazi-controlled industry, including the two historical epics that feature prominently in the novel, The Comedians (1941) and Paracelsus (1943). Kehlmann’s story centers on the moral ambiguity of this period and on Pabst’s final wartime project, The Molander Case (1945), which was shot in Prague under chaotic conditions as the war ended and subsequently lost. Pabst’s complex career—from celebrated artist to Hollywood exile to Nazi-era filmmaker—illustrates the profound moral crises faced by artists under totalitarianism.