Franz Wilzek is G. W. Pabst’s assistant during his time making films in Nazi Germany. Chapters narrated by a present-day elderly Wilzek with a failing memory open and close the novel, providing a narrative frame for Pabst’s story. Wilzek’s recollections are fragmented and deeply self-protective, demonstrating the novel’s theme of Self-Deception in Memory and Perception and revealing the long-term psychological burden carried by those who were adjacent to and complicit in great evil. When asked during a television interview about the lost film The Molander Case, Wilzek vehemently denies it was ever made. He shouts frantically that the film “doesn’t exist,” using this fierce repression as a psychological defense against the immense trauma and guilt connected to the film’s production, which involved the use of concentration camp prisoners as extras. The narrative’s structure, which opens with Wilzek’s confused present before moving into a lucid past, emphasizes this psychic fracture and the unreliability of a memory shaped by guilt.

As Pabst’s assistant, Wilzek embodies an everyday form of complicity. He is not an ideologue but a deferential “acolyte” whose participation in the regime’s propaganda machine stems from professional duty and a lack of courage to object. His guilt is given a physical form in the cans of the lost film, which he keeps for decades. The farrier who mistakenly takes the rucksack of film returns it to Wilzek, but instead of giving it to Pabst, Wilzek again chooses inaction. This time, however, choosing not to act reveals a hint of defiance; Wilzek sheds his identity as the “good student" in a quiet refusal to condone his mentor’s moral transgressions. Now, the reels in the back of his closet represent the historical truth Wilzek has tried to suppress, a tangible reminder of his role in the atrocities he witnessed. His possession of the film is a manifestation of a conscience that has been silenced but never fully erased.

Wilzek’s passivity is challenged by the television editor, Rosenzweig, whose father was one of the prisoners used in the film. This encounter forces Wilzek to confront his past not just as an assistant who followed orders but as a historical observer who chose silence. However, after decades of repression, Wilzek’s tendency toward self-preservation is too strong. His memory of the film and keeping Pabst’s masterpiece from him resurfaces briefly, but once the bag of film is out of sight, Wilzek returns to his state of confusion and safety.

As G. W. Pabst’s wife, Trude serves as the novel’s moral anchor and a foil to her husband’s escalating self-deception. She possesses a clarity that Pabst lacks, recognizing the danger of returning to the Reich from the outset. While her husband rationalizes his collaboration with the regime as an artistic necessity, Trude becomes a silent, suffering witness to his moral decay. She is forced into isolation and quiet despair, trapped in a world of banal complicity that she cannot escape but to which she will never belong. To cope, she engages in self-destructive behaviors, like drinking and self-harming.

A capable and intelligent woman with her own creative ambitions, Trude’s agency is systematically eroded by her husband’s decisions. Once a playwright, she finds herself trapped in a life of fear and powerlessness within the Reich. Her decision to manage Pabst’s postwar career is a pragmatic act of survival, but it is predicated on his brokenness, demonstrating how his choices have irrevocably defined and diminished her own life. The screenplay she writes after the war, Mysterious Depths, is deeply symbolic of her own psychological state as much as her husband’s; she is a woman buried alive in a reality defined by her husband’s compromises.

Kuno Krämer is a flat, static character who functions as a tempter and an agent of the Nazi state. He represents the insidious and bureaucratic nature of the regime’s power. First appearing at a party in Hollywood, he approaches Pabst with a seductive appeal to artistic opportunity and patriotism, assuring him he would be “welcomed with open arms” in Germany (47), able to make any film he likes. This show of politeness masks the coercive force that Krämer represents. When he reappears in the Reich to summon Pabst to meet the minister, his authority is more explicit, as he hints that Pabst would be arrested if he refuses the meeting. Krämer embodies the seemingly reasonable, step-by-step path toward collaboration, offering Pabst a professional opportunity that, in reality, is a moral trap.

Karl Jerzabek, the caretaker at Dreiturm Castle, is a flat character who symbolizes the brutalizing effect of a totalitarian system on an ordinary individual. Described initially as a local “good soul,” he transforms into a petty and cruel tyrant once the Nazi regime empowers him. He torments Pabst’s elderly mother and wields his minor position as a local party leader with sadistic glee. Jerzabek’s arc from subservience to malevolence demonstrates how such a system rewards and unleashes the basest human instincts. He represents a brutish form of complicity, driven not by ideology but by pure opportunism and a desire for power over others. Jerzabek also represents Pabst’s systematic erosion of self and authority. Upon returning to Dreiturm, the caretaker is the one in control, forcing the Pabsts to live in the downstairs quarters and behave cautiously around the Jerzabeks, illustrating how the Nazi regime transforms power dynamics in small communities.

Appearing in a single chapter, Louise Brooks is a largely static character who functions as a crucial symbol of past promise in Pabst’s psyche. A beautiful actress whom Pabst “discovered” and had a brief affair with, Brooks represents a past defined by authentic artistry and uncompromising personal freedom, everything Pabst feels he has lost. Brooks is a “living flame” who refuses to be tamed or to cater to the compromised world of Hollywood. Her clear-eyed perception of Pabst’s predicament and her refusal to be his savior highlight his diminished state. For Pabst, Brooks represents the ghost of the artist he once was and the life he might have led.

Jakob, G. W. Pabst’s fictional son, is a dynamic character whose development illustrates the devastating consequences of his father’s choices, and the particular danger of indoctrination for young minds. Taken from a cosmopolitan life and thrust into the Nazified world of the Reich, Jakob adapts quickly and learns to survive by internalizing the regime’s brutal ideology. The novel traces his transformation from a sensitive, artistic boy into a hardened member of the Hitler Youth. By the time he is a young man, Jakob gladly joins the war effort, feeling he would be “lucky” to have the honor of dying for the Führer. After his tank is hit, Jakob is left with physical and psychological scars. More than anything, Trude finds the physical, mental, and emotional damage done to her son the most unforgivable consequence of Pabst’s capitulation to and collaboration with the Reich.