Originally published in Germany as Lichtspiel in 2023, The Director is a historical novel by the celebrated German Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann. Known for blending historical fact with fiction in acclaimed novels such as Measuring the World (2005) and Tyll (2017), Kehlmann’s The Director is a fictionalized biography of the influential Austrian film director G. W. Pabst. The story chronicles real events of Pabst’s life, including his frustrating exile in Hollywood, his fateful decision to return to Nazi-annexed Austria just before the outbreak of World War II, and his subsequent career making controversial propaganda films in Nazi Germany. However, Kehlmann also uses a historical mystery—the fate of Pabst’s lost final wartime film, The Molander Case—as a central plot device to explore the fraught relationship between art, power, and history, as well as themes of The Moral Compromises of Artistic Ambition, Self-Deception in Memory and Perception, and The Blurred Line Between Survival and Complicity.

This guide refers to the 2025 Summit Books hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, religious discrimination, substance use, addiction, self-harm, mental illness, emotional abuse, illness, death, death by suicide, cursing, animal death racism, child abuse, bullying, and sexual content.

Plot Summary

The narrative begins in the present day with Franz Wilzek, an elderly former film director with a failing memory, appearing on a live television broadcast of What’s New on Sunday, hosted by the famous Heinz Conrads. At the studio, the young editor Rosenzweig preps him for the show. During the interview, Wilzek shares anecdotes about his minor film career before the conversation turns to his time as an assistant to the legendary director G. W. Pabst. Conrads, reading from cards prepared by Rosenzweig, asks about a lost film, The Molander Case, which he claims Pabst and Wilzek shot in Prague in 1945. Wilzek becomes intensely agitated, denying the film was ever shot and calling the story a lie while experiencing a confusing flashback of being on a film crane in a concert hall. The show ends abruptly, and a furious Conrads fires Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig then tells Wilzek that he orchestrated the questions because his father was an extra in the lost film. Wilzek returns to the sanatorium where he lives, confused by the confrontation but proud of his television appearance.

The story shifts back in time to recount G. W. Pabst’s exile in Hollywood. At a poolside meeting, Pabst struggles to pitch an ambitious film idea in his poor English. The studio executives ignore his pitch and pressure him into directing a script he despises, A Modern Hero. After the film flops, Pabst visits the actress Greta Garbo, whom he discovered for his film The Joyless Street. He pitches his film idea to her, but she politely refuses, suggesting he ask another of his former stars, Louise Brooks. At a party hosted by fellow emigrant director Fred Zinnemann, Pabst is approached by Kuno Krämer, a German engineer and agent for the Nazi regime, who invites Pabst to return to Germany, promising him unlimited resources and artistic freedom. Pabst is enraged by the offer. As a last resort, he meets with Louise Brooks, the star of his film Pandora’s Box. She also turns down his film, bluntly telling him he has no power in Hollywood and that their brief past affair meant nothing to her. Defeated, Pabst sails back to Europe with his wife, Trude, and their young son, Jakob. In Paris, they join a gathering of other German-speaking emigrants. Trude reveals their plan to make a quick trip to Austria, now annexed by Germany, to visit Pabst’s ailing mother before sailing back to America. The other emigrants are horrified, warning them that it is reckless to enter Nazi territory voluntarily, but Pabst dismisses their concerns.

The Pabst family travels by train into the Reich. At the border, Jakob watches officials brutally remove people without proper papers from a train leaving the country. They arrive at their estate, Dreiturm Castle, to find that the caretaker, Karl Jerzabek, is now the local Nazi party leader and has been tormenting Pabst’s elderly mother, Erika. Jerzabek himself sent the telegram that lured them back. Facing abuse at the hands of the Jerzabeks and the worsening oppression of the Nazi state, Pabst and Trude realize they are in grave danger and plan to flee. However, as Pabst retrieves a valuable item from a high shelf in the library, Jerzabek enters and deliberately topples the ladder, causing Pabst to fall and suffer a severe concussion and a fractured hip. While Pabst is delirious, Trude tells him he imagined Jerzabek’s attack and then delivers the devastating news: Germany has invaded Poland, World War II has begun, and the borders are closed. They are trapped.

Several years pass. The Pabst family has been forced to live in the small caretaker’s quarters while the Jerzabeks occupy the main castle. Pabst is a broken man, still suffering from his injury, and Trude is forced to do housework for both families. Jakob is now a schoolboy, fully integrated into the Nazi system, and to secure his social standing, he brutally wins a fight against a larger boy using a hidden stone. Kuno Krämer, now an official from Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, visits the castle and summons Pabst to a meeting in Berlin. In a surreal and terrifying meeting, Goebbels demands that Pabst perform an act of “penance” for his past left-wing associations. Pabst capitulates and receives a script for a historical film, The Comedians.

After The Comedians, Pabst is sent by the ministry to assist Leni Riefenstahl on her film Lowlands, where he meets Franz Wilzek, who is working as a camera assistant. Pabst is horrified to discover that the extras are Sinti and Roma prisoners from the nearby Maxglan concentration camp, but he feels powerless and continues his work. Later, during a pre-production meeting for Pabst’s next film, Paracelsus, screenwriter Kurt Heuser is abruptly arrested by the Gestapo. Jakob witnesses the incident, but instead of being frightened, he devastates his father by expressing his willingness to die for the Führer.

In the final months of the war, Pabst begins filming his adaptation of a novel by the party-approved author Alfred Karrasch, radically transforming the trite story into a dark, expressionistic film titled The Molander Case. While filming in Prague, the military extras for the film’s crucial concert scene are cancelled. Desperate to complete his vision, Pabst forces the production manager to procure Jewish prisoners from a nearby concentration camp to serve as the audience. Franz Wilzek, now Pabst’s assistant, is horrified and collapses after seeing his old family doctor, Dr. Sämann, among the prisoners. As they race to finish editing, the Prague Uprising begins. Pabst and Wilzek escape the studio with the seven reels of the finished film in an army rucksack. They fight their way through the war-torn city and board the last train to Vienna. On the train, an exhausted Pabst falls asleep. A farrier with an identical rucksack accidentally takes Pabst’s bag, leaving his own behind. When Pabst awakens in Vienna, he discovers the farrier has taken the film, leaving him with a bag of horseshoes. The Molander Case is lost.

In post-war Austria, Pabst is a shell of his former self, rendered mostly silent by the loss of his masterpiece. Trude has taken control of his career, writing scripts and managing productions while he directs in a diminished capacity. After the final day of shooting their film Mysterious Depths, their flashlight dies while they are exploring a deep cave, trapping them in total darkness where they confront their broken relationship. Many years later, a middle-aged Jakob, scarred from his war wounds, visits an elderly Louise Brooks in Rochester, New York, to deliver a silver cigarette case from his late father. She is sharp and unsentimental, telling him the Nazi experience “broke” him.

The narrative returns to Franz Wilzek in the sanatorium. Rummaging in his closet, he finds the old army rucksack containing the seven reels of The Molander Case. A final flashback reveals the novel’s twist: About a week after the film was lost, the farrier found Wilzek and returned the rucksack. Wilzek, however, never told Pabst, allowing his mentor to live out his life haunted and diminished by the loss. As Wilzek’s own memory fades, he is left alone with the lost film, remembering only the face of Dr. Sämann in the concert hall.