In America, a German-Austrian novelist hears echoes of his father’s life under Nazism

By PJ Grisar
June 1, 2025

One of the earliest expressions of totalitarianism in German-Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s novel The Director unfolds in a classroom.

In 1930, Jakob, the son of the Expressionist auteur G.W. Pabst, is acclimating to his new school in Austria, after years of being educated in America. His teachers wear the Nazi party uniform. If a pupil speaks out in class, they’re made to copy the school rules, in four longhand pages, writing against a wall in the hallway. The boys are encouraged to beat each other to a pulp. Jakob, who loves to draw, is given the following prompt from the art instructor: “Farmhouses are the citadels of our people.”

Jakob wasn’t real — Pabst’s eldest son was named Peter — but these stories are. They come from Kehlmann’s own father, who came of age under the Nazis in Austria, and survived the war as a Jew.

“He was very awake to the absurdity of it,” Kehlmann, 50, said in a Zoom interview from his home in Harlem, where he lives with his wife, an international criminal lawyer, and teenage son — when he’s not in Berlin. “I mean, he also thought it was terrible, but he also thought he was quite funny.”

Kehlmann’s father, Michael, a TV and film director, was born to an assimilated Jewish family in Austria in 1927 (his parents were both baptized). Michael was 10 when Hitler annexed Austria in the Anschluss, but Daniel’s grandfather got ahead of the persecution.

“He managed to turn himself and his wife, as far as the files were concerned, into half Jews,” Kehlmann said, managing to forge papers and pay off witnesses to bury his actual lineage.

Because of this deception, Michael was able to stay in school. One day, Kehlmann says, a recruiter for the SS came to the class. Michael was toward the front of the line, standing for inspection — he was tall — but managed to get out of serving by admitting to his mischling status. He was sent to the back.

Michael was ultimately expelled because of his background and sent to work at a factory manufacturing products for the war effort.

“He was so bad at it that the workers, his mates and colleagues, they took him to the side and said, ‘Listen, we know that you’re a Soviet saboteur,’” Kehlmann said. He wasn’t, but they couldn’t believe he was that inept.

Toward the end of the war Michael was arrested while at a party with members of the resistance (he wasn’t a member himself) and sent to the Maria Landsendorf concentration camp near Vienna. He was released after about three months of forced labor, when another prisoner bribed an official who ended up releasing a whole group. By that point, Kehlmann said, people knew the war was lost, and were trying to “accumulate some credit that they could use in the future,” when the Nazis would face consequences.

These sort of absurdities abound in The Director, newly released in English translation, about Pabst, who made the silent classic Pandora’s Box, launched Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks to stardom and capitulated to the Third Reich soon after the outbreak of World War II.

Only in Pabst’s case his slide into Nazi compliance wasn’t coerced. His cooperation was singular among his cohort. He escaped a dictatorship, but wound up trapped, repatriated and complicit in the Goebbels’ propaganda machine through a series of accidents and poor decisions. (He fractured his hip while attending to his sick mother back in Austria — in the meantime, Germany invaded Poland and the borders shut down.)

“There were all these people who had those nightmares that suddenly they were back in Nazi Germany,” Kehlmann said, referring to filmmakers like Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang (Jewish, unlike Pabst), who managed to flee to Hollywood and resume their careers. “And there’s one case, only one, that’s Pabst, of somebody who probably had these nightmares and then actually found himself back there in Nazi Germany.”

In a twist, Pabst, in Kehlmann’s telling and in reality, seemed to have enjoyed more creative freedom in the Third Reich than under the studio system in the days of the Hays Code — but it comes at a steep price.

Given an insipid melodrama from a Nazi hack to adapt, Pabst is able to enliven the subject matter with touches of the old Expressionism. But in a harrowing scene toward the end, he resorts to an unspeakable use of Nazi resources to wrap production: He casts concentration camp inmates as extras for a pivotal concert scene.

There’s no record of Pabst doing this (the film, The Molander Case, is lost) but Kehlmann notes that Pabst had collaborated with Triumph of the Will director Leni Riefenstahl on her film Lowlands, which used prisoners from Maxglan. Given the fact that the film industry undoubtedly used slave labor — with many of the workers as young as 10 — the harrowing image of emaciated background actors is not much of a stretch.

All the while, he insists that his art will endure beyond any regime.

“Times are always strange,” he insists. “Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered.”

When an audience member a 92NY in event May asked if he thought good art was possible under fascism, he said not under Nazi fascism.

“I think the lie permeated just everything all the time,” Kehlmann said. “You didn’t have any space to think free, to feel free, to be a human being.”

He then paraphrased Bertolt Brecht, who said if Hitler conquered the entire world, there wouldn’t be one good poem praising him.

Kehlmann started work on The Director during the first Trump administration, living as a German-Austrian in America and detecting parallels to his father’s experience in the way people started to avoid criticism of the government. He says that phenomenon was far more subtle than what he sees in Trump’s second term. (The renaming of the Gulf of Mexico — and the agreement of news outlets and Google Maps — tracks with the Nazis’ insistence that Austria, after the Anschluss, was to be called Ostmark.)

“I’m not saying the first Trump administration was like Nazi Germany, not at all,” Kehlmann said. “But it made me think about those questions of complicity.”

Pabst, who as a director, needed outside resources more than other artists, was a natural fit for the story — though, at first, Kehlmann toyed with making the book more of a roman à clef. Because he was not a Nazi true believer (he was called the Red Pabst for his supposed Communist sympathies), his susceptibility is particularly striking.

Asked where he sees artistic complicity today, Kehlmann pointed to this year’s Oscars, where only Martin Short, a Canadian, managed a tepid joke about being deported. He’s baffled that those insulated by wealth and fame are not speaking up.

“Fascists and non-fascists are having very polite dinners with each other, and one side knows that the other side will not hesitate a second to deport them or to have them imprisoned,” Kehlmann said.

Kehlmann mined much of his family history for the book, a departure from his usual oeuvre, a blend of contemporary and historical novels, the most famous of which, 2005’s bestselling Measuring the World, concerned a 19th Century effort to manage the titular feat. (Working on a Kafka miniseries concurrently, he was also influenced by the absurdist.)

While far from autobiographical — Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt, which he translated and fact-checked, comes closer to the circumstances of Kehlmann’s forebears  — The Director draws from lessons his father imparted.

“He must have been traumatized from the things he saw and experienced. But in his case, that didn’t mean he didn’t talk about them,” said Kehlmann. “He talked about the fact that there was a large extended family that now wasn’t there anymore, that they were all gone and had been killed. So I grew up with the constant notion of family as something absent.”

He also grew up knowing he was surrounded by the perpetrators, a reality that made him suspicious and worried.

“It comes in handy now, and I’m trying not to make my son too worried about things, but also to tell him that things can change,” said Kehlmann. “I mean, we are not American citizens, he knows that we might have to leave, that it’s very possible that we have to leave the country on short notice.”

But that doesn’t mean obeying in advance.

“It’s much easier to make a stand early,” Kehlmann said of crackdowns on free expression and civil rights. “The authoritarian system is extremely good at implicating everyone, and you make those small compromises that don’t seem like much — but they add up. They add up, and they entangle you more and more, and they lead to more intense and more significant compromises.”

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