The Director by Daniel Kehlmann is a fictionalized account of the career of C. W. Pabst, the famous Austrian director of Pandora’s Box and other masterpieces of early cinema. The very liberal Pabst fled to America during the rise of the Nazis but circumstances necessitated that he and his wife and (fictional) son return to Ostmark (Austria), where they then became trapped by the outbreak of war. A major theme of the book explores how Pabst chose or was coerced into making (non-propaganda) films for the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda.
For me, it was one of those books that you can't put down....except that every now and then you have to put it down. By which I mean it's brilliantly written, very inventive, deeply absorbing, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, but it includes heavy doses of humiliation, terror, desperation and shame, resting upon a kind of covert foundation of increasing dread. It is deadly serious, and thinking about what I had read realigned some major viewpoints I had held.
