Daniel Kehlmann's G. W. Pabst novel The Director - Keeping it light. Keeping it carefree.

Daniel Kehlmann’s previous novel, Tyll (2017), was about a magical clown wandering through the hellscape of the Thirty Years’ War.  Apparently that was not grim enough for him so his new novel, The Director (2023), although there is some early hopeful Hollywood sunshine, is about G. W. Pabst’s life and work in Nazi Germany.

If the idea of a novel about a great German director making films under the thumb of the Nazis sounds interesting, well, this novel is highly interesting, although I will warn the kind of reader who is bothered by such things that Kehlmann writes fiction.

Chapters hop around from character to character and from style to style.  Sometimes the style is an imitation of German Expressionist filmmaking or lightly Kafkaesque.  Ross Benjamin does a wonderful job capturing these stylistic shifts, or inventing them out of nothing, or for all I know he suppresses even more dazzling stuff, how would I know, I don’t read German.  Seems good to me!

Pabst and his crew have just been interrupted by “two men in leather coats” while discussing a new film over dinner:

“But seriously,” says Karsunke.  “Enough of the funny business.”

“Yes, seriously,” says Basler.  “Which of the gentleman here is…”

He falls silent and looks at his colleague.  The other pulls a notepad out of his pocket, taps his finger on the tip of his tongue, and squints as he flips through the pages once, twice, three times.

“Just kidding,” says Karsunke.

“Keeping it light,” says Basler.  “Keeping it carefree.”  (209-10)

They are Gestapo agents from The Castle doing a comedy routine.

As the variety of the chapters accumulated, I became more impressed with what Kehlmann was doing with the novel.  Any resistance finally vanished in the amazing “German Literature” chapter, where Frau Pabst is invited to join a highly connected book club.  Yes, Nazi book club satire, a perfect mix of the lowest stakes with the highest.  Is this subtle or blatant?

“Where did you get these beautiful porcelain cups?” asked Gritt Borger.  “If I’m not mistaken, they weren’t here last time.”

“An antique shop on Feldmochinger Strasse,” said Else Buchholz.  “A whole set.  Eighty-five reichsmarks.”

Everyone fell silent.  Outside on the street two men could be heard talking to each other.  The coughing start of a car engine was audible, as well as the splashing of the coffee Maria Lotropf was pouring into her cup.  (163)

I cannot prove that those two men are Karsunke and Basler passing by.  Their car engine starts on p. 212 but does not cough.

The Director is a study of compromised creativity, but Pabst is not a monster.  What choice does he have?  It is always at least a question.

“I have no intention of making any more films.”

“Wrong answer,” said the Minister.  “Wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer.”

Both were silent.

Pabst took a breath, but the Minister interrupted before he could speak: “Now it would be good if the right answer came.” (147)

He has some choice.  A chapter narrated by P. G. Wodehouse (which “has been substantially revised for the present English translation,” curious) is about the same issue.

Lousie Brooks, Greta Garbo, P. G. Wodehouse, Leni Riefenstahl – a superb use of Riefenstahl – plus artful technical detail about film editing, lighting, and acting, plus a Nazi book club. Good stuff.

Daniel Kehlmann's Tyll - All this is true, he says, even what has been made up is true.

One of the new books I read last year, Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (2017 in German, 2020 in Ross Benjamin’s English) was from the future.  I accidentally bought an Advanced Reader’s Copy – “Not for Sale” the cover declares.  But surely at this point I can think of myself as an Advanced Reader, in English, at least.  Maybe an Intermediate Reader in French still.

Tyll is the merry prankster, a German medieval folklore figure who wreaks havoc with his honestly not-so-merry pranks.  He has some importance in German literary history because Tyll stories were among the early products of German printing.  Some old Tyll leaflets appear on page 4, along with those about “the Ship of Fools and the great priestly folly and the evil Pope in Rome and the devilish Martinus Luther of Wittenberg and the sorcerer Horridus and Doctor Faust and the hero Gawain of the Round Table and indeed about him, Tyll Ulenspiegel, who had now come to us himself.”

In the novel Tyll the archetype Tyll come to life for another tour of central Europe, this time during the Thirty Years War (a new round of the evil Pope versus the devilish Luther).  Perhaps the spirit of Tyll inhabits a boy with a talent for juggling and tightrope walking.  Perhaps that boy consciously takes on Tyll’s identity.  If the spirit of Tyll has returned, it is not clear why.  The world of the Thirty Years War is irredeemably awful.  Juggling and ventriloquism can’t solve that problem.  But the novel puts Tyll in the background, mostly, of a number of other people’s stories.  He gives them little nudges, sometimes just by existing.

If I understand Michael Orthofer’s more thorough review, he would like the novel to have been more about Tyll himself.  But it is not.  It is more about the meaning of Tyll.

All this is true, he says, even what has been made up is true.  (126)

The world was once enchanted, and then became disenchanted, by science and bureaucracy and so on, argued Max Weber and many others.  The world of Tyll is still enchanted, in the sense that everyone believes in magic and religion, and the representative scientists are experts in crystals, or dragons, or, in the case of Athanasius Kircher, literally everything.  Kehlmann has some fun with Kircher’s cat piano; I would include an illustration if I could stand the cruelty.

Using the irony of a novel about a magician, Kehlmann seems to be arguing for disenchantment, for a little less magic in the world, for less religion, or at least less religious war, and for modern science, not Kircher’s science:

Kircher had grasped early on that one had to follow reason without being flustered by the quirks of reality.  When one knew how an experiment had to turn out, then the experiment had to turn out like that, and when one possessed a distinct conception of things, then, when one described them, one had to satisfy this conception and not mere observation.  (264)

A good novelist is likely all right with mere observation.  It is not so “mere” in the hands of an artist.  We can have as much enchantment as we want, by means of art.

The book I read begins with a letter to the Dear Reader from Dan Frank, the Editorial Director of Pantheon Books, that is filled with guff, especially the closer: “Whether you are a fan of Neal Stephenson, Jorge Luis Borges, George R. R. Martin, or Margaret Atwood, you will be captivated by the unique and original vision of Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll.”  Stephenson wrote books set in the same century, which is something, although leafing through Quicksilver I will say that Kehlmann is rather lighter on his feet; Borges has me stumped; I have not read Atwood but looked up descriptions of her most famous books and am again baffled; as for Martin, Tyll does not have much in common with the only book of his I have read, the morally instructive Sandkings (1981) but does feature a Winter King and a Winter Queen and lots of characters who are murdered in the usual horrible ways.  I guess Martin fans like that?

I assume this letter is just part of the ARC, not the soon to be published version?  You people who get free books, do they usually come with this nonsense?  How can you stand it?