New novel 'The Director' explores an artist's responsibilities in a time of trauma

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: The role of the artist in times of crisis, a powerful new work of fiction rooted in real events explores that question resonating with the challenges of our own time.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown has the story for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: The 1925 filmed “The Joyless Street” starring Greta Garbo, 1929’s “Pandora’s Box” with Louise Brooks, two landmark films directed by G.W. Pabst, considered one of the world’s great filmmakers of the silent era, an innovator in visual storytelling.

The Austria native first made his mark in Europe left for Hollywood as the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, but found little success there, and then as World War II was beginning returned home, where he made films for and under the Nazi regime.

Daniel Kehlmann, Author, “The Director”: It’s like the normal, regular story of the refugee fleeing the Nazis, fleeing prosecution turned on its head. And I thought, this is an amazing story. I have to look into that and I have to turn that into a novel.

Jeffrey Brown: The result by German-Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann, “The Director,” a fictionalized account based on the life of an actual artist and his choices in the worst of times.

Daniel Kehlmann: It’s a novel about complicity. It’s — because if you if you survive at all in a dictatorship, then you have to become complicit.

And in the case of Pabst, because the Nazis wanted him to make films, and he did that, he feels like, I have a lot of artistic freedom here. I can do this. I can make good films.

And that’s, of course, when the pact with the devil becomes very real.

Jeffrey Brown: Kehlmann, now 50 and living in New York, burst on the world literary scene 20 years ago with his novel “Measuring the World,” which also featured historical characters in the 18th and 19th centuries. He’s written six other novels, including 2020’s “Tyll,” a reimagining of actual events in the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century. It was a finalist for the international Booker Prize.

Daniel Kehlmann: Novel writing is the art of the possible. It’s what could have happened. And you have a certain license in a novel to do what journalists, for example, or historians cannot do.

Jeffrey Brown: Right.

Daniel Kehlmann: They cannot just say, this happened, because you need very, very reliable sources. And, as a novelist, this is exactly what you’re allowed to do. You can follow the hunch.

Jeffrey Brown: You have got the framing of the facts here.

Daniel Kehlmann: Yes. Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: But then you can play.

Daniel Kehlmann: Yes, exactly.

Jeffrey Brown: In “The Director,” he shows us the everyday changes, the flags, children in uniform, the rules of who doesn’t belong that can swiftly transform a society, even as most people adjust and life goes on.

Daniel Kehlmann: People could tell themselves that this is still OK. What we’re doing here is still morally acceptable. And then, when you go down that road, it’s always — there’s always the next step, which still feels acceptable, and another step which still feels acceptable.

And that’s what happens to my main character, and I thought also what happens while you’re reading it.

Jeffrey Brown: Part of this story you knew from growing up, from your own father.

Daniel Kehlmann: Yes. And there are many people in the boo, characters, I have to say, whom my parents knew especially.

Jeffrey Brown: There is a very personal aspect to this novel. Kehlmann’s father was from a Jewish family in Vienna, entirely assimilated, or so they thought, until he was expelled from school, arrested and put in a concentration camp for three months before the end of the war.

Later, in fact, he became a film director.

Daniel Kehlmann: It’s quite unusual in my generation of writers to still have had a parent who was a victim and a witness to the Nazi era. And I felt at some point I had to write about that.

Jeffrey Brown: So, at some point, you did decide, well, it’s time to take it on, to kind of incorporate that into your own work?

Daniel Kehlmann: Yes. And I also felt, but I need a really unusual story, because it was so unique and so unusual and so crazy, somebody who was not a Nazi and came back into this world, like, I’m coming in there as a storyteller, out of his own choice.

And when I found that story, I felt like this is also unlocking for me my own family history.

Jeffrey Brown: I mean, the idea that you were one of the few writers of your generation that have this direct connection, did you feel a responsibility to look at that?

Daniel Kehlmann: Not when I was younger.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Daniel Kehlmann: When I was younger, I had this very strong feeling that there is no responsibility in what artists do. But then also, with getting older and also with seeing what happens in the world, I felt more and more of that responsibility.

Jeffrey Brown: Kehlmann was writing his book about the past amid moves to the right in recent years in parts of Europe and the U.S. And it comes out amid enormous fears about the rule of law and threats to democratic norms.

Daniel Kehlmann: I mean, until like a month ago, I would have said about — I would have said it’s all about warning where we might be going. But now I don’t feel like that anymore. I feel like the United States is moving into the direction of becoming an authoritarian state with a speed that I would never have anticipated.

We Europeans, we have seen it several times over the last two generations. It’s kind of intergenerational trauma. It’s in our bones. It’s in our DNA. We know a system can change in weeks, sometimes in days.

Jeffrey Brown: Has it changed the way you think about your own work, your own role?

Daniel Kehlmann: It means, for example, that I’m trying to write books like that one, like “The Director,” books that are talking about what I know as an European and as somebody who has my family background and who has studied the history of the Third Reich, and, again, not the great crimes about which we all know, but everyday life and everyday compromise and how compromise permeated everyday life and how it was everywhere.

Jeffrey Brown: G.W. Pabst continued to work after the war, but his reputation was never the same. He died in 1967.

The novel is “The Director.” Daniel Kehlmann, thank you very much.

Daniel Kehlmann: It’s a pleasure.