International Booker shortlist: Daniel Kehlmann’s ‘The Director’ novelises the art of propaganda

“You have to be extremely careful not to say anything wrong, even more so since the beginning of the war. But once you get used to it and know the rules, you feel almost free.”

I began reading Daniel Kehlmann’s novel, The Director, without any suspicion that GW Pabst, the protagonist, was a real person. First published in German as Lichtspiel in 2023 and translated by Ross Benjamin, the novel featuring the Weimar Republic’s foremost director has been shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

Real life

Pabst grew up in Vienna and studied drama at the Academy of Decorative Arts travelled to the US in 1919 to work at the German Theatre in New York City. In 1914, he decided to become a director, and he returned to recruit actors in Europe. His films of the late 1920s and ’30s placed a strong emphasis on the interrelationship between social conditions and the individual.

However, by the mid-1930s, the overall quality of Pabst’s films was declining. He returned to Germany when the Second World War broke out and reluctantly directed historical films imposed upon him by the Nazi regime. These included Komödianten (1941) and Paracelsus (1943), a biography of the revolutionary 16th-century German physician. He eventually moved to Vienna and made Der Prozess, a strong indictment of antisemitism that helped restore his image. His postwar films, Es geschah am 20 Juli (1955), about the failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and Der letzte Akt (1955), about the final days of the Hitler regime, voiced his anti-Nazi statements.

The world at large has something more meaningful to thank Pabst for: discovering the eternally adored Greta Garbo.

In Kehlmann’s version of Pabst’s life, the director is detained by the Third Reich when he comes to visit his ailing mother in Austria, with his wife Trude and young son Jakob. He is forbidden to return to Hollywood, but artistic freedom is promised at a small price.

Following a meeting with the Nazi Party propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, Pabst realises that his creative talents will be applied to nation-building purposes. The stories are neither beatific nor morally uplifting, but Nazi propaganda through and through. There are long arguments about Pabst wanting to make War Has Been Declared, a class satire on wars and instead being forced to direct A Modern Hero, a comedy about a circus rider, which is wholly inappropriate for the troubled times. Most importantly, his heart is not in it. Grabbed by the neck by the Party, Pabst reminds himself “all he’d had to do was make a hand gesture and say a few words.”

His family life is greatly affected too. The mansion he’s been assigned is no homely haven – the caretaker is an odd character, the cellar is dark and scary, Trude, his wife, takes to alcohol, unable to cope with her fascist neighbours. Jakob enrols as a Hitler Youth.

Pabst discovers small ways to rebel. He takes on subjects he knows will be disapproved by the regime and sneaks in his criticism in propaganda movies. In the meantime, pressure mounts and the situation worsens – the sets have been relocated to Prague to avoid bombing. Pabst becomes desperate to finish filming The Molander Case, even as the crew begins to be drafted to the warfront. The terrible reality of war buries the truth that Pabst had always believed in – the supremacy of art.

The role of art

Reading The Director in India of 2026 is all the more surreal. Bollywood produces propaganda movies by the dozen every year, and unlike Pabst who was acutely aware of his role in aiding the Nazi Party, the Indian directors today work hand in glove happily with the ruling party in efforts to normalise jingoism, which by definition alienates minorities and sceptics. Worse still, it appears that the makers of these movies genuinely believe they play an essential role in “rectifying” history and “documenting” the present.

As is expected of novels such as The Director, Kehlmann takes no sides and goes back and forth between the characters’ interiority and their official duty, to show how deeply flawed yet deeply human those caught in this hopeless nexus can be. While reading the novel, I often wondered why Pabst didn’t simply refuse. The answer 80 years ago was the same as the answer today – fear, ambition, and to some extent, conviction. Perhaps something in the Nazi propaganda did make sense to Pabst, enough to give his assent at least twice.

Nevertheless, it is soon made clear that Pabst is not one of them. The section spanning the shooting of The Molander Case may be read as a manifesto on the conflict between art and the State, and how the State has manipulated the arts throughout history to serve its (often sinister) purposes.

Pabst, who believes he has been dealt an unfair hand, is in reality also a victim of his own moral blindness. His craftsmanship behind the camera offers him no safeguard when the hell he has helped create makes knocks at his door. Art that is devoid of courage is perhaps the most worthless of all.

Also read:

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• International Booker shortlist: Life after the revolution in ‘The Nights are Quiet in Tehran’

• International Booker shortlist: The cost of living as a free woman in ‘She Who Remains’

• International Booker shortlist: Ghostly men and ghosts of men in ‘On Earth As It Is Beneath’

The Director, Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Benjamin Ross, Riverrun.