Daniel Kehlmann: Lichtspiel / The Director (a novel)

Daniel Kehlmann: Lichtspiel / The Director. Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 10 Oct 2023.

Daniel Kehlmann: Ohjaaja / Lichtspiel. Helsinki: Siltala, 2025. Finnish translation by Tuulia Tipa.

A book presentation and discussion organized by Goethe-Institut Finland.

Participants: Tuulia Tipa (translator), Antti Alanen (film historian), Jukka Koskelainen (author, translator).

Hosted by: Lena Kingelin (Goethe-Institut). In the presence of: Tapio Riihimäki (National Audiovisual Institute, promoting the G. W. Pabst retrospective at Kino Regina).

Saarikoskimatto, Central Library Oodi, Töölönlahdenkatu 4, 00100 Helsinki, 18 Nov 2025.

Daniel Kehlmann's acclaimed novel Lichtspiel / The Director has been published into Finnish in an outstanding translation by Tuulia Tipa, known to pursue challenging projects with devotion.

Lichtspiel is topical. In 1933, two thousand German film artists and professionals were banished from the industry by the Nazi administration. They went into exile in France, England and Hollywood.

This year, a similar threat of authoritarian oppression is growing in the United States. Kehlmann evokes the ubiquitous sense of menace in a dictatorship. Little hints such as "it could get worse" carry existential dread.

G. W. Pabst was already abroad when Hitler took power. He was filming in France and stayed there. He visited also Burbank, invited by Warner Bros., a co-producer of his Brecht-Weill The Threepenny Opera adaptation. Although collaboration between Pabst and the gritty WB does not sound theoretically impossible (Warner excelled both in social issue movies and hard-boiled musicals), clashes in screenwriting, casting and editing were insurmountable. 

After finishing A Modern Hero (a film better than its reputation), Pabst continued filming in France until 1939. His native Austria had ceased to exist since the Anschluss. Armed with US passports and tickets to America, the Pabst family paid a final visit to Georg Wilhelm's widowed mother in their Steiermark castle. Right then the Second World War broke out, and the ways out were blocked. Later also traffic through Italy was blocked. Determined to pursue a Hollywood career, Pabst was trapped.

Finally, he directed two movies under the Nazi administration for Bavaria Filmkunst in Munich-Geiselgasteig: Komödianten and Paracelsus. They are interesting and decent films, with accents defying Nazi ideology. Nevertheless, the films were tarnished, not because of what they were but because of the context of exhibition.

During my preparation for today's discussion I understood the Goebbels genius in Nazi propaganda. Only 1-3 per cent of the feature-length fiction movies during his reign were Nazi propaganda. Yet, all promoted the Nazi cause. How come? Because the screenings started with Nazi newsreels with inflammatory militarist and antisemitic content. Good films locked audiences which were exposed to those brilliantly crafted newsreels. As far as I know (to be confirmed), the newsreels were obligatory: you could not enter the screening without seeing them first.

G. W. Pabst hated Nazism and after the war directed an anti-Nazi trilogy: Der Prozess / The Trial (a film about the persecution Jews in the 1880s, starring the great Jewish actor Ernst Deutsch, returning from exile), Der letzte Akt / Hitler: The Last Ten Days (the first German-language film about Adolf Hitler, telling the same story as Der Untergang / Downfall much later) and Es geschah am 20. Juli / It Happened on July 20th, the story of the Stauffenberg conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, later covered by Tom Cruise in Valkyrie).

Pabst never lost his talent, but after the Weimar Republic he never again found such a sympathetic cultural ambience. He always loved Germany, its humanistic and generous tradition. Had he made it back to Hollywood, he might have had to struggle for years but maybe accomplished a career similar to Douglas Sirk or Fritz Lang. Or Michael Curtiz. It is possible to imagine Pabst as a director of Casablanca for Warner Bros. Bad command of English did not prevent Curtiz from success. Neither should that have been the case with Pabst.

...

We discussed the question of bio-fiction.

Having read the publicity blurbs (full of glaring errors and misunderstandings about real people) I had decided not to read the novel, but because of the Goethe-Institut invitation I did. The English and Finnish blurbs are based on the Rowohlt original.

Daniel Kehlmann writes fiction. Artistic freedom is unlimited. But I question Kehlmann's decision to use names of real people. Kehlmann inserts prominent distortions to telegraph that this is fiction. There are also surreal exaggerations to underline this.

I blame Rowohlt publicity for promoting the novel as factual. It is not. You cannot trust anything in it. Basic premises and important details have been altered. Rowohlt should announce clearly that this is not a book about real people and the facts are altered.

I sympathize for the Pabst family who are justified to feel offense for defamation and smear. Not so much because of the novel, although there are dog whistles and insinuations which have been spelled out in the publicity blurbs and reviews in which fiction replaces fact.

To sum up: I admire Kehlmann's account of life under a dictatorship. But because he uses real names and alters everything, I feel a headache on every page. I have been in the presence people whose names appear in the novel, including Fred Zinnemann and Billy Wilder. Nothing about them in the book makes factual sense. And it does not make sense to try to make sense, because this is fiction.

There are excellent books on G. W. Pabst, such as The Films of G. W. Pabst edited by Erich Rentschler and the mighty G. W. Pabst volume published at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival, edited by Wolfgang Jacobsen. They are about is films. Solid compact biographical texts have been written by Hans Michael Bock for the Berlin Film Festival volume and for CineGraph.

G. W. Pabst and Robert Bresson belong to the rare giants of film art of whom no biography has yet been written. Would Olaf Möller write the definitive Pabst biography?