Global bestselling author
Daniel Kehlmann’s new book
The Director is “powerful and timely” (Jonathan Lemire for
MSNBC'S Morning Joe) and “nothing short of brilliant” (
Wall Street Journal).
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.
When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator; and, today, it is “a call to strengthen our spines” (
New York Review of Books).
Kehlmann will be in conversation about the book with Rick Salomon, a co-founder of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, Senior Fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Renew Democracy Initiative.