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From "one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today" (Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize–winning author), a visionary tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich.
An artist's life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.
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.
International Booker Prize 2026 longlist
...f men whose bonds break down in ways both hard to comprehend and impossible to look away from." Buy from Bookshop.org https://www.awin1.com/cread.php The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin: "An artist's life and a pact with the devil: this is a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver sc...
-Anne_Glasgow
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (1/29/2026)
The Director by Daniel Kehlmann.
-Judi_Ross
"As one of Pabst's colleagues puts it to him, '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.' It's a searing look at the mechanics of complicity." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[Kehlmann] constructs a dark account of one man's descent into fascist complicity, a path strewn with surrealistic scenarios and chilling self-justifications in favor of art…Kehlmann's novel is purposefully unnerving and timely." —Booklist (starred review)
"An incomparably accomplished and inventive piece of fiction by one of the most intelligent novelists at work today." —Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex
"Daniel Kehlmann, the finest German writer of his generation, takes on the life of the eminent film director G.W. Pabst to weave a tragicomic historical fantasia that stretches from Hollywood to Nazi Germany, from Garbo to Goebbels, to show how even a great artist can make, and be unmade by, moral compromises with evil. A dazzling performance and a real page turner." —Salman Rushdie, author of Knife
This information about The Director was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Michael Lionstar
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975. His novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. He currently lives in Berlin and New York.
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