Guilt, Authoritarianism, and Art: Timeless Truths in The Director
The Director is a disturbing but masterful presentation of how totalitarianism creeps into every aspect of life and corrupts it.
This is not a review. See why.
Context
The Director is a fictionalized account of the life and work of a real-life film director, G. W. Pabst. Raised in Austria, he fled when the Nazi Party began to gain popularity. In America, he struggles to get the kind of work he wants or the funds to work on the type of films he deems good. So he is delighted to be invited to direct a promising film in France, and he and his wife and son eagerly cross the Atlantic once again. But then the funding falls through, and worse: His elderly mother has fallen ill and needs him back in Austria, now called Ostmark and is under Nazi control. The Pabst family reluctantly return to the ancient castle in the woods where his mother resides with the caretaker and his family. It is a changed country, and they do not plan to stay long—but then war breaks out and they have no choice. The Ministry of Propaganda also pressures Pabst, using the threat of concentration camps, to make films for the new regime. After some resistance, he does, deciding that if he can at least make art it isn’t so bad. Eventually he is assigned to create an adaptation of a trite novel by a writer the regime favors and decides to make it full of symbolism, a masterpiece with layers. But ultimately, the film that might have been Pabst’s magnum opus goes missing, and he is never the same.
The novel is mostly in the third person, and we get bits from many different perspectives, mainly Pabst’s, his son Jakob’s, his wife Trude’s, his assistant Franz Wilzek’s, and a Nazi official named Krämer’s.
Key Ideas (Overall evaluation: good)
Complicity in atrocity drives people to blind themselves
Mindless, resentful thugs are as essential to a tyranny as its leaders
It is impossible to make honest art through the apparatus of an authoritarian state
Complicity in atrocity drives people to blind themselves
To avoid being sent to a concentration camp, many of the characters in the novel become complicit in the Nazi regime and its atrocities. Not only do many of them accept state money for their projects, the authorities expect other shows of loyalty, such as performing the Nazi salute and joining community activities. For instance, Trude joins a politically correct book club and Jakob the Hitler Youth. Pabst, by his very presence in Austria rather than abroad with many of his colleagues, is presented as endorsing the regime. Complicity affects each character differently, but it does affect them all. Pabst buries himself in his work. Trude becomes an alcoholic. Jakob develops a split personality; “When you can’t do something and at the same time have no choice but to do it, there’s only one solution: have someone else do it. Someone who looks like you and who uses your body. . . “ (194). Ultimately, he is unable to continue doing what he loves as a result of his participation in the Hitler Youth.
Pabst’s assistant Franz struggles very hard with what Orwell called doublethink, and ultimately it snaps his mind. We first see this when Pabst wants to add a scene about collective madness and its infectious nature to a comedy they’re working on; Wilzek notes that this could be seen as an allusion (to Nazism), and everyone around him subtly reminds him not to speak about such things aloud. He begins to suppress such knowledge in his own mind. In a more severe instance when doublethink would be required for continued survival in that regime, we learn that “Franz realized that he didn’t want to know what he knew, so much so that his thoughts had ceased. Where he usually talked to himself in his head, there was only a dull silence” (267). Here we have the thought-killing nature of censorship at work in real time, for as Orwell put it, “Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.”1 And so it is with poor Franz; we learn at the beginning that his later years are spent in an asylum, barely able to think at all. The Nazis themselves bear the responsibility for the terrible positions these people were put in, but this novel asks us to consider the psychological turmoil of those who could avoid being put in a camp by making certain choices that in some way enabled the regime—showing clearly that nothing the regime does is done without force, which necessarily produces a variety of harms.
Mindless, resentful thugs are as essential to a tyranny as its leaders
This novel contains a few symbolic characters and a few deeply disturbing ones, but none fit both descriptions better than the caretaker of Pabst’s old castle, Jerzabek, and his family. For years, they had been ideal employees, taking care of the castle and Pabst’s mother without complaint. But when the Nazis took over, Jerzabek joined the Party and their tune changed. They became resentful and sarcastic. When Pabst, Trude, and Jakob return to live with them, they become outright insolent and neglectful of their jobs. Jerzabek’s daughters physically harm Jakob, while Trude is left to do most of the housework herself. The Pabsts live in fear of the Jerzabeks, who might report anything they perceive as less than politically correct to their superiors. This, of course, is precisely the atmosphere the Nazis aimed for—one in which people do not speak their minds unless their thoughts are strictly sympathetic to the Party, and the effect snowballs because all anyone hears is sentiments that fall within the Party line, so those critical of the regime don’t know whom to trust and people think public support for the Party is stronger than it is.
Kehlmann portrays this atmosphere well, but it is not his target; within the castle, what he is really showing is the archetype Jerzabek represents. Under an authoritarian regime, ignorant brutes can rise while those who are rational, creative, and productive get passed over or are coerced into silence. Jerzabek is the former type, and Trude realizes at the end that “It wasn’t really Hitler who ruled. Not Goebbels or Göring or any of them. It was always him—meaning Jerzabek (314). Of course the top brass provide direction and inspiration, but day-to-day it is those with the small dictator mindset who take advantage of the mechanisms of dictatorship to terrorize their moral superiors. And such fervent supporters of a regime, too numerous for a Party to recruit individually, are vital for its survival. As Hannah Arendt put it, behind the brutality of the Nazi supporters, “there often lay a deep hatred and resentment against all those who were socially, intellectually, or physically better off than themselves, and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams, were in their power.”2
It is impossible to make honest art through the apparatus of an authoritarian state
Although Pabst initially tries to avoid directing any films the Nazi government wants him to make, he is portrayed as having been easily cowed by others’ disapproval even under normal circumstances, and integrity is a muscle that atrophies if not exercised. Add to that the very real threats of the Nazis against his family, and he was easy prey. He tries to make the best of a bad situation and rather than fleeing (even once his mother dies), he focuses on trying to make films he thinks are good. He tells his assistant, “All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film. Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist” (270).
He is clearly rationalizing his decision; the film could have been made in another country, or in Austria at another time. The Nazi regime was not essential to it. And in order to get away with this rationalization, he must avoid the voice of his conscience, which is often embodied by his wife. On a walk in the woods so that they won’t be overheard, she argues they should leave, and he replies that she’s “only half right. Because all this will pass. But art remains.” She insists, saying “Even if that’s the case. Even if it remains, the. . . art. Doesn’t it remain soiled? Doesn’t it remain bloody and dirty?” (215). This is the crux of the matter. Art is not separate from its creators, and if it is to portray truth its creators must be free. Art sanctioned by such monsters as the Nazis can never have the authenticity that is a prerequisite for artistic greatness, because it is in the nature of totalitarianism that it touches every aspect of a person’s life and work. Ultimately, Pabst is unable to see the film he believes will be his magnum opus come to fruition. Kehlmann has created a fictional but hauntingly plausible explanation of what happened to a real film shot under the direction of the real G. W. Pabst.
The Vibe
To show the mental strain on the characters and the true nature of Jerzabek, the novel contains episodes that border on the surreal. This keeps the reader off-balance, which I personally did not enjoy, though I can appreciate that it serves a narrative purpose. The novel’s message is not obvious, its storyline is not perfectly linear, and it jumps in time abruptly. However, it was a satisfying read in that reflecting on it offered deeper emotional connection to the characters and intellectual stimulation in relating the themes to what I know about Nazism and tyranny.
Conclusion
The Director is a disturbing but masterful presentation of how totalitarianism creeps into every aspect of life and corrupts it. Through symbolic characters and chaotic glances into a few key characters’ psychologies, it reveals the way pressure can crack a well-meaning person’s mind and destroy what someone believes to be life-serving, such as a work of art. Complicity in tyranny, even on a small scale and even under coercion, ultimately destroys a person’s soul.
George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-prevention-of-literature/.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1973), 453.