Cherrypicker | Literature
Light with many, many shadows

In Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, one of the most famous directors of the Weimar Republic, sells his soul to the Nazis, albeit with comical contortions

The title of Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, Lichtspiel (moving picture, literally “light play”), begs for puns referring to the movies. “Great literary cinema” cheers Maren Ahring on NDR Kultur. “Master of editing” headlines Adam Soboczynski in DIE ZEIT. This is due, on the one hand, to the content: in this novel Kehlmann tells the life story of Austrian film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst. But, as a screenplay-tested writer, Kehlmann also has a talent for film writing. Most recently, he wrote the screenplay for the TV series Kafka in collaboration with David Schalko.

Lichtspiel consists of three sections of varying lengths: Outside, Inside and After, which refer both to Pabst’s life and to the Nazi era. The first section, comprising around 120 pages, is mainly set in the 1920s and 1930s, when Pabst – along with Fritz Lang, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, and Ernst Lubitsch – became one of the great film directors of the Weimar Republic. At the time the Nazis came to power, Pabst was shooting a film in France. He initially decided to stay there, but then went to the USA, where he made the film A Modern Hero in 1934, which flopped.

In the second and by far longest section, Kehlmann tells of the time when Pabst lived and worked under the Nazi dictatorship. He had travelled to Austria in 1939 to visit his mother, was unable to leave the country after the outbreak of the Second World War and subsequently came to terms with the Hitler regime. The final, almost forty-page section of the novel is like a closing credit and deals with Pabst’s life after the war.

Historic and fictional characters

The novel is framed in the first and last chapters by Franz Wilzek, a (fictitious) former assistant to Pabst, who now has dementia and lives in a retirement home. In the novel, Wilzek also assisted on Pabst’s last film, The Molander Case, which was shot during the Nazi era but remained unfinished and lost. After the war, Pabst was never able to come to terms with the loss. In Kehlmann’s work, the former star director is a shadow of his former self in the post-war period, always dreaming that his supposed masterpiece will reappear somewhere.

Plenty of historical figures like Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, Heinz Rühmann, Helmut Käutner, and Leni Riefenstahl make appearances in the novel. However, Kehlmann also invented quite a few characters. Yarns are spun to augment the historical background. Not only is the aforementioned Wilzek fictional, but also the Mephistophelean figure of Kuno Krämer, a member of Goebbels’ propaganda ministry who sponsors Pabst. In real life, Pabst also never had a son named Jakob, who succumbs to the fascination of Nazi ideology in the Hitler Youth. The fictional characters are accompanied by invented episodes that enrich the story, for example Kehlmann tells how the army knapsack with the Molander film canisters is accidentally swapped for a blacksmith’s army knapsack.

Sold soul, lost film canisters

A brilliant chapter describes the protagonist eating humble pie. To get back into the film business, the director, also known as “Red Pabst” because of his films critical of war and society, must journey to the centre of power to see Reich Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and repent. This visit consists of a surreal, almost Dadaist conversation. At first there is a long back and forth about who wants something from whom. Then Goebbels loses his patience and tells the director all that he can offer him, “for example concentration camps. Any time. No problem.” But he can also offer him something completely different: “Any budget, any actor, any film you want to make.” After more stammering and many interrupted sentences, Pabst finally delivers what Goebbels wants: he distances himself from his earlier works. He is immediately given the script for The Comedians, a film about Caroline Neuber, a famous actress of the 18th century, for which Pabst will receive an award for Best Director at the 1941 Biennale di Venezia.

Another superbly written scene depicts the filming of Riefenstahl’s movie Lowlands. The story takes place in the Pyrenees at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, but is filmed in the Alps. The shooting drags on, Pabst is meant to support the overburdened Riefenstahl, who also plays the leading role, with the direction of the movie. In Kehlmann’s story, Riefenstahl comes off well neither as a director nor as an actress. She is certainly not a moral authority: as Riefenstahl needs “southern” looking extras, she has Sinti and Roma forcibly recruited from the nearby Maxglan concentration camp. Even though Pabst feels uncomfortable when he finds out about this, he merely agrees with the assistant director who says, “There’s nothing we can do.”

Kehlmann tells Pabst’s life story with his typical humour. Time and again, Pabst is praised by his contemporaries for films that are not even his own, such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or that “great vampire film,” which of course refers to Murnau’s Nosferatu. In the end, Pabst is another example of an artist who sells his soul – albeit hesitantly and reluctantly – for the sake of art. By the end of the novel, Pabst has recovered neither his soul nor his lost film canisters.