Reading guide: The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin

When the Nazis seize power in the 1930s, G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors, is filming in France. To escape the horrors unfolding in Europe, he flees to Hollywood. But under the dazzling California sun, the world-famous director suddenly seems like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, whom he made famous, can help him.    

When Pabst receives word that his elderly mother is ailing, he feels compelled to head back to his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife and their young son are confronted with the barbaric nature of the Nazi regime. 

Then the minister of propaganda in Berlin wants the film genius. He won’t take no for an answer and makes big promises. 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. 

The Director was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2026. 

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich and lives in Vienna, Berlin and New York. His novels include: Measuring the World, Me & Kaminski, Fame, F, You Should Have Left and Tyll. He has won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Doderer Prize, The Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize.  

Tyll, in a translation by Ross Benjamin, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020. Measuring the World was translated into more than 40 languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. The Director is his 14th novel. 

‘In The Director, Daniel Kehlmann performs a literary panning shot over the career of real-life filmmaker G. W. Pabst and charts the ways in which Nazi ideology leaked into the arts during Europe’s occupation. Where is the line between survival and collaboration? And can art survive the moral bankruptcy of its makers?  

‘It’s hard to imagine any writer tackling such hefty themes with lightness, yet Kehlmann does just this, writing compassionately, humorously and unsparingly from the perspectives of his complex characters, guiding the reader through the moral maze. Translator Ross Benjamin writes each shifting voice and set-up with the nuance they demand in a juggling act of wit and gravity that shouldn’t look this easy. Deeply intelligent, ambitiously structured and unputdownable.’ 

‘The initial spark was film: the strange moral glamour of the medium, and the way it can make compromise look like professionalism. Pabst’s life offered me an entrance into a dictatorship from the angle of someone returning from ‘a free country’ and learning the rules as he goes.    

‘I wasn’t interested in the monstrous villains – others have written the necessary books about them – but in the everyday complicities: the small workplace bargains, the club meetings, the casual blindness. And then there was the delicious novelistic temptation of a vanished film: to ‘shoot’ it on paper, and let the reader watch.’ 

Read the full interview

The book is set, for the most part, during the 1930s and 40s. During that tumultuous period, we witness G.W. Pabst experience some extreme highs and lows. We get to know him not just as a film director but also as a son, husband, father and friend. How did your feelings about Pabst shift over the course of the novel and as his circumstances changed? 

In an interview with the Booker Prizes, author Daniel Kehlmann said he was interested in portraying ‘everyday complicities: the small workplace bargains, the club meetings, the casual blindness’, while translator Ross Benjamin said The Director explores ‘how complicity happens – not in one grand betrayal, but through a series of smaller moves’. How complicit with the Nazi regime do you think Pabst is? Is there a specific moment when he becomes morally compromised in your view? 

Kehlmann has also talked about ‘the delicious novelistic temptation of a vanished film: to “shoot” it on paper, and let the reader watch’. What did you think of the language used in the filming scenes? Could you picture the different movies as they were being shot? 

Benjamin has said, ‘As a reader and translator, I was particularly drawn to the mix of propulsion and unease, nightmare and slapstick, evil and absurdity, history and hallucination.’ Did you enjoy these aspects of the novel, too? What kind of atmosphere do Kehlmann and Benjamin ultimately create? 

The International Booker Prize 2026 judges said, ‘To employ sparklingly comic writing to tell such a dark story is an audacious and yet fantastically successful achievement.’ Do you agree? What impact does humour have within the novel? 

In an ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of the book, Kehlmann says, ‘Although this novel is largely inspired by the life stories of the historical G.W. Pabst and his family, it is a work of fiction; for instance, there was no son named Jakob.’ How do you feel about the mixing up of the real and the fictional? Did you discover anything new about the Nazi period from reading this book? 

The novel is split into three parts, ‘Outside’, ‘Inside’ and ‘After’, and it’s written from multiple viewpoints. It’s framed by an incident involving Franz Wilzek some years after Pabst’s death. What did you think of the structure of the novel? Did you like the way it begins and ends? How did your feelings about Franz change, considering his behaviour as an old man?