Regular readers expecting frequent reports of my profound insights have I’m afraid been disappointed over the past month; life does get away from one, doesn’t it? I still plan to write more about my very meaningful journey to Vienna in March, but I am also still thinking about it and trying to find a good structure for the writing. I think I’ve found it and I hope to get to it soon. At any rate, apologies to all, and I still think fondly of my new friends in Austria.
In the meantime I can recommend The Director, the new novel by Daniel Kehlmann and shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize. Lichtspiel, to give it its original German, Paul Celanian title, follows the great Austrian film director G.W. Pabst (1885-1967) from a brief exile in Hollywood in the 1930s through his return to Central Europe in 1939 with his wife and son (a fictional invention) to visit his ailing mother. He finds himself trapped through the war years and decides to work for the Third Reich, on films which he insists do not contribute to Nazi propaganda. The novel is a keen and often funny — not to mention timely — exploration of compromise and the artistic spirit (in one episode, Pabst acts as a co-director of a film by the spiky Leni Riefenstahl — yes, this film; in another, we’re treated to P.G. Wodehouse’s attendance at the Berlin premiere of Pabst’s Paracelsus in 1943), and I highly recommend it.
