On Daniel Kehlmann's LICHTSPIEL

Best-selling German novelist Daniel Kehlmann has written a cinematic tour de force, a surreal and atmospheric reimagining of the anguished and peripatetic later life of legendary Austrian film director G.W. Pabst. The book's title is aptly chosen:
"Lichtspiel" is an old-fashioned word for "film" that also refers to a "play of light." An English language translation of the novel is scheduled for publication around summer 2025 by Quercus in the UK and Summit Books in the US and Canada.

Kehlmann's novels and plays have won numerous prizes. His novel Tyll (2017), based in part on folkloric tales about a German jester during the Thirty Years' War, was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize and is slated to be made into a Netflix series; Measuring the World (2005), a huge literary success, has been translated into more than forty languages and was made into a (3D!) film by director Detlev Buck in 2012. Its unlikely subject is the early 19th-century relationship between explorer/world traveler Alexander von Humboldt and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Kehlmann frequently explores the perspectives of creative people who understand the world in very different ways. Even though he writes about historic German figures who might seem obscure to general audiences, his novels are highly readable – and often comedic – page-turners.

In Lichtspiel, we join Georg Wilhelm Pabst, groundbreaking director of classic films such as Joyless Street, Pandora's Box, Diary of a Lost Girl and The Threepenny Opera, at a Hollywood party in 1933. He and his wife Trude mingle there with the many expatriates who have fled from the increasingly oppressive working environment in Europe. But Pabst has limited English – his misunderstandings are hilarious – and the only work he's offered in Hollywood are third-rate projects that he must accept to pay the bills. Indeed, Hollywood in the 1930s isn't Europe in the 1920s; Pabst is not a known quantity here, and the superficial film types he meets at garden parties always confuse him with Lang or Murnau. Lurking at the edge of sun- dappled gatherings, and seemingly everywhere the Pabsts go, is a shadowy German-speaking character whose function is mysterious. Apparently, a minder from Berlin, he alludes relentlessly to the great films Pabst could make if only he will return to the Fatherland, where Propaganda Minister Goebbels looks forward to meeting his every need.

And Pabst is soon in very great need indeed, when he receives a cable from his aging mother back in Austria. Still living in Pabst's decrepit old villa, where she is seen to by odious caretaker Jerzabek and his wife, the old lady claims to be very ill. Against Trude's better instincts, Pabst hustles his family back across the Atlantic so he can get his mother out of danger – just in time for Austria to be occupied by the Nazis.

Though its themes are memory and forgetting, reality versus dreams, Lichtspiel is highly filmic. Pabst sees the world through vividly imagined scenarios yet is sadly oblivious to what's happening around him. An "actor whisperer" and editor par excellence who has also lived and worked in France, the continental maestro never fails to greet a lady with a kiss on the hand. The only emotions he cannot read are his wife's.

Kehlmann strikingly conveys the desperation and confusion of a man forced to make a Faustian bargain to keep his career – his existence – and his family afloat. It is often assumed that artists who continued working in Germany under the Nazis were sympathetic to the regime: Kehlmann reminds us that a life can never be rendered in simple black and white. In a truly terrifying and hallucinatory scene, panicky Pabst is summoned by Goebbels to the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin, a colossal building with infinite corridors. Is the director seeing visions? Do characters disappear and reappear through different doors? The Minister assures him that if he continues making good German films for the Reich, his mother will receive a spot in an excellent care home, and Pabst's every wish will be granted.

Lichtspiel's cast of luminaries includes Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, Fred Zinnemann, Fritz Lang, Werner Krauss, Leni Riefenstahl, and, hilariously, P.G. Wodehouse. In a highly entertaining chapter that takes place at the premiere of Pabst's Paracelsus (1943), minders parade the celebrated British humorist, who is stuck in the Reich like the Pabsts, in front of the cameras. Kehlmann describes this event entirely in Wodehouse's voice – certainly even more challenging when you're writing in German.

Pabst's desperation to continue filming at the Nazi-occupied Barrandov studio in Prague in 1945 is palpable. The film he's been assigned is The Molander Case (Der Fall Molander), a frothy piece of nonsense about a stolen violin. The Russian army is closing in, the city is consumed by violent explosions… and prisoners are still being brought in from concentration camps to act as extras. Actor Paul Wegener wonders: "Don't you find it strange, Pabst, that we're making a film like this during an apocalypse? This kind of...artwork?" To which Pabst replies: "The times are always strange. Art is always inappropriate, always unnecessary when it's created. And later, when you look back, it's the only thing that was important (author's translation, p. 366)."

Among Daniel Kehlmann's recent projects are wildly inventive scripts for Kafka, a strange and wonderful prime-time series for German public television which is based on Reiner Stach's biography. As with Lichtspiel, the series' surrealistic visual style evokes the creative workings of its protagonist's mind.

Daniel Kehlmann writes ripping good yarns; this one is highly recommended.

Lichtspiel
by Daniel Kehlmann
Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 2023
471 pp. Hardcover: €26.00