The following version of this book was used to create this guide: Kehlmann, Daniel. The Director. Summit Books, 2025.

Franz Wilzek, an elderly former film worker living in the Abendruh Sanatorium, is driven to a television studio in Vienna to speak about his past. He is nervous and resentful, yet flattered that someone still wants his memories. On air, the host questions him about the great director G. W. Pabst and about a production from the final months of the war in Prague, The Molander Case, a film that was never completed in the public record and has become a legend. Wilzek tries to shape his story, but he also senses that the program wants an easy narrative rather than the confusion and fear he remembers.

The story then turns back to the years before the war, when Pabst’s reputation reaches far beyond the German-speaking world and his circle includes actors, producers, and assistants whose careers depend on his decisions. In Paris, people displaced by the new regime watch Europe harden into hostility and weigh what survival will demand. Pabst, who has spent time working abroad, believes he can manage events by staying mobile and keeping his work separate from politics.

After the annexation of Austria, Pabst returns to his estate, Dreiturm Castle, with his wife, Trude, and their teenage son, Jakob, in part to satisfy and care for his aging mother, Erika. Pabst intends the stay to be temporary, a brief visit before he can leave again. Instead, they find themselves under the control of their caretaker, Karl Jerzabek, a zealous local Nazi who delights in showing his new authority. Jerzabek’s constant presence, crude insinuations, and open antisemitism make Trude feel watched and endangered, and Erika’s confusion leaves the family without a stable center. Pabst tries to reassert his role as master of the house, but he is unsettled by how quickly deference has turned into coercion.

Pabst and Trude plan to get Erika into proper care and then return to safety outside the Reich, yet each attempt to act is met with obstacles. An accident in the castle library leaves Pabst injured and vulnerable, and as Germany expands the war, borders close and travel becomes impossible. The family’s isolation deepens, and even ordinary movement feels like a privilege that can be taken away. Jakob, who once delights in drawing and observation, is pulled into the new school environment, where ideology presses itself into lessons, friendships, and public rituals. Trude watches her son absorb the language and excitement of belonging, and she fears the ways the regime offers purpose to the young.

A ministry official, Kuno Krämer, arrives at Dreiturm to deliver a message that is framed as an honor but carries an implied threat. The Propaganda Ministry expects Pabst to cooperate, and refusal would carry consequences. Pabst travels to Berlin and is brought into the orbit of the Propaganda Minister, who treats filmmaking as both art and weapon. In their meeting, admiration, intimidation, and theatricality blur together, leaving Pabst unsure whether he is being courted, tested, or trapped. What becomes clear is that Pabst’s fame makes him valuable to the regime, and that value can be used to bind him.

Pabst returns to work within the Reich’s film system. He tells himself that if he makes nonpolitical films and avoids open propaganda, he can preserve a private line he will not cross. Yet every production requires permits, money, and approvals that come from the same power he claims to resist. Trude is drawn into the practical labor of scripts, revisions, and set life, forced to manage the day to day while carrying the pain of her marriage, including Pabst’s long-ago attachment to the actress Louise Brooks. Meanwhile Jakob’s world narrows toward uniforms, slogans, and the pride of participating in something vast. The household becomes a place where affection and fear coexist, and where silence is often the safest response.

As the war worsens, shortages and suspicion spread through studios and crews. Pabst retreats to Dreiturm between assignments, where Jerzabek’s influence grows and the castle feels less like a refuge than a cage. People disappear, are arrested, or return altered, and Pabst learns to measure every conversation for risk. Jakob’s path leads him toward military service, and the family’s attempts to protect him fail against the machinery that claims young men as matter of course.

Late in the war, Pabst is assigned to direct The Molander Case, a supposedly harmless detective story adapted from a popular novel called The Star Violin. He initially despises the material and resents the demand that he deliver something quick, functional, and morale-boosting. But in a burst of energy that feels like both liberation and desperation, he remakes the project into something more ambitious, dictating revisions to Franz Wilzek and shaping the film around movement, longing, and human insufficiency. The production shifts to Prague’s Barrandov Studios, where Adolf Hänel, the production manager, fights for resources as budgets strain and the city sits under the threat of air raids and collapse. Actors and technicians arrive with exhaustion written into them, and even routine work is haunted by the knowledge that the world outside the set is disintegrating.

Filming becomes frantic as the front approaches. Shortages, bureaucratic interference, and bombing interrupts plans, and the sense of time running out dominates every decision. Pabst is increasingly obsessed with the idea that this film, made at the edge of disaster, might be the work that justifies his compromises. At the same time, he is tormented by the absence of Jakob, whose fate is unclear as the war consumes units and cities. When the end finally comes, the film is unfinished in the world, and its reels become objects of rumor and desire. In the chaos of retreat and occupation, people carry equipment and film canisters through streets and trains, and what is saved depends as much on accident as on loyalty.

After the collapse of the Reich, Pabst returns to a devastated country where alliances and reputations shift overnight. Former collaborators become polite, evasive, and eager to be seen as distant from their own pasts. Pabst is investigated and denounced, yet he uses charm, old connections, and the confusion of the moment to avoid the punishments others face. Jerzabek is arrested, but even his fate seems subject to the same muddled moral accounting. Pabst’s mind circles back again and again to the missing Molander reels and to the missing Jakob, as if recovering either could restore an order that no longer exists.

Trude pushes forward with a new project, Mysterious Depths, drawn from her own writing and set around a cave rescue. The shoot takes place in an Austria under occupation, with electricity rationing, flooded locations, and a crew that includes people returning from exile and people who survived by serving the old system. A young production manager, David Bass, and the older filmmaker Paul Levy represent different forms of survival, and their presence makes the postwar atmosphere feel both hopeful and poisoned. Pabst, however, works with a strange detachment, offering flashes of craft but seeming more present to his internal hauntings than to the film in front of him.

On the last day in the cave, Trude leads Pabst deeper to see prehistoric paintings. In the dim light, the images become a mirror for what they endured, and Trude recognizes in one figure the same brutal, crooked power she associates with Jerzabek and with the rule that shaped their lives. The marriage’s tenderness gives way to bitter clarity as they speak about harm, responsibility, and the way their son was formed and broken by the world they brought him into.

Years later, Jakob is alive but scarred, carrying the memories of armored warfare and the moral injuries of service. He travels to New York and meets an aging Louise Brooks, once Pabst’s star and lover, who lives in disorder and bitterness. Jakob brings relics connected to his father’s career and searches for a coherent picture of the man he loved and resented. Brooks refuses sentimental comfort, forcing Jakob to confront both Pabst’s choices and his own youthful enthusiasm for the regime that destroyed so much.

The novel returns to Franz Wilzek in the sanatorium. Furious that the television in the lounge has broken and no one saw his appearance, he rages at the cruelty of disappearing without witnesses. As his memory slips, fragments connect: a rucksack delivered by mistake, a heavy burden he kept for years, and a secret he postponed facing until it became impossible. Wilzek realizes what he has been carrying and what he has withheld, and he is left with the weight of the lost film and the lost chances to tell the truth before time, and his own mind, take it away.