Dreiturm Castle, Tillmitsch, Styria

Dreiturm Castle in rural Styria during the Nazi era is the novel’s central domestic setting, where Pabst’s family becomes physically and psychologically trapped. The decaying property and the caretaker Jerzabek’s rising authority turn home into a site of surveillance, humiliation, and coerced dependence. Because the castle houses film collaborators, guests, and local enforcers under one roof, it stages the book’s core tension between private life and public ideology, showing how complicity grows through daily routines rather than only through dramatic decisions.

Barrandov Studios, Prague

The film studios in wartime Prague, especially during the production of The Molander Case, function as a sealed world where art is made under imminent collapse. The setting forces Pabst and his crew to confront how aesthetic ambition can demand resources, bodies, and obedience that the political system supplies through violence. As air raids, evacuations, and shortages...