Art

Kehlmann shows that artistic craft can function as a moral sedative, letting Pabst experience political catastrophe as a problem of form rather than a problem of responsibility. Early in his career, Pabst treats editing as a lesson in controlled deception, explaining that if you “show a dog barking, followed immediately by a man falling down dead, and the dog killed the man with its yapping,” the audience will feel the invented causality as obvious (63). The example is comic, but it establishes how easily a sequence can replace an explanation, and it hints at the danger of trusting coherence more than truth. Pabst’s confidence grows from this logic, because it convinces him that mastery over images can stabilize a disordered world.

That habit follows him through every negotiation and every crisis. He learns to read people as raw material, like actors and sets, and he trains...