THE DIRECTOR, living life through extraordinary times demands a lot from an artist

THE DIRECTOR
DANIEL KEHLMANN (tr. Ross Benjamin)
Summit Books/S&S (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

2026 International Booker Prize shortlistee!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph. The Director shows what literature is capable of.

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My Review: Georg Wilhelm Pabst (25 August 1885 – 29 May 1967) lived an unlucky life. He was trapped in his native Europe for each of the World Wars fought there. His work...impressive stuff...is almost totally forgotten outside the small world of cinéastes. (Do you know anyone, apart from me, who's seen The Threepenny Opera and/or L'Atlantide?) We're treated here to a deep fictional dive into his inner workings. Given that he already knew Nazism was wrong, bad, and evil, and was trying to escape its miasma, his decision to collaborate with Goebbels in the propaganda machine seems inexcusable. In fact it was never forgiven. Not even his German-language film The Last Act (The Last Ten Days in English) bought him back his prior-to-collaboration esteem in spite of its honest treatment of Hitler's insanity at the end of the war.

What price security. It cost this security-seeker very dear. His only son was swallowed by the Hitler Youth because his father returned to see if he could care for his ailing mother. He is examined in this novel as only fiction is capable of examining an inner life. It's not the justifications and self-delusion that a memoir could bring to the table. It's the decisions he made writ plain and unadorned with the inevitable dishonesty of making excuses.

Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money. And that was why one only rarely made films, the rest of the time one talked to people and went out to lunch and wrote letters and gave lectures and tried to convince someone. And again and again one secretly wondered when all the people working on a film together would realize that they could do it without a director too, if only they agreed. Because the actors could certainly act on their own, the camera operator could easily film them, the architect could build a stage for them, and the editor could select and assemble the best footage afterward. But because everyone simply believed that a director was necessary, the whole thing was not undertaken without a director.

I don't think a man who could meet with and work for Nazis could've brought himself to conjure those honest, self-deprecating words.

I'm new to Kehlmann's work. This kind of spotlight is not flattering to its object. It can easily become a hatchet-job or hagiography; each is distorted and ultimately dishonest. In Author Kehlmann's choice of fictionalizing events and people very close to precisely aligned with the historical record, he puts the dishonesty and ambiguity on whom it belongs: Pabst. It's just...disturbing, and in a way a biography, a memoir would not be because Author Kehlmann clearly knows the facts and has an opinion yet makes us, the audience, take in our responses without the comfort of distancing our responses.

Would any one of the readers of this book behaved differently than Pabst? The fictional framing strips away the fig-leaf of "objectivity" so we must sit in the decisive moments with Pabst. Are you sure your illusion of yourself as a resister is accurate? Are you sure your judgment of what you'll need to give up is accurate? Are you sure you can be in, but not of, the system you scorn and abhor?

Translator Ross Benjamin did a good enough job rendering the read into English that I was a bit surprised to realize it was a translation. That is, to me, a very high compliment, or intended as one at least. It is a feat of writing to fictionalize someone who's famous (if you know who he is) in the light that emphasizes who he was; an equal feat to take that unusual choice to a very high level of craft in a different language. Kudos to both artists for a job well done.

Why, if I'm praising this work so highly and with such fervor, am I not offering all five stars? Because at no time was I transported into a different awareness, a space of timeless immanence such as I was by Evil Genius or The Remembered Soldier. It's all too rare, that removal from mundanity, so this is not a knock on the quality of the read. I'm impressed and I'm edified and I'm involved by this novel. It's at the top of the literary heap. It deserves its International Booker nomination. I'm not going to put in my pantheon but I'm going to urge it on you as a fascinating, timely, well-crafted story.

GIVE MY LOVE TO BERLIN, a story I love but a novel I don't

GIVE MY LOVE TO BERLIN
KATHERINE BRYANT
Walrus Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1927, the beautiful city of Berlin is the gay capitol of the world. Ruth, a performer at one of the nightclubs in the city, and her girlfriend, Tillie, are living their lives and enjoying the freedom of the Weimar Republic. They are surrounded by a chosen family that includes drag performers, transgender women, and the prominent physician, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Ruth, Tillie, and their best friends, James and Ernesto spend much of their time at the Institute for Sexual Science, the hub of the queer community in the twenties and early thirties.

As the '20s come to a close, Tillie watches her father, a prominent lawyer, as he becomes more entrenched with the Nazi Party. Working in his law office as his secretary, she meets prominent figures in the Nazi Party, including Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, and becomes increasingly concerned as time passes that there is much more at stake than just her relationship with Ruth, who is also Jewish.

Tillie becomes privy to the planning of rallies, the plans the Nazi party is making in order to ensure Nazi victories in major elections, and how the Nazis are taking over Germany one neighborhood at a time. The novel jumps between the twenties and thirties and the early nineties and a young woman named Thea. Thea is dealing with the onset of her grandmother's dementia, and discovers secrets hidden away that her grandmother never intended for her to uncover.

Alternating between Tillie's perspective during the '20s and '30s as the Weimar Republic slowly gives way to a dictatorship and Thea's perspective in the '90s as the secrets of her grandmother's history come to light, Give My Love to Berlin follows the lives of two gay couples—Tillie and Ruth, and their best friends, James and Ernesto—trying to navigate falling in love, thriving in their community, and coming to terms with the danger they are in just by being who they are.

The author wrote this book for several reasons, mainly because she had never heard of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, or his work and she did not know that Berlin had been such a huge part of gay culture. After the 2016 election, the author could see parallels between the vitriol for the queer community in many parts of the United States and the way queer people were being treated as the Nazis gained power, particularly in Berlin. Now, with all the anti-drag and anti-transgender legislation, it is more important than ever to tell these stories so we can keep them from repeating in the future.

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My Review: The reviews of this book on Goodreads are very divided. Many apparently Jewish reviewers seem to take exception to the author's inclusion of queer people as victims of the Holocaust. Many others seem to dislike the wooden prose. I'm in the latter camp. (Pardon the wordplay.)

It's a great idea for a book, one that would've come across better had it felt less like research notes made to fit...poorly...around fictional standards. It's not clear to me that all the plot points were thought through...why would a woman working for literal Nazis ever question a trans person feeling threatened anywhere at all?...so I was left with the idea that this story seized the author's imagination but didn't get the mulling time, or followed editorial guidance, to smooth some of the burrs on its edge.

I was utterly repelled by the amount of sexual violence, as I know I was expected to be; the response to it from every character seemed...off. One does not just seamlessly drop the horror of sexual violence. It's ordinary to mask the trauma as a survival mechanism, but this felt more like just being okay with it. Again, I think this is more about the author not taking enough time to think these issues through, or not having (or heeding) editorial feedback.

If the author ever revisits the story with a strong editorial eye, this could be a good, interesting, involving novel. As it is, this is not a great read. I'm disappointed and saddened to say it.

THE VANISHING SKY, home-front chronicle of German commonfolk & NAZI WIVES: The Women at the Top of Hitler's Germany, uppermost class' viewpoint

NAZI WIVES: The Women at the Top of Hitler's Germany
JAMES WYLLIE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Hess, Bormann—names synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margarete, Lina, Ilse and Gerda...

These are the women behind these infamous men—complex individuals with distinctive personalities who, as they fell under Hitler's spell, were drawn deeper and deeper into a perverse version of reality.

In Nazi Wives James Wyllie skilfully interweaves their stories, exploring their roles in detail for the first time against a backdrop of the rise and fall of Nazism and in the context of the aftermath, notable for the resolute lack of contrition from those wives who survived.

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My Review:

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail,
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

–Rudyard Kipling, "The Female of the Species"

We're not supposed to notice things like this in the time of "Believe Women"...yes, of course, if they're telling the truth, but always, always LISTEN to women with open minds...but the women in this book were not exemplars of twenty-first century womanhood's new (!) course. They were awful, racist, anti-semitic, and deeply spoiled people, as one would expect.

Ilse, Carin, Emmy, Gerda, Eva, Margaret, Lina, and Magda married men who ran the worst, most heinous government of the twentieth century. They knew, either from direct evidence or from the unavoidable lessons of sheer propinquity, the kind of men they were married to, and they acquiesced at the minimum and ably assisted in other cases (thinking of Magda Goebbels most especially) in forming and maintaining the ethos of the Reich.

Not one of the women who survived WWII ever expressed regret or remorse for her, or her husband's, actions. These women were prototypical, stereotypical Mean Girls. They reveled in their luxurious lifestyle, they shut down whatever empathy they possessed when confronted with anything that challenged their world, and most especially in the case of Magda Goebbels (who went so far as to murder her children when defeat was inevitable) showed no obvious signs of possessing a conscience.

That made the read kind of revolting on some levels and deeply upsetting on others. I wasn't aware of the facts presented by Author Wyllie. In many ways I wish I still wasn't! But the truth is, the authorial choice to refer to the men by their surnames and the women only by their first names made teasing apart which horrible woman was attached to what vile man more complicated than it needed to be. This is also a function of the organizational principle used, that of dealing with the entire pack of wolves as a whole. I found myself flipping around, looking to connect (eg, Gerda Bormann's, the most often) strands. Gerda was far and away the woman I found least interesting, coming across to me as a Stepford wife without much to recommend her in either positive or negative ways.

All that said, the organizational longueurs are the source of the rating but the informational content earns the author and the book my recommendation. I'm glad someone has, at long last, foregrounded the role that women played in the Third Reich, at the highest levels, in setting, supporting, and even exemplifying the worst of an awful regime.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE VANISHING SKY
L. ANNETTE BINDER
Bloomsbury USA (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Warlight and The Invisible Bridge, an intimate, harrowing story about a family of German citizens during World War II.

In 1945, as the war in Germany nears its violent end, the Huber family is not yet free of its dangers or its insidious demands. Etta, a mother from a small, rural town, has two sons serving their home country: her elder, Max, on the Eastern front, and her younger, Georg, at a school for Hitler Youth. When Max returns from the front, Etta quickly realizes that something is not right-he is thin, almost ghostly, and behaving very strangely. Etta strives to protect him from the Nazi rule, even as her husband, Josef, becomes more nationalistic and impervious to Max's condition. Meanwhile, miles away, her younger son Georg has taken his fate into his own hands, deserting his young class of battle-bound soldiers to set off on a long and perilous journey home.

The Vanishing Sky is a World War II novel as seen through a German lens, a story of the irreparable damage of war on the home front, and one family's participation-involuntary, unseen, or direct-in a dangerous regime. Drawing inspiration from her own father's time in the Hitler Youth, L. Annette Binder has crafted a spellbinding novel about the daring choices we make for country and for family.

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My Review: First, read this:

“You’ve got to do the right thing. You’ve got to use your mind,” she said. “That’s what the real God wants. People should do the right thing but they never do.”

–and–

They should have hung their heads, but people didn’t feel shame anymore. They lied and after a while they believed the lies they told, and this is how it went.

–and–

“He’s not coming back,” Ushi pushed her cup aside. “People leave and they don’t come back. My Jens is gone and my Jürgen, too.” Her voice quavered. “They’ve wrecked the world, these men, and still they’re not done. They’d take the sky if they could. They’d take the air we breathe, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

The Stockholm Syndrome of an entire nation, an entire class of people, is the shocking subject of this novel based on the facts as the author knows them surrounding her own family's WWII experience.

Etta Huber is frantic, as what wife of a dementia-suffering husband (Josef) trying to get into the war wouldn't be; as what mother of a returned soldier (Max) suffering from what we would call PTSD wouldn't be; as what loving, protective mother of a young teenager (Georg) caught up in a vision of glamour obfuscating the war's reality wouldn't be. The situation with Max is, of course, the one she's got the most emotional room for. No sane recruiter would take her retired-schoolteacher husband whose grasp of reality is deficient to wield a weapon, surely? Max, the bright and shining boy who left, is gone forever and here in his place is...a burden, frankly. In a time when the food-growing region the Hubers live in is getting less and less well-fed, another mouth isn't a joy...then Georg is sent to the Eastern front, which destroyed his brother Max, to dig defenses in what everyone knows is a vain effort to stop Allied tanks attcking German troops.

Etta isn't coping well with any of this. What she doesn't know is that she's got a stronger boy in Georg than she thought. He's been unable to believe the nonsense he's been fed in the Hitler Youth. He's fallen in love with one of the other boys, which (since this is simply unthinkable and impossible for Hitler Youths) has formed a strong resistant core in him. He ends up deserting before the boys get to the front, and walks home. Through war-torn Germany. On his own.

Max's horrors are always with him, and his behaviors worry his Mutti. Of course, he was always the odd kid:

Even when he was little Max had a way of fixing his eyes on her and asking questions that had no easy answers or no answers at all. "Mutti?" he'd asked her once when he was only six, "where do birds go to die? I see birds every day and never a dead one. Where do they go then?" and Etta could only shake her head at her boy, who thought of such things.

"They go someplace nice," she told him, "where it's quiet and the cats won't find them and the wolves and foxes neither. That's why we don't see them. They go to bird heaven." He looked at her a long while and then he nodded, satisfied with her response. It made sense that birds could find their way to heaven. They flew beneath it every day. It would only take a breeze to bear them up and through the gates, only a breeze and they were gone.

Much like Max himself disappears, vanishes from his loving mother's ability to care for him...forever. It's one of many heartbreaks in Etta's world.

What a world it was. She, and her other bog-standard German neighbors, have noticed there are people disappearing. Most of them simply note this fact without a lot of interest, but note it they do. The rare German whose instinct is to help in whatever small way she can the disappearing ones, is fighting a losing battle as we-the-readers know. But the fact is no one, inside or outside Germany, knew what was going on in the camps where the disappeared went. It wasn't good...but it was factually unknown until after the war. This novel is set *during* the war, and the author presents the unease of the people with the ever-increasing evidence of their leadership's lies and obfuscations.

In the end, what earned this book a mere shade over three stars was its overly slow pace. Many things were dwelt on that could've been done away with or been less of a focus. The voices of the Germans are, on the other hand, exactly how the German folk I knew in my life sounded: Formal, deliberate, and slightly obscured behind any words they did say. This doesn't mean it was always fun to read their ponderous utterances. But it was the purpose of the author to tell a family story. I expected it to have more of that feel to it. Instead it became a deeply personal historical account of the agonies of your way of life's death.