The Director
by Daniel Kehlmann
"The Director is one of the most unsettling novels I've read in years—Kehlmann makes Pabst's slow capitulation feel completely inevitable, and that's what makes it so devastating."
Synopsis
G.W. Pabst was one of cinema's towering figures—a director of international renown who had the foresight to flee Europe when the Nazis seized power, landing in Hollywood with his reputation intact and his future seemingly secure. But under the California sun, the world-famous director finds himself invisible. Even Greta Garbo, the actress whose career he helped build, cannot restore what he has lost.
When word arrives that his elderly mother is gravely ill, Pabst returns to Austria—now renamed Ostmark under Nazi rule—intending to stay only briefly. He doesn't leave. And when Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propagand
