The Director, by Daniel Kehlman, is a New York Times top five fiction books of 2025

This fascinating historical novel follows the later career of G.W. Pabst, the brilliant German film director who created Pandora’s Box and the Threepenny Opera, and who made both Garbo and Louise Brooks world famous. A few years before World War II, Pabst and his wife and son settle in Hollywood, then in Paris, before he is pressured to return to Austria where his aging mother lives, on the eve of the invasion of Poland. We observe him and his family as they each learn to live in the Third Reich’s reality of strongmen, implicit threats and ethical choices. Pabst remains a director first and foremost, attempting to imprint his visual style to any film he may find himself forced to make. He faces the prospect of compromising every creative principle he once held.  Timely and complex, and often quite funny, this is a portrait of one man’s test of integrity in an increasing fracturing world.  You must register to participate.