The book is divided into three parts – outside inside, And Later, Simulating the Filmmaking Process: A Film’s Inception, Its Making, and Its Afterlife. Was that intentional?
Many references were deliberately inserted, including structural references to the film’s production. This is something that comes natural to you if you have a main character like Pabst, who was a great storyteller in his own right.
As a novelist, I’m interested in how the story you’re telling is taking shape. Therefore, to tell the story of a filmmaker from the 1920s, the German silent-film era, must have not only structural but also psychological implications. For example, when Pabst finds himself in tight, dense, and dangerous scenes, he imagines he is shooting a movie.
Despite being a fictionalized version, readers do not have access to Pabst’s interiority in the novel. Was the source material limited or did you intend not to delve into that territory?
No, that was completely intentional. Pabst, the historical figure, was an opaque man. But we have his notebooks and unpublished letters, which I have accessed from the archives. But there is not much internal reflection in them.
I could have easily invented more interiority, but I decided to portray him as a person unsure of his decisions. Someone who is not strong or empowered to reflect on oneself. It happens quite late in the book when he’s on set, not knowing what he wants, that he starts manipulating the actors, like all good directors in my experience. In that moment, we see Pabst as a completely different person. And that’s why he’s a great director.
In a way its interiority is expressed. So, it’s not like I’ve kept it hidden. I wanted my character to work well psychologically because he doesn’t have the capacity for self-reflection.
angela christlieb made a movie Pandora’s legacy (2024) with the help of Pabst’s grandson, Daniel. Have you seen it?
Yes I have. The film came out after my novel (in German), and I got in touch with Angela, and we talked about doing a show together, which sadly didn’t work out due to scheduling reasons. I think his film is really good, and he said he enjoyed reading my novel too.
While working on the book, did you come into contact with Pabst’s family?
No, I didn’t. This was a conscious decision as most of the material was already in the archives. Anyway, there is no one in the family who knows Pabst directly. On the other hand, I anticipated that they would not like a book on Pabst that depicted him as supportive of a dictatorship, and I did not want them to feel betrayed by me.
And what was their reaction when the book came out?
Obviously he was not happy. Mainly because I took fictional liberties, particularly concerning Pabst’s son in the novel.
There was a real son named Peter Pabst, and in my novel Jacob is born at the same time. So, they share some of the same dates, but Jacob is a fictional character. I had this note in a German language book that the chapter on the making of the film Molander, molander caseis fictional, so the family reached out to me and wanted me to insert an additional disclaimer about Pabst’s real son, which I was happy to add. So, yes, he didn’t like the book, but it was a polite conversation.
When his wife tells Trude Pabst that he is telling her a story about why he is in Austria, it makes the reader think about the tendency to rationalize decisions, about the tendency to make imaginary things seem harmonious within ourselves.
We do this all the time. The idea that someone like Pabst would do this in this situation in my novel is meant to show that this is not entirely his story. He was forced to make films. It’s not entirely his fault. This is not an outright lie. But that’s the spin of things. It is a fixed version of their life story, making it easier for them to see or describe.
And we do this all the time not only for moral reasons, but also sometimes when it becomes unbearable for us to think that major events in our lives are completely random or could have happened completely differently. This is a strange thing. Kundera puts it in his famous title, the unbearable lightness of existenceAn unbearable thought, the fact that everything in life could be different.
I think very few people will be able to survive and be fully aware of this fact. But I don’t know. Maybe there is no freedom in our life. But if so, everything could have turned out completely different. An unbearable lightness.
Given that you were writing about 1920s cinema. You had to get details like “a little spark can ignite the nitrate film” right. Please share your reference points for such details. Were you worried they’d be lost on readers?
It’s okay if it rubs off on the readers. I think you can take liberties with the lives of historical characters if it makes sense in your stories, because that’s what novels allow you to do, but you have to get the factual bits as accurate as possible.
Surprisingly, there was not much material readily available on the actual physical details of film production or film-editing. The Internet was also not helpful, especially with regard to film-editing. I am grateful to a great friend of mine, director Volker Schlöndorff (87), who started at a very young age. He helped me a lot. He pointed out mistakes in the early draft of the manuscript. Without their help, I would not have been able to get those facts right. So, you see, the Internet has its limitations.
Do you think authoritarian regimes convey messages for their own benefit in works of art? In that sense, what is the purpose of art?
It’s in the nature of art to be a little problematic. In criticism of the decision (1790), Immanuel Kant talks about how when you interact with an artwork, you can get its aesthetic idea, but you can never fully understand its creation.
If there’s a clear message you can get from an artwork, say, ‘No more wars’, then your work is done! For Kant, real art does not work like this. This works when you’ll never be able to tell where exactly this piece of art is telling me what to do. And if it’s really a great work of art, there’s always something more to it. It is incomplete. You don’t reach the end of it.
You might say it’s my German romanticism, but I like the idea. I find this to be a good explanation of why an artwork can have multiple messages as they are not all completely extractable because you have never finished a good work of art. And I think that’s the difference between a didactic novel and something like War and Peace, which also tells you that wars are bad but in a much more complex way.
Such works speak beyond time. Artists today also have to face the compromises Pabst made.
Yes, there is a relationship with time, especially with filmmaking, which is completely different from the dilemmas faced by painters 300 years ago. To make a movie you need a lot of money and resources, so the question of compromises that have to be made in the process is somewhat serious.
In addition, authoritarian states are very interested in films. They want to know how they are. Therefore, not only are artists tempted to compromise because they want resources, but authoritarian states are also more incentivized to attract artists to their side. However, Pabst did not make entirely promotional films. If you watch the two films he made in those years, this becomes quite clear. And they’re not bad movies at all, which adds to the complexity.
In order to properly understand the historical context, when writing the book I was conscious only of this special situation of Nazi Germany. Although I was being shaped by what was happening around me at the time, like in Russia, or during Trump’s first presidential term, I didn’t know whether my work would have contemporary relevance. But that was then, now I think it happens.
In PeacockThe reader meets Greta Garbo, whom Pabst discovered, and at the end, the description is as follows: “Sometimes in her dreams she was actually walking down the street and no one turned to look at her.” In the book, there is also a subliminal allusion to what effect the process of making art has on actors like Lewis Brooks.
That’s one of the reasons I wrote a book on a filmmaker because I was absolutely fascinated by the difference between these two actors. One was a huge star (Brooks), and the other was probably the biggest movie star of all time.
Garbo was so universally revered that it dissolved her identity. She was not just beautiful, she was a very skilled actress who was very selective in her choice of films. There was a mad energy in his acting. But that changed, when she didn’t look like her image in the movies, she didn’t want anyone to look at her. Being a real person, she couldn’t bear the real person. She just wanted to be the person on screen that everyone knew she was, hiding in a dark apartment waiting to die. It was shocking but also wonderful in storytelling.
What art can do to the artist, then, can be seen in the strange example of Lewis Brooks. Despite being so famous, when she returned to America from Europe, she suddenly stopped getting acting parts. There is no explanation for this. His life focused on how insecure an actor’s career path can be. She lived the rest of her life in extreme poverty. So, again, being a huge star like Garbo can take over your identity, or like Brooks it can take over for you in a minute.
For me, as a novelist, what was good was that I didn’t have to think too much about creating this conflict between the two because Pabst had worked with both of them. So, Pabst’s actual story made it natural for me to put both of them in the novel.
What do you have to say about the establishment being afraid of critics?
No one is as insecure as a dictator. It’s counterintuitive but dictators are very afraid of critics because their power is illegitimate, and they surround themselves with people who know this. They are afraid of these people. The less democratic a country is, the more nervous and insecure its rulers are. Even with regard to the smallest statement of criticism.
Nazi Germany is an extreme example of this. You obviously weren’t allowed to criticize the government, the Fuhrer, or the Nazi ideology, but you also weren’t allowed to criticize non-political movies or books because if you didn’t have anything good to say about them, that in itself was too much criticism of the government.
This extreme vulnerability is ridiculous. It’s almost like a joke. It feels like I’ve made something, but I haven’t. What we really learned from that dictatorship is that no one is as insecure and possibly afraid as the dictator.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. She can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
