Kommt, Geister
('Come, spectres')
Scenes from The Director
by Daniel Kehlmann
In the first ever of the now annual lectures on poetics at Frankfurt's Goethe University in 1959, Ingeborg Bachmann pleaded with her audience to not consider her too narrow-minded for insisting to focus on questions of guilt in art.
Alongside Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang, the director Georg Wilhelm Pabst is considered to be one of the giants of silent film in the Weimar Republic. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Pabst decided that he could no longer stay in Germany and attempted to gain a foothold in Hollywood – in vain. In 1939, the outbreak of the war surprised him during a visit to his mother in Austria and he was unable to return to the USA. At the behest of the minister of propaganda, he was soon shooting films in Germany again and made three movies for the Nazi regime.
Daniel Kehlmann's The Director focuses on another of Pabst's Nazi film projects, Der Fall Molander ('The Molander Case'), whose final edited version he was unable to complete before the end of the war; it has been considered lost ever since. The novel takes a closer look at this famous and at the same time tragic artist, who was convinced that his only duty was to art – until he was steamrollered by reality. With a keen eye and in a meticulously considered register, Kehlmann has composed a parable of artistic self-delusion and moral entanglement with a totalitarian regime, and explores the extent of an artist's responsibility, the limits of art and the seductiveness of power.
Ulrich Noethen brings to life the ambivalence of an era during which the boundaries between genius and adaptation, freedom and guilt, beauty and barbarism became dangerously blurred.
The actor trained in Stuttgart and has won numerous awards, including the Deutscher Filmpreis German film prize for his performance in Comedian Harmonists, the prestigious Goldene Kamera film and television award in the best German actor category and the Grimme-Preis television award, which he has won twice. He has most recently appeared in the literary film adaptations The German Lesson and Unterleuten: The Torn Village as well as the TV film Louis van Beethoven.
Dramatic rights: © Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Hamburg
