The book is divided into three parts — Outside, Inside, and After, mimicking the process of moviemaking: a movie’s inception, its production and afterlife. Was that intentional?
Putting lots of references to moviemaking, including structural ones, was deliberate. It’s 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 the shape the story you’re telling is taking. So, to tell the story of a filmmaker from the 1920s, the German silent-movie era, should not only have the structural but also psychological influences. For example, when Pabst finds himself in tight, dense, and dangerous scenes, he imagines himself shooting a movie.
Despite being a fictionalised version, readers don’t have access to Pabst’s interiority in the novel. Was the source material limited or did you intend not to tread that territory?
No, that was totally on purpose. Pabst, the historical figure, was a rather opaque person. But we’ve his notebooks, and unpublished letters, which I accessed from the archives. But there isn’t much interior reflection in them.
I could’ve easily invented more interiority, but I decided to portray him as a man unsure of his decisions. Someone who isn’t strong, or forceful, in reflecting on himself. This happens rather late in the book when he’s on a set, knowing exactly what he wants, he begins to manipulate actors, like all good directors in my experience. In that moment, we see Pabst as a different person altogether. And that’s why he is a great director.
{{/usCountry}}I could’ve easily invented more interiority, but I decided to portray him as a man unsure of his decisions. Someone who isn’t strong, or forceful, in reflecting on himself. This happens rather late in the book when he’s on a set, knowing exactly what he wants, he begins to manipulate actors, like all good directors in my experience. In that moment, we see Pabst as a different person altogether. And that’s why he is a great director.
{{/usCountry}}In a way, his interiority comes to express itself. So, it’s not that I kept it hidden. I wanted my character to work well psychologically because he doesn’t have the faculty of 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 movie came out after my novel (in German), and I got in touch with Angela, and we talked about doing an event together, which sadly couldn’t work out because of scheduling reasons. I think her film is really good, and she said she had fun reading my novel, too.
While working on the book, did you get in touch with Pabst’s family?
No, I didn’t. That was a conscious decision because most of the material is already in the archives. There’s nobody alive in the family who knew Pabst directly anyway. On the other hand, I foresaw that they wouldn’t like a book on Pabst, depicting him as an accessory of a dictatorship, and I didn’t want them to feel betrayed by me.
And what was their response when the book came out?
They weren’t happy obviously. Mainly because the fictional liberties I took, especially related to Pabst’s son in the novel.
There was a real son called Peter Pabst, and Jakob in my novel is born at the same time. So, they share some of the same dates, but Jakob is a fictional character. I had this note in the book in German that the chapter Molander on the making of the film, The Molander Case, is fictional, so the family reached out to me and wanted me to put an additional disclaimer about the real son of Pabst, which I was happy to add. So, yes, they didn’t love the book, but it was a polite interaction.
When his wife Trude says to Pabst that he’s telling himself a story about why he’s in Austria, it makes the reader think of the tendency to rationalise decisions post-facto, of fictionalising things to be harmonious within ourselves.
We do that all the time. The idea that somebody like Pabst in my novel would do that in the situation is to show that it isn’t entirely his story. He was forced to make movies. It’s not entirely his fault. It isn’t an outright lie. But it’s a spin on things. It’s a certain version of his life story, making it easier for him to look or describe it.
And we do that all time not just for moral reasons but also sometimes when it becomes unbearable to us to think that big events in our life are entirely random or could be totally different. It’s a weird thing. Kundera calls it in his famous title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an unbearable thought, the fact that everything in life could be different.
I think very few people would be able to live and be fully aware of that fact. But I don’t know. Maybe there’s no freedom in our lives. But if there is, everything could have turned out entirely differently. An unbearable lightness.
Given that you were writing about 1920s cinema. You had to get details like “the slightest spark could ignite the nitrate film” right. Please share your references points for such details. Were you concerned that they’d be lost on readers?
It’s fine if that gets lost on readers. I think you can take liberties with the lives of historical characters if it makes sense in your stories, for that’s what novels allow you to do, but you must get the factual bits as correct as possible.
Surprisingly, there wasn’t a lot of material on the real physical details of filmmaking or film-editing easily available. The Internet wasn’t helpful either, especially regarding film-editing. I’m grateful to a great friend of mine, director Volker Schlöndorff (87), who started very young. He helped me a lot. He pointed out mistakes in early drafts of the manuscript. Without his help, I couldn’t have gotten those facts right. So, you see, the Internet has its limits.
Do you think authoritarian regimes plant messages in works of art to leverage it for their own gains? In that sense, what’s the purpose of art?
It is in the nature of art to be a bit problematic. In The Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant talks about how when you interact with an artwork, while you can get its aesthetic idea, you can never finish constructing it fully.
If there’s a clear message that you can draw from an artwork, say, ‘No more wars’, then you’re done with that work! That’s not how real art works for Kant. It works if you’ll never be able to point where exactly this piece of art is telling me what to do. And if it’s really a great work of art, then there’s always more to it. It’s unfinishable. You don’t get to the end of it.
You can say it’s my German romanticism, but I love the idea. I find it a good explanation of why an artwork can have multiple messages because all of them aren’t fully extractable because you’re never done with a good work of art. And I think that’s the difference between a didactical novel and something like a War and Peace, which also tells you that wars are bad but in a much more complex way.
Such works also speak across time. The compromises Pabst made are also faced by artists today.
Yes, there’s a relationship with time, especially with movie making, which is completely different from dilemmas painters faced, say 300 years ago. You need a lot of money and resources to make a movie, so there’s something acute to the questions of compromises being made in the process.
Also, authoritarian states are very much interested in movies. They want to know what they are like. So, it’s not only the artist who’s tempted to compromise because they want resources, but authoritarian states also are more incentivised to lure artists on their side. Pabst, however, didn’t make outright propaganda films. If you watch the two movies he made in those years, that becomes quite clear. And they are not even bad movies at all, which adds to the complexity.
I was only conscious of this particular situation in Nazi Germany while writing the book, to get the historical context right. Though I was being shaped by what was happening around me at the time, say, in Russia, or during Trump’s first presidential term, I wasn’t aware if my work would have a contemporary relevance. But that was back then, now I feel it does.
In Peacocks, the reader meets Greta Garbo, who Pabst discovered, and towards the end, the narration goes: “Sometimes in her dreams she was actually walking on the street and no one turned to look at her.” In the book, there’s also a subliminal hint regarding what the process of making art does to its actors like, say, Louise Brooks.
That’s one of the reasons I wrote a book on a filmmaker because I was absolutely fascinated by the contrast 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 kind of dissolved her identity. She wasn’t just beautiful, she was a very accomplished actor, who was selective about the films she chose. There was a neurotic energy in her acting. But when that changed, when she didn’t look like her image in the movies anymore, she didn’t want anybody to see her. By being the real person, she couldn’t bear the real person. She just wanted to be the person on the screen everyone knew her to be, hiding in a dark apartment waiting for death. It was shocking but also amazing in terms of storytelling.
Then, regarding what art can do to the artist can be seen in the strange example of Louise Brooks. Despite being so famous, she stopped receiving acting parts suddenly when she came back from Europe to America. There’s no explanation to it. Her life was more about how insecure an actor’s career path can be. She lived in extreme poverty for the rest of her life. So, again, being a gigantic star like Garbo can dissolve your identity, or it can be over for you in a minute like Brooks.
To me, as a novelist, what worked well was that I didn’t have to think much to construct this dichotomy between the two because Pabst worked with both of them. So, the actual story of Pabst made it natural for me to put both of them in the novel.
What do you have to say about power establishments fearing critics?
No one is as vulnerable as a dictator. It’s counterintuitive but dictators have so much more to fear from critics because their power is illegitimate, and they are surrounded by people who know that. They fear these people. The less democratic a country is, the more nervous and vulnerable their rulers are. Even regarding the smallest utterance of critique.
Nazi Germany is an extreme example of that. You weren’t allowed to criticise the government, the Führer, or the Nazi ideology obviously, but you weren’t allowed to criticise even apolitical films or books because if you had nothing great to say about them, then that in itself was too much of a critique of the government.
This extreme vulnerability is laughable. It’s almost like a joke. It sounds like something I made up, but I didn’t make that up. That’s really something we learnt from that dictatorship, that no one is as vulnerable and probably as afraid as a dictator.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.