“I don’t know what I would have done.” When the novelist Daniel Kehlmann hears Germans talk about the Nazi era, that is what many of them say. We were sitting in a Manhattan café at the end of ...

If movies are a place where dreams come true and nightmares are made real, what do films say about history? And can the pursuit of art as a civilizing influence ever mitigate the horrors taking place ...

A new novel considers the perplexing life and times of G.W. Pabst, the Austrian filmmaker who worked in the shadow of the Reich. By J. Hoberman J. Hoberman is the author of “Everything Is Now: The ...

One of the earliest expressions of totalitarianism in German-Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s novel The Director unfolds in a classroom. In 1939, Jakob, the son of the Expressionist auteur G.W. Pabst ...