The Artist’s Dilemma Under Totalitarian Power
Daniel Kehlmann’s novel The Director tells the story of Pabst, a great filmmaker who made films in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, financed by the Nazi regime. With a strong sense of irony, Kehlmann portrays how Pabst, without worrying about questions of morality, pursued the ideal that an artist’s duty was to advance art — even while people were being killed in the concentration camps by the thousands.
In a way, the novel may feel remarkably relevant to many people today. These are, after all, times faintly similar to those. Many artists today are deeply afraid. When capitalist forces join hands with right-wing governments, artists often feel that they have no freedom left to make their own choices, and they surrender completely. But surrender does not necessarily mean becoming propagandists for those in power. It can simply mean remaining silent.
The mind can invent all kinds of justifications for this silence. They may convince themselves that artists should not talk about politics, that they should not concern themselves with politics, and that an artist’s only goal is to concentrate on their art and seek greater depth within it. But this is ultimately nothing more than a form of self-preservation.
At the same time, artists may use their very silence as a way of expressing their views indirectly. Kehlmann shows how Pabst subtly introduces surrealistic images and contradictions into the visual language of his films. These elements can also be read as his way of depicting how people confront authoritarianism. On one side there is surrender; on the other, a form of resistance within whatever limits are possible. Artists continue to exist as artists somewhere between these two.
There is certainly a tendency among artists towards timidity, hesitation and an attempt to resist as far as they possibly can. Yet there is also a strong perception among the public that, in times of oppression, artists do not resist power nearly enough. Perhaps this is why people today pay little attention to what a writer’s or artist’s voice might be on social issues. Because, as far as many successful artists are concerned, people know that this voice often ends up sounding indistinguishable from the voice of the state itself.
There is a particular passage in the novel that I feel compelled to mention here. It is one of its most well-known passages, frequently cited by readers in their reviews. Kehlmann offers a terrifying parody of the reading circles that operated in Nazi Germany at the time.
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The organisers of these groups would choose for discussion only those writers who were acceptable to the government and its ideology — writers who were, in effect, party-approved artists. They would then exert a subtle pressure on everyone else to praise them.
A writer who had been celebrated just three months earlier could suddenly become a mediocre or terrible writer because of his political position, because he had fallen out with Hitler, or simply because Hitler’s opinion of him had changed. People would stop even mentioning his name. Everyone in the group understood that keeping track of these shifts in official opinion was essential. If someone failed to notice the change and continued to praise a writer who had once been celebrated, he himself could be branded unpatriotic. Since he might even be sent to a concentration camp, everyone became extremely cautious about saying the wrong thing.
Reading and discussing literature itself became an ordeal.
At one point, a character reminiscent of Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, says:
“There used to be harsh critics. We passed a law saying there would be no more criticism, only art appreciation. After that, the critics disappeared.”
The heart of the novel is courage. Do artists show courage when they find themselves in an uncomfortable and frightening political climate, or do they retreat and hide?
Courage does not necessarily mean raising slogans or putting one’s life on the line. Refusing to bend as far as one possibly can, taking at least some degree of risk, and refusing to make decisions based solely on one’s own self-interest — these too are forms of courage.
The novel asks why that kind of political courage disappears precisely when a crisis arrives.
