MJH | "The Director" Book Talk

Global bestselling author Daniel Kehlmann’s new book The Director is “powerful and timely” (Jonathan Lemire for MSNBC’S Morning Joe) and “nothing short of brilliant” (Wall Street Journal).

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator; and, today, it is “a call to strengthen our spines” (New York Review of Books).

Kehlmann will be in conversation about the book with Rick Salomon, a co-founder of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, Senior Fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Renew Democracy Initiative.

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975. His novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. He currently lives in Berlin and New York.

Richard A. Salomon is a graduate of Carleton College and Harvard Law School. Since 1994, Mr. Salomon has been the founder and CEO of Vantage Point Consultants. Vantage Point Consultants advises corporations on ways to optimize the expenditure of legal dollars, running the gamut from the drafting of Guidelines for Outside Counsel on cost management principles and converging the number of law firms utilized for common geographic and substantive markets to forging alternative fee arrangements with outside counsel and establishing preferred vendor programs for recurring categories of law-related charges. Vantage Point has worked with over 400 of the Fortune 500, including their General Counsel, throughout the world.

Mr. Salomon is involved in numerous philanthropic and social service-related activities. He is a Senior Fellow and member of the Advisory Board of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights; a co-founder, member of the Executive Committee and the Board of Directors of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center (2008 – present), the 2017 National Museum of the Year; a member of the Advisory Board of Garry Kasparov’s Renew Democracy Initiative; a member of the Hagel Leadership Council of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats; and a member of the Advisory Board for the Visas for Life Foundation (relating to Consul General Chiune Sugihara) since 1996. Mr. Salomon previously served on the Board of New York University’s Of Many Institute and the President’s Council of the Interfaith Youth Core. He has also organized and moderated many events with the 92Y, Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Center, the Illinois Holocaust Museum, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, The Common Good, and many other venerable institutions.

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