“These are strange times. Art is always irrelevant. It’s always useless when this happens. And then, looking back, it turns out that was the only thing that mattered. These are words of GW Passbt during the filming of a lost film, shot in Prague, in … the agony of the Second World War, based on a horrific novel by the Nazi writer Alfred Karrasch.
GW Pasbt (1885-1967) is today part of an essential chapter in the history of cinema, the art of the 20th century. His cinematic debut summarizes a nascent expressionism (the great artistic and literary avant-garde of the beginning of the century) with the marked signs of a profoundly realistic cinema. Her coup de grace began in 1925, with no less than a very young Greta Garbo in “Under the Masks of Pleasure”. This continues, under the influence of the then almighty Freudwith ‘Mysteries of a Soul’, a year later. He adapts a work by Ilya Ehrenburg, and people are already starting to give him the nickname “Pasbt, the red”.
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Author
Daniel Kelmann -
Editorial
Random House -
Year
2025 -
Translation
Isabel Garcia Adánez -
Pages
373 -
Price
29.90
He created, with Heinrich Mann and Erwin Piscator, the Popular Cinema-Art Association. He brings to the big screen the story of Lulú, which had been a literary success, and discovers, or rather illuminates, the prodigious interpretation of Louise Brooks, this will be in 1929. A year later, he dares to make a profoundly anti-war film, “Quatre Infanterie”, and in case anyone in the Weimar Republic, already dilapidated, had doubts, he launched into the production of “The Threepenny Opera” by Bertolt Brecht and, not to mention, it will be in 1933, a terrible year for Germany, that one of the most brilliant cinematographic versions of Cervantes’ work, “Don Quixote”, will be filmed.
Daniel Kehlmann’s (Munich, 1975) extraordinary portrait of the Austrian director is so brilliant, terrifying, terrible and, literary, grandiose. It’s fiction, but written, as I would have remembered it Vargas Llosa“with knowledge of the facts”. And what sovereign knowledge. Pastb, like so many others, Murnau, Lang, Zinnemann, Siodmak, Sirk, left Germany after the emergence of the Nazis.
In Hollywood Your stay is a disaster. He is tasked with making a minor and ridiculous film. It fades. Only the presence of his wife, Trude, will help him continue. Their mother being ill in Austria, they decide to return, after a stay in France, to care for the elderly woman and install her in a suitable residence. He plans to return to France, then back to the United States. But life is never in order and war breaks out. They remain isolated in the family castle of Dreiturm, in the Austrian town of Tillmisch.
He receives a supposed invitation from the sinister Reich Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels.
And this is where the dark night of Pasbt begins. In an equivocal, cryptic, threatening manner, he receives a supposed invitation from the sinister and all-powerful Minister of Propaganda of the Reich, Goebbels. The conversation in the ministry office is one of the great literary moments that Kehlmann offers the reader, showing the anguish, the absurdity, the tribulations, the doubts and, why not, the immense fears that any type of collaboration with the Nazis arouses in the great director. You offer financing Since he never wanted to make new films, the doors of a totalitarian state were opened to him, even as the shadow of the regime’s propaganda fell continuously over his work. Don’t miss the presence of Leni Reifenstahldevastating image that Kehlmann offers of this relationship and of Leni. Just like the conversations with Garbo, in America first, and with Brooks, his great passion.
The key lies in the way in which the most solid liberal convictions collapse in the face of barbarism, in the face of horror, and how, at the same time, Pasbt tries, in the middle of the hell in which he lives, continue creating art. A tension as complex as it is unpredictable for anyone. And therein lies the tremendous literary, historical and personal value of this memorable novel.
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