Daniel Kehlmann's 'The Director' is a novel about the great Austrian film director G.W. Pabst, who fled the Nazis to Hollywood only to find himself trapped back in the Third Reich, making films for Goebbels's propaganda ministry. Kehlmann, best known for 'Measuring the World,' uses Pabst's predicament to explore questions about art, complicity, and survival that have no easy answers. The novel follows Pabst from his silent film triumphs through his troubled American exile to his return to Austria, where family obligations and political naivety leave him making films for a regime he despised. Kehlmann is interested not in condemning his subject but in understanding how intelligent, cultured people accommodate themselves to evil, rationalizing each small step until they find themselves somewhere they never intended to go. The novel captures the texture of filmmaking, the collaborative art where individual responsibility dissolves into collective creation, making it particularly apt for exploring questions of complicity. Pabst's postwar reputation never recovered from his wartime films, but Kehlmann presents a more complicated figure than simple categories of resistance or collaboration allow. Readers will find a meditation on the compromises art requires and the compromises that destroy it.