Join the HCSF Reading Group to discuss The Director By Daniel Kehlmann
In-Person Meeting
Sunday, October 11, 2026
4:30-6:00 pm Pacific
In-Person, SF, CA
Address emailed to registrants a week before the meeting
Carpools can be arranged
HCSF Members: Free, but RSVP required
Non-Members: $10 Not a member? Register here for membership!
Please sign in with your HarvardKey otherwise a duplicate record will be created and you will not be able to log-in.
No HarvardKey? Please retrieve your HarvardKey here. If you need help, email ithelp@harvard.edu or call 617-495-7777
HCSF Guidelines for attending in-person events
If you are showing COVID-19 or Flu symptoms, please stay home. This is critical to the health and safety of our staff and communities.
Registration ends Friday, October 9
The Director
Daniel Kehlmann
2025, 352 pages
Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize
Kehlmann is one of Germany's leading contemporary fiction writers, particularly known for historical novels that distill eternal human dilemmas into everyday experience, all rendered in concise and accessible prose. His books are at once sad and funny, heady and chatty, realistic and absurdist, cynical and uplifting.
The Director tracks the historical case of G. W. Pabst, one of the great filmmakers of the Weimar era, the period in Germany between the end of World War I in 1918 and the rise of the Nazis in 1933. [Movies he directed starred Louise Brooks, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.] Unlike his compatriots Fritz Lang and Fritz Murnau, Pabst rejected émigré life in Hollywood and, despite his communist sympathies, returned to Europe from the United States in the 1930s. After first swearing never to collaborate with the Nazi regime, he ended up directing films for its propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels. In banal yet often painful detail, Kehlmann reimagines the mix of pressure, vanity, humiliation, and resignation that can lead a great artist to ignore ethical imperatives and become complicit with authoritarians—a theme that feels especially timely today. (Foreign Affairs)
Questions about our meetings or how we choose our books?
Contact Kirsten Miclau
HCSF Reading Group Organizer
readinggroup@harvardclubsf.org