Geordie Williamson

I could, actually.

That was me escaping from Central West and New South Wales to become a publisher.

So I sort of would have to run it in reverse, I think.

Oh, look, I'm so ashamed.

I mean, I knew Pabst's name before I came to Kehlman's novel, but I was always a great fan of Murnau and Lange.

They were the big cheese for me in that kind of early German expressionist era of cinema.

But Pabst seems to be a little bit closer in sort of a documentary style, I think probably to the playwrights of that era.

He's more of a Brechtian character.

And there's a hilarious moment in, well, it's not hilarious, it's horrible, really, in the novel where Pabst has returned to Germany during World War II and Goebbels drags him in for a meeting.

And basically the first thing he says to him is, oh, Red Pabst, you're here.

So that particular kind of left

leaning, more interested in the kind of socioeconomic grind of the Weimar era, rather than just glossing it over with lots of shiny things.

That seems to have been Pabst's stock in trade.

But what's fascinating, obviously, in this book is that somebody who obviously is kind of on the right side of history in so many respects gets dragged down into the fascist gutter.

Kaleman calls it soft moral bankruptcy and it's a portrait.

It's soft moral bankruptcy for sure.

And she gets a wonderful cameo early on in the director where poor old Pabst has washed up in America, having tried to escape the kind of the gathering storm in the 30s.

And he's been given...

a film by the studio system.

It's a screenplay that's second rate.