Weimar Germany’s three greatest film directors were Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and G. W. Pabst. Two, Lang and Pabst, were Austrian. All three moved to the United States, where Lang succeeded, as, prior to a fatal car crash, did Murnau. But Pabst did not. So, with the Nazis running Germany, he resumed his career in France instead. He may or may not (accounts differ) have been planning to give Hollywood another try, but, if so, he waited too long: Pabst was in Austria, by then incorporated into Hitler’s Reich, visiting his elderly mother when war broke out.

In the engrossing, grim, and, on occasion, darkly comic Lichtspiel (originally published in 2023), the German author Daniel Kehlmann describes, invents, or embellishes what happened to Pabst—and what he did then…