Why Do Collaborators Do It?

“I don’t know what I would have done.” When the novelist Daniel Kehlmann hears Germans talk about the Nazi era, that is what many of them say. We were sitting in a Manhattan café at the end of February, discussing his latest book, The Director, about the Austrian filmmaker G. W. Pabst’s collaboration with the Third Reich. Kehlmann, himself born in Germany and raised in Austria, wasn’t about to dispute the truth of the sentiment. But he sensed a cop-out in this confession—an anticipation that compromise is possible, even probable. “It’s kind of a moral capitulation that masks as being humble.”