An Evening at the George Eastman Museum with Daniel Kehlmann

About this event

The University of Rochester, in partnership with the George Eastman Museum, presents a conversation with acclaimed author and playwright Daniel Kehlmann , moderated by Peter Bagrov, the museum's senior curator of moving images.

Kehlmann will discuss The Director , named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025. The novel is inspired by the life of German filmmaker G.W. Pabst and his work with Louise Brooks, the silent film star who spent her later years in Rochester.

Museum Director Bruce Barnes , University President Sarah Mangelsdorf , and Board of Trustees Chair Chris Boehning ’87, ’88 (MS) will offer opening remarks.

Guests are welcome to attend a reception immediately following the talk.

Registration link.

A special thank you to Chris Boehning and the George Eastman Museum for co-sponsoring the event.

More about Daniel Kehlmann:

Daniel Kehlmann is a German-Austrian writer, whose novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novels The Director and Tyll were shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature.

The Director, a New York Times Best 10 Books of 2025 and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, is a visionary tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich. Hailed as “an incomparably accomplished and inventive piece of fiction by one of the most intelligent novelists at work today” by Jeffrey Eugenides, this novel explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator. Some of Kehlmann’s other famous works include two plays, Christmas Eve and The Mentor , as well as novels Tyll, F , You Should Have Left , Fame , Me and Kaminski , and Measuring the World .

Kehlmann held the Eberhard Berent Chair at New York University. He is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (The German Academy for Language and Literature). From 2016–2017 he was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars. Kehlmann also works as a screenwriter and wrote the script for Next Door in 2021, which ran in Competition at Berlinale and the TV show KAFKA. He adapted Thomas Mann’s novel Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Man .

He currently lives in Berlin and New York with his wife and son.