The role of the artist in times of crisis, a powerful new work of fiction rooted in real events,

explores that question resonating with the challenges of our own time.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown has the story for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

The 1925 film The Joyless Street starring Greta Garbo.

1929's Pandora's Box with Louise Brooks.

Two landmark films directed by G.W. Papps, considered one of the world's great filmmakers

of the silent era, an innovator in visual storytelling.

The Austrian native first made his mark in Europe, left for Hollywood as the Nazis came

to power in the 1930s, but found little success there.

And then, as World War II was beginning, returned home, where he made films for and under

the Nazi regime.

It's like the normal, regular story of the refugee fleeing the Nazis, fleeing prosecution,

turned on its head.

And I thought this is an amazing story.

I have to look into that and I have to turn that into a novel.

The result by German Austrian novelist Daniel Kelman, the director, a fictionalized account

based on the life of an actual artist and his choices in the worst of times.

It's a novel about complicity. It's because if you survive at all in a dictatorship, then you have to become complicit.

And in the case of Pabst, because the Nazis wanted him to make films and he did that,

he feels like I have a lot of artistic freedom here. I can do this.

I can make good films. And that's of course when the pact with the devil becomes very real.

Kelman now 50 and living in New York burst on the world literary scene 20 years ago

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