Lean and Disciplined, Fatherland Follows Thomas Mann to Postwar Germany

Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski chronicles the great writer Thomas Mann’s journey back to Germany where Fascism was replaced by Communism in the East.

By Kilian Melloy

Recent years have seen an uptick in films that examine the years of terror and resistance that Europe endured under the yoke of genocidal Nazi tyranny. Given the state of America, and the world, especially since 2016, that hardly feels coincidental. Perhaps in anticipation of an eventual reckoning for today’s excesses, Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski (Cold War, My Summer of Love) looks back to a slightly different era: 1949, during the post-war years when Germany was reckoning (or not) with the atrocities its onetime leaders had committed and tensions were growing between the Soviet Union, with its fantasies of a socialist utopia, and the United States, where victory on two fronts has buoyed national pride, prosperity, and global power.

Pawlikowski focuses on a few days during which German expatriate novelist Thomas Mann (Hans Zischler) returns to his onetime homeland, and from there to the city of Weimar in Soviet-occupied East Germany, a city as famed for Goethe having lived there as for the liberal epoch that bore its name prior to the rise of the Nazis. Mann is accompanied by his daughter, Erika (Sandra Hüller), who keeps his schedule, does his driving, and screens the hate mail that comes his way from unrepentant Germans who view the venerable writer (now living in the U.S.) as a traitor. Mann’s own opinion on this point is eminently practical: Addressing the inquiry of a reporter during a press conference, he notes that if he had remained in Germany, he would not be alive to attend the occasion, much less to accept the Goethe Award that is the reason for his return. Mann’s retorts to others are just as direct; approached by Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner, the grandsons of Hitler’s favorite opera composer, to give them his backing, he sends them scurrying with a tart, sharp rebuke.

A family tragedy befalls the Manns even as their trip progresses, but that doesn’t stop them from completing the journey… and, in Mann’s case, offering insights in public speeches that gut the assumptions of communism (while not letting capitalism off the hook, either). It’s a journey that only the strongest, most authoritatively self-possessed people could make while holding on to their integrity. The screenplay, written by Pawlikowski and Henk Handloegten, is just as strictly lean and disciplined, even somewhat stoic, as are Hüller and Zischler in their performances, while the black-and-white cinematography by Łukasz Żal achieves a mood that’s as specific and timeless as woodcut. Look for this title to haunt the year’s best-of lists.

Fatherland is playing now in New York and Lost Angeles and expands to additional markets on October 30 and November 6 (when it reaches Boston). Check your local listings.