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Klaus Mann, author of the anti-fascist novel Mephisto, is slumped on the bedroom floor in his underpants, talking on the phone to his sister Erika; behind him, a long-haired boy gets out of bed and slips out the door.
It’s 1949, the opening scene of Paweł Pawlikowski’s new film Fatherland. Klaus and his sister Erika live in the US, where they are being investigated by the FBI and threatened with deportation for being homosexuals (true) and Communists (false).
Klaus is sick of these Cold War idiocies, he tells his sister, in which you’re constantly being asked whose side you’re on, « Mickey Mouse or Stalin’s ».
The Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski’s latest foray into twentieth century history is inspired by a real-life event: in 1949, Erika and Klaus’ father, the exiled Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann, was invited back to Germany to receive the Goethe Prize, which he was being awarded in both West Germany and in the newly created GDR. In Pawlikowski’s retelling, the elderly Mann (Hanns Zischler) is accompanied by his daughter Erika, an actress and writer who is played by the stupendous Sandra Hüller. Her brother Klaus (August Diehl) promises to join them, but you somehow know he won’t.
Pawlikowski uses this father-daughter return to examine post-war Germany’s divided psyche, as well as the Mann family’s own pathologies.
In West Germany, Erika and Thomas Mann find a ruined country of unrepentant Nazis who resent their nation’s sufferings and the Allied occupation: the CIA station chief who is the Manns’ handler doesn’t even know enough German to decipher the hate mail that’s flooding Thomas Mann’s hotel pigeon-hole.
In East Germany, the Manns’ babysitter is a Soviet military officer who is both jollier and more murderous than his American counterpart: when a dissident sneaks into Mann’s Weimar hotel room begging him to tell the world in his Goethe Prize lecture that the nearby Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald has now been repurposed as a camp for Soviet political prisoners, Major General Tiulpanov has the man carted off – presumably to Buchenwald.
In his lecture, Mann evokes instead « a good Germany » that will become the realm of enlightened universalism, but the audiences’ faces are stony.
Pawlikowski was born in Poland in 1957, and raised in London and Germany. In documentaries and feature-films from « Serbian Elegy » (1992) to « Cold War » (2018), he’s worked the European fault-lines of nationalistic wars, religion, resistance, exile.
Fatherland, shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Łukacz Źal, is ravishing. The richness and complexity of Źal’s compositions and lighting create party-scenes worthy of 1930s Hollywood, but the film’s protagonists and hence its drama and political charge have been oddly flattened. Pawlikowski in the film’s credits thanks Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician, a biographical novel about Thomas Mann and his family. But as Tóibín makes clear, both Erika Mann and her brother Klaus were flamboyantly accomplished and driven people who were a lot farther-sighted and braver in their long public fights against all forms of fascism than their equivocating father. Together they got their family – and Mann’s manuscripts – out of Germany by 1933, and eventually pushed Mann into the condemnation of Nazism that produced his great novel Doctor Faustus (1947). This isn’t the story Pawlikowski wants to tell. What Fatherland gives us instead is a beautifully quiet and restrained family drama in which a famous writer is prompted by his dutiful if outspoken daughter to recognize too late how he’s neglected the ones who love him.
The film ends with a vision of what Mann’s « good Germany » might look like: father and daughter holding hands and weeping as they sit in a bombed roadside church, listening to Bach played from a broken-piped organ.
The film’s ruined warscape was shot in Poland, where Pawlikowski now lives and works; it’s a German-French-Polish-and-Italian co-production.
