In Paweł Pawlikowski’s ‘Fatherland,’ Thomas Mann’s Divided Germany Is a Study of Artistic Compromise and Family Rupture

Part period piece, part political premonition, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland rounds out the Polish director’s loose trilogy set in the detritus of World War II. Following fellow black-and-white dramas Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), the filmmaker’s latest—which won him the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, tied with La Bola Negra—is simple on the surface, and unfolds with an often academic frankness. However, it disguises, within its scant 82-minute runtime, greater ruminations about the state of the world.

Set in 1949, the story follows a pair of state visits by famed German novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) on either side of the Inner German Border, a few years before the erection of the Berlin Wall. However, amid a personal tragedy, his tense relationships with his children, and the looming specter of authoritarianism, Thomas’s long-awaited return from American exile becomes complicated, in a tale that examines the nature of freedom and artistic and personal repression.

The movie belongs to a remarkable trio of performers, between Zischler’s staunch reserve as the Nobel laureate—who tries to keep a lid on his most passionate political opinions, until he can no longer contain them—and the actors playing his renowned adult children. Sandra Hüller (this year’s Best Actress winner at Berlin) plays his daughter, chaperone and translator Erika, a shadow of her father, who similarly revisits a broken Germany after years escaping the Nazis. They’re similar in most respects, except for Thomas’s rejection of his “junkie” son, Klaus (August Diehl), whose morose phone call with Erika the film initially opens on.

We first meet Klaus as he sits at the foot of his bed in a cramped Cannes apartment, as his male lover is still asleep, and he regales his sister with his bitter opinions on Germany’s attempts at post-Nazi reconstruction. Klaus’s fractured identity as a German man is one he likens to the fissures in his family life, though not merely as a distant allegory. The two ideas are intrinsically linked, as he labels German “a language invented to lie in,” before discussing the ways in which Thomas is exceedingly proficient at this particular function.

Klaus doesn’t interact with Thomas on screen, and he rarely shares scenes with Erika either—at most, the movie cuts between them, linking them across space in ghostly ways—ensuring that the movie’s editing helps establish the trio’s strained dynamics early on. This domestic tumult soon colors the political visits undertaken by the father-daughter pair, first to the U.S.-controlled Frankfurt, where Thomas receives the Goethe prize under the watchful eye of the C.I.A., and then to Weimar in the Eastern Soviet Bloc, to celebrate the 200th birthday of the prize’s namesake, the writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

During these twin visits, Thomas flirts with (or rather, passively accepts) the possibility that his words might eventually be twisted and his works turned into propaganda. Whether or not he’ll push back—and to what degree—is a matter of some question, but the ongoing schism of the “first” and “second” worlds is on every character’s mind. Klaus, for instance, deems this precipice a choice between “Stalin and Mickey Mouse,” a dichotomy reflected in the visits themselves, as the respective overt and subliminal overreach of each faction worms its way into every conversation.

Despite being a revered guest on either side of the border, there’s a sense that Thomas is trapped by invisible forces at every turn. For instance, he’s framed between two grandsons of Richard Wagner at a social gathering—who insist on a consequence-free separation of his work from its Nazi appropriation—and in more private moments, Thomas can seldom express his grief to his daughter Erika when relaying the news of a death in the family. The characters’ tri-pronged ideological choices leave them between a rock, a hard place and a frying pan, as though Fatherland were an echo of the numerous tipping points society is faced with today, between the iron grip of far-right fascism and the choice between free-market and socialist ideologies—not to mention, the ways in which artistry can be absorbed and misused by anyone with an agenda. As the world teeters on the brink of inevitable transformation, what will any of us be willing or unwilling to do?

The film may not display its own staunch commitments in a contemporary political context (beyond a rejection of soft de-Nazification by way of quiet reintegration), but its locus is a political moment so enormous as to be emotionally petrifying. Perhaps the story ought to have been more detailed, in its exploration of its characters’ outlooks—that Erika and even Thomas himself may also have been queer is broached only subtextually, making the latter’s rejection of Klaus all the more complicated—but in the process, Pawlikowski transforms Fatherland into an austere conduit for intimate themes and ideas he’s been toying with for over a decade.

Like both his previous films, about Polish characters revisiting recent history, Fatherland is a tale of a family whose return “home” to a divided Germany is distinctly alien—a sensation that in turn defines their relationships to one another. And like Cold War, it’s equally about the compromise between artistry as soulful expression and political propaganda, something Thomas is faced with as a mere fact of his existence in this new and unfamiliar world. Pawlikowski himself has long had to reckon with encroaching far-right sentiments across Europe, and given his own past as a Polish Cold War exile—who settled for a time in West Germany, no less—his own perspective feels defined by having grown up ping-ponging between disparate allegiances. (That’s sure to do a number on one’s sense of self.)

However, that Fatherland can be so intricately mapped onto its creator’s personal life isn’t a virtue in and of itself, even though it might unlock some of its meaning. The film’s emotional potency—while delayed by design, as Zischler peels back Thomas’s layers with Erika’s help—is defined by its aesthetic approach, which sees Pawlikowski and ace cinematographer Łukasz Żal crafting confined yet eye-catching 4:3 frames that constantly isolate the Manns from the people and ideas around them. Only a handful of uneasy allies are allowed to fully enter their orbit.

Holding on to one’s convictions can be a lonely road, especially when balancing self-preservation. This path is made all the more winding by unspoken blockades between generations, but these quiet ruptures are no mere metaphor for the wider world. Rather, they’re a central facet of political life, serving as bridges between distinct eras and political epochs. Fatherland may find refinement through restraint, but its static frames contain the weight and movement of history, making it feel, in its strongest moments, monumental and poetic.

More in Film Festivals