"Fatherland," the new film by Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, comes across as an elegant, restrained historical drama laden with personal and political pain. Shot in black and white by Łukasz Żal, the film deals with exile, betrayal, the inability to truly return to one's homeland, and the burden that an artist's fame can have on one's family.
The story takes place in 1949, when the famous German writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann returns to Germany after years of exile in California, where he had gone to escape the Nazis and where he had obtained American citizenship. He first visits Frankfurt, West Germany, to receive a prize named after Goethe.
Mann, played with cold restraint by Hanns Zischler, is accompanied by his daughter Erika, played by Sandra Hüller. His presence is eagerly anticipated, while the political and cultural importance of his figure leads to a CIA representative being stationed next to him.
However, he embarrasses his Western hosts when he expresses his intention to accept another award in Weimar, the city where Goethe lived but which is now in communist East Germany. With the same diplomatic distance, Mann also accepts honors from communist officials.
In this way, the film presents Mann as a figure who tries to transcend history and the ideological divide of the post-war era. He aims to emerge as a symbol of a cultural Germany beyond East and West, without clearly taking sides in the new political conflict that is shaping Europe.
But while Thomas Mann moves between formal receptions and careful speeches, Erika experiences a deep personal pain. Sandra Hüller gives the character a sharp intelligence and a restrained fragility. Erika suffers for her beloved brother, Klaus, also a writer in American exile, who is struggling with depression and drug addiction.
The film begins with a somber and poetic phone conversation between Erika and Klaus, where the loneliness of both is felt. Later, during Mann's visit to Germany, father and daughter receive shocking news about Klaus, but Thomas decides to push the pain aside and continue his triumphant tour.
Klaus Mann becomes, unexpectedly, a central presence in the film. His novel “Mephisto,” which tells the story of an ambitious actor who compromises with the Nazis, emerges as a more politically bold work than Thomas Mann’s own stance. The novel’s character was based on Erika’s ex-husband, the actor Gustaf Gründgens, who shows up at the Frankfurt reception with a self-pitying account of his brief stint in a Soviet prison.
Gründgens attempts to make light conversation with Erika, but she responds with a slap. Meanwhile, in another corner of the room, Thomas Mann refuses to support the return of the Bayreuth Festival and says that his theater should be burned to the ground.
This rare political outburst fails to hide the growing moral crisis in Mann's life. It's not just the feeling that he may have neglected Klaus or that his own great fame has damaged his son's confidence as a writer. More fundamentally, Klaus's creation, "Mephisto," seems to incriminate him as well.
Mann may move freely beyond the Iron Curtain and believe he stands above any compromise with the Americans or the Soviets, but the film raises the question: where does his commitment really lie? He belongs to Germany, but the Germany that nurtured his and Goethe's greatness seems to no longer exist.
At a press conference in Frankfurt, a German journalist criticizes Mann for leaving the country instead of choosing the path of “internal exile,” that is, remaining in Germany under a dictatorship. Mann responds curtly that if he had not left, he would not have survived.
But the emotional core of the film is that survival itself is called into question. Through Klaus' tragic fate, Pawlikowski suggests that the German national spirit may not have survived Nazism, the Holocaust, geopolitical division, and the start of the Cold War.
Bach's music brings some emotional relief to father and daughter, but "Fatherland" offers no easy solace. It is a dense, sobering and intellectual film that harshly examines the relationship between art, guilt, family and history. /GazetaExpress/
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