The exiles: "Fatherland"

It might seem perverse to describe the 80-minute Fatherland as a substantial extension of the Paweł Pawlikowski filmography, but here we are. After the perfect miniature of 2013's Ida (82 minutes) and the comparatively epic romance of 2018's Cold War (89 minutes), Pawlikowski's latest combines both a snapshot of post-War German life and a radiograph of one especially tangled family unit: father, son and daughter. The father is identifiable enough as the esteemed author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), joined here in 1949, returning home from his lengthy American exile for a series of speaking engagements intended to position him as the kind of literary conscience and progressive thinker the new Germany sorely needs; he is met, on the whole, with a hero's welcome, but also unnerving notes of discord, courtesy of those who regard the writer as a traitorous elite who never had to suffer in the way so many of his fellow Germans have. He is accompanied on this round trip by his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), a sometime actress pressganged into serving as simultaneously her father's assistant, editor and dresser; she's the one who has to deal with the hate mail waiting for them in the pigeonholes of Germany's finest hotels. Both appear haunted by the fate of Thomas's son - and Erika's brother - Klaus (August Diehl), glimpsed in a prologue as a young bohemian inhabiting his own exile, evading any post-War guilt (and the other burdens that came with being German in 1949) through casual sex and drug abuse. Already, I hope, you'll have some idea of how much Pawlikowski squeezes into his typically elegant, monochrome, squared-off frames. On one side of the screen, literary respectability: the functions, the press conferences, the state-sponsored banquets. On the other, abject dishevelment: bombed out buildings, wounded and hurt people. The Manns' trip was conceived to help bridge the gap between these two Germanys while also helping to rebuild a culture and a country. But that's an awful weight to put on tender human shoulders, and the reality - such as Pawlikowski sees it - was an awkward, hesitant dance, a collective shuffle around the black holes of recent history, everyone doing their darnedest to avoid what would have been the more potent N-word in this specific context: that of Nazism.

A purely British film on a similar historical moment - perhaps one dramatising Erika's marriage to the poet W.H. Auden - would doubtless try and cosy certain aspects up for notionally easier consumption. What Pawlikowski pulls off instead is a contrast between plentiful period elegance - returning, at one point, to the big bands and ballrooms of Cold War, complete with a singing cameo for that film's Joanna Kulig - and the altogether haphazard human behaviour he places front and centre. Thomas crosses paths with Wagner's grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang (Enno and Theo Trebs) and tells them, in no uncertain terms, that Bayreuth should be razed to the ground and their mother arrested; at the same function, Erika slaps her ex-husband Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff), the actor who inspired her brother's novel Mephisto; later, daughter is left aghast at her father's insistence at carrying on in the face of personal tragedy. Though they come this way to sow the seeds of culture, what the Manns most often encounter on their travels is scorched earth and salted ground. It is, though, stirring for us to be presented with a film that is so compelled by the idea of culture: in the TikTok era, who else but Pawlikowski would have thought about making - and then been financed to make - a film about Thomas Mann? (The loftiness of the film's subject even occasions a droll joke of sorts: while travelling between gigs, the writer is informed by a functionary petitioning to appoint Mann as Germany's poet laureate that his Nobel Prize "carries no weight here".) But even today - as this nomadic filmmaker surely understands more than most - culture remains a means of renegotiating one's place in this world. In a year when the far-right AfD have made gains across a newly divided Germany, why not make a movie about Thomas Mann? Clive James once voted the author "the twentieth-century cultural figure most likely to keep coming back into the student's life", and some trace, some echo of the historical moment Fatherland evokes does appear to have persisted into our present, whether the literal threat of the boozy fascists Erika chides for singing beerhall anthems outside her hotel window or the more ambient gloom of Klaus's despair. The Manns, too, are having to rebuild while attempting to comprehend what the hell has just happened. 

And that, finally, is what keeps Fatherland from becoming so lofty it drifts off into some academic ether: at a crucial point, the history is allowed to recede slightly, revealing two mortal souls attempting to pull one another up out of a bombshell crater. On some basic human level, this is the story of an overshadowed daughter trying to understand her distant father. (One of several memorable choices of framing: when Erika and Klaus are having their late-night, cross-continental heart-to-heart in that prologue, Thomas is working unseen in an adjacent room, behind a closed door.) Zischler, a dead ringer for the real Mann, suggests a recognisably German man of letters: brisk and businesslike to the point of seeming dismissive, insistent on moving forwards and rejecting the cold comforts of the past, he clings to a utopian worldview, dating back to his beloved Goethe, which is tempered only slightly by recent world events. (Mann is one thing; Man entirely another.) He's a statue waiting to happen, pointing in a radically different direction to Hitler (with a necessarily lowered arm); the tragedy rearing up before Erika is that she can see her father becoming enmarbled before her very eyes, encapsulating the ideas the New Germany is desperately looking for while also depriving her of a parent at the moment she most needs one. If it's unexpected to encounter a film about Thomas Mann in 2026, it's doubly unexpected to encounter a 2026 film that has been composed with such evident care and intelligence, an art movie with appreciable art. To the deathly certainties of fascism, Pawlikowski retorts with nuance, (literal) grey areas and an embrace of all that might otherwise be considered contradictory. It's certainly rare to see a film that is so mournfully beautiful and yet so full of life, so rich with big, urgent ideas. And the economy that Pawlikowski arrives at with his editor Piotr Wojcik is inspired: if we're left wanting more as the credits roll, that's an acknowledgement there was still a lot more hard work to be done to get Germany and these relationships back on their feet. In this context, you had to take your victories - and your happy endings - where you could. Fatherland is so au fait with high culture it can use Bach (albeit one of the more recognisable Bachs) as a punchline-cum-payoff; at last, we witness a minor-key reunification, a fragile but hopeful communion between generations and between the living and the dead.

Fatherland is now showing in selected cinemas.