“You and your father make a great double act,” exclaims an onlooker to Erika Mann (Sandra Hüller), the eldest daughter and traveling companion of Nobel laureate Thomas (Hanns Zischler). The latter is enjoying celebrity status in his homeland with glitzy speaking engagements on either side of the Berlin Wall. After 16 years in the United States, he’s being welcomed warmly in both precincts under the sign of Goethe, whose 200th birthday provides the pretext for an all-in celebration of homegrown genius, framed by existential questions about the Heimat. Meanwhile, the household axiom of Erika’s childhood—that “Little Erika must salt the soup”—has made her a woman-for-all-season(ings): sounding board, translator at press conferences, wardrobe coordinator, hairstyling consultant, substitute spouse. Also some light typing and the occasional denial (on her father’s behalf) of Communist sympathies. You know what they say: Behind every great Mann …
Erika’s libertine brother Klaus (August Diehl) has an answer for that one. He prefers not to, especially if living means going on a victory lap with Dad, who’s negotiating the ideological space between what Klaus acidly refers to as “Stalin or Mickey Mouse.” Klaus is good with a one-liner. “Maybe we should all kill ourselves, like Toller, Zweig, Benjamin, Roth, but all at once,” he croaks during a strung-out, telephone heart-to-heart with Erika, who’s invited him to leave his crash pad in Cannes to join the family convoy. It’s a morbid joke about romanticizing death, for which he knowingly plans to become the punch line.
Before Thomas wrote his own take on Doctor Faustus, Klaus revised Goethe for the age of National Socialism with his 1936 novel, Mephisto. The book framed a narcissistic German actor’s relentless careerism as a deal-with-the-devil. “The worst will happen,” the prophetic playwright Marder warns him. “When it comes it will bury us all.” Whereas Klaus transfigured the fear and cynicism of Nazi Germany into an enduring cautionary tale, Thomas has emerged from Germany’s collapse with a message of unification and healing: peace, love, and understanding as a manifesto. His grandiloquent public pronouncements about literature, ideology, and the “best way forward for humanity” are applauded by liberal democrats and totalitarian apparatchiks alike. In private, however, the best this great orator can muster for his dead son is to condemn him in passing, and in between award ceremonies, as a no-account drug addict.
The castle of words comes complete with its own dungeon. German “is a language that was created to lie in,” Klaus had whispered over the phone, a phrase that becomes his final testament. Fatherland’s deceptively jaunty road-movie narrative, which traverses Germany over a few days, takes his thesis for a chauffeured test drive. It’s telling that the scattered moments of truth here between father and daughter occur mostly in silence.
There’s a fine line between mastery and mannerism, and auteurs—especially austere ones—are often rewarded for crossing it. But even though Pawlikowski won the best director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, he isn’t chasing prestige and acclaim here so much as taking its trappings as a subject. Fatherland’s fascination with the Manns and their uneasy peregrinations echoes Pawlikowski’s 1991 short documentary Dostoevsky’s Travels, in which the last living descendant of the great Russian writer awkwardly retraces his grandfather’s footsteps through Western Europe. (His mercenary goal: to raise enough money to buy a Mercedes-Benz.) The pretensions in Fatherland are real, but they belong to the characters. Instead of impaling his protagonists on the stakes of literary celebrity, Pawlikowski draws out their tenderness. Fatherland is a small film, but it’s sharp and polished and jewel-like, multifaceted.
He’s well-matched, though crucially not overpowered, by Hüller, who holsters some of her usual ferocity to play a character who’s grown accustomed to biting her tongue. Her casting as a devoted yet indignant daughter can’t help but evoke the actress’s star-making triumph in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann—the one where, at her father’s insistence, Hüller’s character warbles Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” to an audience of bemused Bulgarians. She also brings with her traces of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, in which she played the complicitous wife of a concentration-camp commandant. Like Glazer, Pawlikowski is interested in the psychology of fascism and in the people who give it a human face, albeit at the margins of his film; in Frankfurt, Erika encounters her ex-husband, Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff), an actor who was the real-life inspiration for Mephisto’s Führer-curious antihero. Gustaf seems less authentically de-Nazified than bitter about ending up on the wrong side of history; Hüller’s disgust in this short exchange is all the more plangent for being directed inward rather than at Gustaf himself.
The story goes that Goethe heard in Bach’s music something profoundly holy—it sounded “as if an eternal harmony were conversing within itself.” The Thomas Mann of Fatherland is enough of an authority on Goethe to know that quote. For once, though, he keeps quiet, and Erika—for the first time—seems happy for his company instead of playing Girl Friday. The members of the double act are transformed into spectators, and also mirrors of the audience—rapt, contemplative, and grateful.
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