Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is a postwar period piece mapping a Germany whose broken halves reflect distorted mirror images: Prosperity and austerity signify twin existential crises. The convivial capitalist surfaces of the West betray guilt and uncertainty as surely as the surveillance state of the East. In hotel staterooms and military checkpoints, in empty cafés and crumbling cathedrals, doublespeak proliferates and doppelgängers abound.
“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 …
It’s not as if Erika is wired for self-effacement. As her journalist pal—and probable ex-lover—Betty (Anna Madeley) reminds her during a reception in Frankfurt, Erika is herself an accomplished writer, the author of School for Barbarians, as well as a pacifist, actress, war correspondent, and anti-fascist crusader. In 1932, Erika sued a German newspaper for libel for calling her a “flat-footed peace hyena”; a year later, she fled to Switzerland and got a British passport through her husband-of-convenience W.H. Auden. (The film leaves these exploits off-screen, along with her subsequent harassment in the United States by zealous witch-hunters in the FBI.) Suffice it to say that some shadows are longer than others, and there’s simply no eluding the one cast by Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, which is long and dark and extends far beyond Germany’s borders. The question, especially for a woman edging toward middle age, is how to live most comfortably in the shade.
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.
The suicide occurs off-screen, but nevertheless serves as the dramatic pivot point for Pawlikowski’s carefully controlled film, with its unapologetically intellectual texture and paucity of plot points. If Fatherland belongs to a genre, it’s a classic two-hander between Thomas and Erika, except that Klaus—who’s beautifully played behind sunken eyes by Diehl—exists in counterpoint to their double act like a phantom limb, heir to what his biographer Frederic Spotts succinctly called a “cursed legacy.”
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.
For all her carefully calibrated deference, Erika cannot let such slander go—that, or she’s devastated by how much her brother resembles the remark. Channeling Klaus’s defiance—indeed almost speaking in his voice—she accuses her father of constructing a “great castle of words” for the express purpose of hiding in it. That fairy-tale image is just right for a film examining the hardwired anxieties and festering resentments of a literary dynasty defined simultaneously by public outspokenness about politics and by fictional narratives sublimating painful private desires—i.e., the look-but-don’t-touch tragedy of Thomas’s masterpiece Death in Venice, with its whispers of longing.
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.
Pawlikowski is a power user of the pregnant pause. The Warsaw-born director is at 69 a decorated veteran of hushed, minimalist dramas, indebted to twentieth-century masters like Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and his countrymen Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The filmmaker is not exactly hiding his influences: Fatherland is his third fine-grained black-and-white throwback in a row. Nor is he bursting with stylistic surprise either. The film features the same squarish, locked-off compositions, brusque editing rhythms, and pressurized silences as celebrated—and for some, enervating—predecessors like Ida and Cold War, both of which felt perilously close to shtick. (The latter was an unexpected art house hit and Oscar nominee.) Pawlikowski’s minimalism is not subtle: He especially likes to train his camera on the negative space above his actors’ heads, a tactic that, depending on how you take it, suggests either divine presence or its opposite. Like so many European directors trawling the festival circuit in search of hardware, Pawlikowski has a tendency to get metaphysical.
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.
It’s also quite funny, in a dry, Teutonic sort of way. “If time permits I’d love to discuss Mephistophelean dialectics with you,” proposes one German Democratic Republic honcho to Thomas. (The East Germans are eager to claim Goethe as their own.) Zischler, who appeared in a 1982 TV version of Mann’s Doctor Faustus—as well as in movies by both Jean-Luc Godard and Steven Spielberg, no mean feat—makes for a suitably dry and diffident emblem of genius, the sort of man who can hover above the conversation while leading it.
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.
Erika’s frustration—with her father, her country, and herself—is the film’s motor; in the homestretch, Pawlikowski takes his foot off the pedal, gliding toward the kind of carefully layered anticlimax that could easily scan as a cop-out. Wherever the Manns go, they find themselves serenaded with anthems or folk songs, sung by student or military choirs who seem to be hijacking the melodies on behalf of their masters. The finale, set at the end of the tour in a dilapidated church surrounded by overgrown statuary, features a recital of Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1723 chorale “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on a pipe organ. It’s a lonely performance, but glorious; it reclaims the music—and the spirit of art itself—on its own mysterious, miraculous terms.
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.
Hence then, the article about on the road with thomas mann was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( On the Road With Thomas Mann )
Also on site :
- Today’s NYT ‘Strands’ Hints, Spangram and Answers for Wednesday, October 21, 2026
- Italy approves sweeping security measures in response to protests
- In 1928, a Former Hershey Dairy Worker Started Making Peanut Butter Cups in His Basement; 35 Years Later, His Sons Sold Reese’s to Hershey for $23.5 Million