OVERVIEW
In the summer of 1949, Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann returns to Germany for the first time since fleeing the Nazi rise to power sixteen years earlier. He is there to accept the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt. His daughter Erika, an actress, writer, and anti-fascist campaigner, accompanies him. Together they travel east through a country still in ruins, from the American-occupied west to Soviet-controlled Weimar, in a black Buick, across a landscape that is at once familiar and unrecognizable.
BACKGROUND
Eight years after Cold War won Best Director at Cannes, Pawlikowski returns with a project that, by his own admission, began as a departure from method rather than a continuation of it. The two films he is most associated with, Ida and Cold War, were built around invented characters, which is the kind of dramatic latitude that lets a director compose history rather than serve it. Fatherland abandons that latitude entirely, placing the actual figures of Thomas Mann and his children at the center of a triangular family drama.
The project was developed by Edward Berger of All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, initially as an adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s 2021 novel The Magician, before Berger decided the film would be more interesting in the hands of a non-German director and handed it to Pawlikowski. Somewhere along the way, the brief shifted toward what Pawlikowski now describes as “fusing the personal and the historical,” with the small caveat that the team “took some liberties with historical facts and their chronology.” That is doing a lot of work, given that the central premise of the film, Erika accompanying her father on the 1949 trip back to Germany, never happened. She refused to go, and the journey became a source of bitter argument between them in real life. The film, in other words, is fiction wearing a biographical coat.
THE REVIEW
The film opens with its strongest scene, a long phone call between Klaus Mann (August Diehl), sweaty, drug-strung, naked in a Cannes hotel room, talking to his sister Erika across a continent while the camera stays patient on his face. Klaus drifts between exhaustion and bitter humor as he tells Erika the world is now divided between communism and Mickey Mouse. She wants him to fly out to join her and their father on the trip across postwar Germany they are about to begin, from American-occupied Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar, where Thomas Mann is set to accept the Goethe Prize twice in two weeks. Both know he will not. By the time Erika hangs up in Los Angeles and walks past her father’s closed study door, the family dynamic is drawn for us as masterfully as possible by a director who has long proven himself one of the best in economic storytelling: three Manns scattered across two continents after sixteen years of exile from Nazi Germany, one of them suspended in despair on a phone line, one absorbing it alone, and the patriarch silent behind a closed door. It is a masterclass of an opening, and almost everything that follows is a slow disappointment that the rest of the film cannot match.
What follows is the road trip between daughter and father through Germany, or what became of it. Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) is shuttled across a country he barely recognizes to accept the Goethe Prize in both Frankfurt and Weimar, becoming the moral certificate two opposite regimes need. West Germany wants him to certify the good Germany, the one untainted by Nazism, while East Germany wants him to bless the one that defeated fascism through socialism. He delivers his speeches. “Literature has no zones,” he tells a West German official. “A good society should be shaped for men, not the other way around,” he tells an East German journalist. Both rooms applaud.
Erika, played by Sandra Hüller with the warmth the rest of the film refuses to offer, lost her father’s optimism a long time ago. She is convinced it’s all an empty performance, and that the national reconciliation her father preaches in his acceptance speeches will do little to fix the tragedy of what just happened. It gets worse when both receive the news that Klaus, sometime after the phone call that opened the film, has taken his own life in Cannes. Klaus was the author of Mephisto, the 1936 novel that barely disguised Erika’s first husband Gustaf Gründgens, the actor who stayed in Germany and accepted Göring’s patronage to keep working while the rest of the Manns went into exile. Klaus is now dead, and the father privately treats the suicide as a selfish weakness rather than a wound he caused. He keeps to the schedule and delivers the speeches, while Erika follows behind, running the logistics, managing the press, and biting her tongue.
The film is shot with incredible discipline in the same boxed-in Academy ratio Łukasz Żal and Pawlikowski developed in Ida and Cold War. In both exterior and interior shots, characters and cars are small against the looming, oppressive world Germany has become. Compared to Cold War, which jumped years between scenes, Fatherland is patient and observant, trusting the viewer to fill in the gaps about what these places probably looked like in Thomas’s and Erika’s memories, set against what they encounter now. The material is not different from what Pawlikowski explored in the first ten minutes of Cold War, the documentary-style sequence of ruined postwar Poland, and honestly, it doesn’t add much more than that film did in those few minutes.
Pawlikowski has now made three films about exile, divided homelands, and characters trapped between ideologies that do not actually want them. In the previous works, this was the foundation on which the films built their thesis. Now it is pushed to the foreground, becoming the whole film. The 82-minute runtime, which is easy to praise as a virtue given how much Pawlikowski fits into it, feels incomplete and desperately needs more of the warmth Hüller tries to infuse it with.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Fatherland completes what is now unmistakably a trilogy with Ida and Cold War: three black-and-white meditations on exile, divided Europe, moral compromise, and homelands that no longer know what to do with the people who left them. Pawlikowski’s control remains impressive, and so does the economy of fitting all of this into 82 minutes. But by the third pass through the same terrain, the precision begins to feel like distance. For a film built around a father, a daughter, a dead son, and a country trying to rewrite itself, Fatherland is strangely unwilling to let the emotions break through the frame. It is easy to respect the achievement, and just as easy to leave it feeling little.