Fatherland
Ojczyzna
Paweł Pawlikowski (2026)
Germany in the aftermath of World War II is no stranger to the cinema screen either as newsreel footage or as drama. The East-West contest for the strategic upper hand as the Cold War gets chillier is a familiar movie subject. But Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, which premiered at Cannes this year and is showing at the London Film Festival just before general release in the UK, explores this political time and place from an unusual perspective. Thomas Mann, Nobel laureate and the country’s pre-eminent man of letters, had lived abroad, mostly in the USA, since 1933. In 1949 he accepted an invitation to return to Germany, to mark the bicentenary of Goethe’s birth. Mann visited Frankfurt, where Goethe was born and grew up, and Weimar, where he spent much of his life and died. By 1949, Frankfurt was part of West Germany and Weimar part of East Germany. Pawlikowski describes attempts made by the two German regimes to claim Mann and, through him, Goethe, as their own, and the effects of this cultural tug-of-war – and of a family tragedy that coincides with the visit – on Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), who is her father’s travelling companion, car driver and, when needed, his interpreter.
There are occasional images of post-war urban rubble, but well-appointed halls, theatres and other institutional spaces are more usual scenery in Fatherland, as Mann gives speeches and press conferences and receives a Goethe Prize on each side of the Iron Curtain. Two other kinds of interior – hotel rooms and sequences shot from inside the Manns’ car – create a different impression. The rooms help convey a sense of the characters’ unsettledness, even dislocation, in their present surroundings. Driver’s-eye-view shots of the roads ahead give off a bleak anonymity. Both ideas may sound rather obvious; they don’t come across that way because Pawlikowski works them into a richer texture of the Manns’ belonging and not belonging. Responding to an international group of journalists, they answer questions in German, French and English. Their breadth of cultural understanding, in combination with these language skills, might seem to qualify them as world citizens. Yet circumstances have forced the Manns to live far from home, and the Germany to which they temporarily return isn’t Heimat. Here, too, Pawlikowski in effect supplies a novel take on a frequent subject of films set in the years just after World War II. Compared with the post-war refugees across Europe that we’re used to seeing on the screen, Thomas and Erika Mann are incomparably privileged in material terms. They might still be described as emotionally stateless persons.
The film’s opening scene takes place in a different interior in another country – an apartment in Cannes, where Klaus Mann (August Diehl) is on the telephone to Erika (unseen throughout the conversation). A younger man gets out of the bed that he appears to have been sharing with Klaus, and leaves the apartment, as Klaus sits beside the bed, bemoaning the state of contemporary art and his own writing, while his sister encourages him to join her and their father on the trip to Germany. Klaus isn’t seen again. Erika learns of his suicide while the Manns are still in Frankfurt. When she tells Thomas, he insists on sticking to his visit schedule: his youngest son, Michael, a professional viola player, happens to be in Cannes with a touring orchestra – he’ll see to the arrangements for Klaus’ funeral. Fatherland derives from actual events – Thomas Mann did visit Germany in 1949, by invitation and to receive the Goethe Prize – though Pawlikowski’s screenplay, which he wrote with Hendrik Handloegten, takes some sizeable liberties with the facts to give greater salience to the film’s central concerns. Mann was accompanied on the trip not by his daughter but by his wife Katia (and their chauffeur). Klaus Mann had committed suicide shortly before his parents’ trip to Europe.
It helps to be clued up in advance about a few things to do with the Manns. During Erika’s conversation with American journalist Betty Knox (Anna Madeley), whom she got to know when both were working in London during World War II, there’s a passing reference to Erika’s husband, W H Auden. They married in 1935 for the sole purpose of securing British citizenship for Erika (they never lived together but were still legally married at the time of her death in 1969). This matters not just as a cultural detail but as a variation on Fatherland ‘s theme of unbelonging, the gap between paper proof of national or personal identity and corresponding emotional experience. At the same drinks reception Erika bumps into the actor and theatre director Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff) – her former husband, sometime lover of Klaus Mann and notorious associate of Hermann Göring. When Erika takes the opportunity to deplore his complicity with the Nazi regime, Gründgens – known to some of us courtesy of István Szabó’s Mephisto (1981) – scorns the relative life of luxury that Erika has enjoyed in exile, thanks to her father, her multilingualism, her network of useful contacts. To the surprise of other reception guests, she slaps Gründgens’ face, hard.
This takes the film’s audience by surprise, too. It has impact because it shows Erika behaving in an unaccustomed way. She’s mostly quietly spoken, although Sandra Hüller makes highly incisive transitions between Erika’s public and private faces. She understands and accepts the job she’s expected to do for her renowned father. Yet she’s ready to show grief at Klaus’s death or to tell Thomas, when they’re alone together, that his fine words are mere background ‘to a show that the Americans and Russians are now running’. Hüller is finely partnered by veteran actor Hanns Zischler (whose cinema work goes all the way back to early Wim Wenders films of the 1970s). The Manns’ car journeys obviously influenced this thought, but Zischler occasionally reminded me of Victor Sjöström as the elderly professor in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), though Hanns Zischler also gives Thomas Mann a curiously businesslike quality.
Like the other Sandra Hüller film showing at the LFF, Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, Fatherland has black-and-white photography. It’s the third consecutive Pawlikowski film, after Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), to be shot on monochrome, and by the same gifted cinematographer, Łukasz Żal. Also as with Rose, this visual choice fits the solemn subject matter; besides, 1949 is a time that most people alive today think of as a black-and-white era. The assortment of music in Fatherland is thoroughly apt and fascinating. It includes, inter alia: a popular easy-listening number, performed during a banquet given in Mann’s honour; drunken German ex-soldiers bawling fascist songs in the street outside Erika’s hotel room’s open window (until she angrily slams it shut); in Weimar, the East German national anthem, ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’ (‘Risen from Ruins’); the Mills Brothers’ ‘Tiger Rag’ on US forces network, playing on the car radio; and, in the film’s memorable conclusion, Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, which Mann and his daughter hear played on the organ in a bomb-damaged church they enter during their journey back to Frankfurt.
Each of the two Germanys may want to claim Mann as its cultural figurehead but his status brings with it risks and demands on the part of vested interests. In Frankfurt, Erika intercepts anonymous letters accusing her father of treachery to ‘the Fatherland’. At the press conference, journalists suggest that, if Mann engages with East Germany, he’s liable to suffer for it when he returns to the US. Two of Wagner’s grandsons unsuccessfully lobby Mann to help revive the Bayreuth Festival. In Weimar, a man bursts into his hotel room, urging Mann to use the speech he’s about to make to reveal that the Soviet military administration in East Germany is detaining political prisoners at the former Nazi camp of Buchenwald. Mann declines this plea too, adhering to his prepared text about German literature and cultural reunification. Because he also adheres stubbornly to Goethe’s vision of the ‘good Germany’ – expressed in the country’s art, especially its literature and classical music, rather than in its political and military history.
Thomas Mann believes in a good Germany but is he a good father? Erika is angered by his apparently insensitive reaction to Klaus’s death, but things change in the final scenes of Fatherland. Thomas tells his daughter, as they prepare to travel back West, that last night he dreamed of Klaus. In that sequence in the ruined church, Mann weeps as the Bach music plays. Erika takes his hand, and says, ‘Let’s go home’. Just as the moment when Erika smacks Gustaf Gründgens hits home in more ways than one, so Mann’s tears are the payoff for Hanns Zischler’s emotional moderation in what has gone before. This closing scene is powerfully ambiguous and crystallises Paweł Pawlikowski’s key themes. How much is Mann in mourning for his son, how much for the political and incipient cultural fission of his country? He and Erika can hold hands as West and East Germany can’t. It’s almost unnecessary for Mann, in response to his daughter’s consoling ‘Let’s go home’, to murmur, ‘Where is that?’ Fatherland is remarkably succinct, running only eighty-two minutes. It’s by some way the shortest film I’ve so far seen at this year’s London Film Festival, and by some way the best[1].
15 October 2026
[1] Afternote: That was still the case – on both counts – at the end of the Festival!