Artists are notoriously self-important, but a handful carry themselves as if they were the Matterhorn — stony, daunting, towering over the concerns of ordinary mortals. One of these was the majestic German writer Thomas Mann. After the teenage Susan Sontag paid him a reverential visit in the late '40s, she wrote in her diary, "I interrogated God this evening" — although, in truth, she'd found the man to be as disappointing as his work was inspiring.
This Olympian figure lies at the center of Fatherland, an exquisite gem about Mann's 1949 return to Germany after 11 years in America shunning the Nazis. Made by Paweł Pawlikowski, it's the third in his trilogy of films set in mid-century Mitteleuropa that includes the Oscar-winning Ida. Clocking in at a taut 82 minutes, this highly literate film wields a feathery touch as it weaves together a family drama, a portrait of post-war Germany, a taste of Cold War wrangling and the intersection of personal and historical guilt.
It begins with an intimate phone conversation between Mann's daughter Erika, played by the great Sandra Hüller, and her adored brother Klaus (August Diehl), a writer who's gifted and gay and despondent. Calling from her parents' modernist villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif., — he's in a messy bedroom in Cannes — Erika urges him to join her on their father's upcoming visit to Germany to accept the Goethe Prize. But Klaus has bitter feelings toward their remote and censorious father whose colossal shadow dwarfs them both.
Played by the shrewd veteran Hanns Zischler, Mann begins his tour of the homeland with Erika serving as a glorified assistant. She runs interference, edits his speeches, even shaves him. He's as pampered as a panda. In historical fact, Mann made this trip with his worshipful wife, but Pawlikowski rightly thinks Erika's dynamic with him would be more interesting. She's an inmate of fatherland.
The other meaning of the film's title becomes clear during their travels to Frankfurt in the American sector and Weimar in the Soviet one. The bombed-out reality of both is evoked in a thrillingly seamless weave of archival footage and newly shot material. Pawlikowski captures how, as the divided Germany rebuilds, both West and East are eager to claim this Nobel laureate for their respective ideologies.
In Frankfurt, war-ravaged but Americanizing fast, Mann's visit is overseen by a CIA agent. He lectures in marbled theaters to a well-heeled audience, many of whom had been down with the Nazis — including Erika's ex-husband, a slippery eel who was the model for the cynical actor in Klaus' novel Mephisto.
In the already poorer and plainer East, Mann is supervised by a general, gives his speech to communist party faithful and is offered a big job by a writer friend who's a true believer in the Soviet cause. Steering clear of either side, he lectures about the "good" German culture found in Goethe's idea of love.
Mann's own idea of love is trickier, at least in practice. Halfway through, there's a family tragedy, but Mann barely seems touched. He insists on pushing on with the tour, much to Erika's hurt and anger, which Hüller captures in all its nuances. Her filial respect flags and she begins reminding us of the impressive woman she actually was — a onetime actress, she'd written anti-Nazi books and reported on Allied forces after D-Day. Erika challenges her father into confronting the family's catastrophe. But Mann may be even better at repression than at fiction. He simply bottles up whatever pain he feels, seeking refuge and solace in high culture.
I suspect this is something that Pawlikowski understands. His own work is shot through with the tension between powerful, often dark passions and aesthetic perfection. You see this clearly in the trilogy, where the harsh realities of love, family and history are embedded in beautiful, almost fanatically precise filmmaking. Meticulously staged and shot in elegant black and white by his superb director of photography Łukasz Żal, these films are stripped of narrative fat and obvious emotional cues. It's as if Pawlikowski is using rigorous artistic form to manage his own painful obsessions.
Because Thomas Mann was famous for turning out long novels — his greatest, The Magic Mountain, runs over 700 pages — it almost feels like a joke that this movie about him should have the shapely brevity of a short story by Chekhov or Joyce. Yet it does, daringly so. Fatherland ends with an abrupt epiphany to the strains of Johann Sebastian Bach, a finale that brings with it a moment of release. And for a short time anyway, we glimpse the vulnerable man inside the redoubtable mountain.
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