Paweł Pawlikowski's 'Fatherland': Thomas Mann Returns to Germany

Paweł Pawlikowski's new film Fatherland runs just 82 minutes — a daring brevity for a movie about Thomas Mann, whose greatest novel, The Magic Mountain, runs over 700 pages. The result, according to the review, is "practically flawless": a taut, literate portrait of Mann's 1949 return to Germany after 11 years in America, spent shunning the Nazis.

The film is the third in Pawlikowski's trilogy of mid-century Mitteleuropa dramas, which includes the Oscar-winning Ida. Shot in elegant black and white by cinematographer Łukasz Żal, 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 — all with what the reviewer calls "a feathery touch."

Mann opens the story not in Germany but on the phone. His daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), calling from her parents' modernist villa in Pacific Palisades, California, urges her brother Klaus (August Diehl) — gifted, gay and despondent, in a messy bedroom in Cannes — to join their father's upcoming trip to accept the Goethe Prize. Klaus refuses. He carries bitter feelings toward a remote, censorious father "whose colossal shadow dwarfs them both."

What does the film change about the historical record?

In historical fact, Mann made the 1949 trip with his wife. Pawlikowski swaps her for Erika — a deliberate fiction, and the reviewer judges it the right call, because Erika's dynamic with her father is the more interesting one. She serves as his glorified assistant on tour: running interference, editing his speeches, even shaving him. "He's as pampered as a panda," the review notes. She is, in the critic's phrase, "an inmate of fatherland."

Played by the shrewd veteran Hanns Zischler, Mann travels to Frankfurt in the American sector and Weimar in the Soviet one. Pawlikowski evokes the bombed-out reality of both cities in what the review calls "a thrillingly seamless weave of archival footage and newly shot material." As divided Germany rebuilds, both West and East scramble to claim the Nobel laureate for their ideologies.

The mechanics are blunt. In fast-Americanizing Frankfurt, a CIA agent oversees the visit; Mann lectures in marbled theaters to well-heeled audiences, many of whom had been "down with the Nazis" — including Erika's ex-husband, the model for the cynical actor in Klaus's novel Mephisto. In the poorer, plainer East, a general supervises him, and a true-believer writer friend offers him a big job. Mann steers clear of both sides, lecturing instead on the "good" German culture found in Goethe's idea of love.

How does the family drama resolve?

Halfway through, a family tragedy strikes. Mann barely seems touched and insists on continuing the tour, much to Erika's hurt and anger — a performance Hüller captures "in all its nuances." Her filial respect flags, and the film reminds us who she actually was: a onetime actress who wrote anti-Nazi books and reported on Allied forces after D-Day. She challenges her father to confront the catastrophe. He doesn't. "Mann may be even better at repression than at fiction," the review concludes, bottling up pain and seeking solace in high culture.

The reviewer sees Pawlikowski himself in that mechanism. His trilogy embeds the harsh realities of love, family and history in "beautiful, almost fanatically precise filmmaking," stripped of narrative fat and obvious emotional cues — as if rigorous artistic form were managing the director's own painful obsessions.

There's an irony the film leans into deliberately: a movie about the master of the long novel has the shapeliness of a Chekhov or Joyce short story. Fatherland ends with an abrupt epiphany set to Johann Sebastian Bach, a finale the reviewer describes as "a moment of release" — and, briefly, a glimpse of the vulnerable man inside the redoubtable mountain.

For context on Mann's Olympian stature: when the teenage Susan Sontag paid him a reverential visit in the late 1940s, she wrote in her diary, "I interrogated God this evening" — though she'd found the man as disappointing as his work was inspiring. Pawlikowski's film finds the man, and the god, in the same frame.