Pawlikowski's 'Fatherland': Mann's 1949 Return, Rebuilt in Polish Rubble

Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland, now in theaters after opening in New York, stages Thomas Mann's 1949 return to a ruined, partitioned Germany — and the director makes no apology for the film's difficulty. "It's a bit suicidal these days to do that," he told The Film Stage, "because in cinema now everything's big and noisy and underlined and music tells you what to think and actors are acting away furiously. It's going against the grain somewhat. It clearly will divide the audience."

Hanns Zischler plays Mann; Sandra Hüller plays his daughter Erika, grieving the suicide of her brother Klaus (August Diehl). The journey from Frankfurt to Weimar crosses the full range of post-war German society — Nazi collaborators, political prisoners, the wealthy, the dispossessed. Mann frames the trip through Goethe, having received an award dedicated to the writer. Erika carries the grief.

What is real, and what is invented?

Pawlikowski is candid about the mixture. He credits Colm Tóibín, whose novel The Magician a producer sent him as a possible adaptation, though the episode he filmed is not from the book. "It was just a gesture," he said, "towards Colm who is a great writer."

Mann's speeches in the film are authentic — one survives in the Hessischen Rundfunks, the German sound archives. Pawlikowski used two originals but conflated the Frankfurt speech with another, Über Demokratie, and added a Clemenceau quotation on "the German romantic cult of death" that was never in it. He admits the whole enterprise is "an imagined fictional story using real people, perhaps slightly irresponsibly. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, then everyone will blame me."

His interest, he insists, was less Mann than the triangle of Thomas, Erika and Klaus: "It's the makings of a Greek tragedy: the brother and sister, the daughter and father, the father and son." Mann returned after 16 years of exile to a country changed beyond recognition — "a country that turned its back on him." The film's question, Pawlikowski said, is "Where is home?" — a question, he notes, many face today.

How do you get a performance like Hüller's?

The much-discussed slap Erika delivers to Gründgens at a bar was not improvised. "That was a pretty precise scene, a pretty precisely written one," Pawlikowski said. He timed the slap to the background music.

His method with Hüller was, by his own description, restrictive: no coverage, fixed frames. "She has to be brilliant within the shot, the frame." She was surprised at first, then understood that image and performance "come together to kind of enhance each other." In the crucial takes — one per scene, he says — "you got goosebumps." Gründgens's insult, "It's easy for you not to sell your soul, you're a nepo baby," lands as "insulting and relatively true," and what happens in her face, Pawlikowski said, "is just mind-blowing." Her character blows her fuse twice; the rest is withheld drama, read through framing rather than display.

Pawlikowski shoots five days, rests one, then cuts one. He edits as he shoots and took an editing credit on Fatherland for the first time, alongside the young editor Piotr Wójcik, hired initially just to "press buttons." The approach began with Ida and continues with cinematographer Łukasz Żal and production designers Marcel Sławiński and Katarzyna Sobańska, both veterans of Ida and Cold War. "The mise-en-scène serves the image," he said — Cartier-Bresson-era photo reportage, not MGM gloss, was the visual reference.

How was 1949 Germany rebuilt?

In Lower Silesia, Poland — German territory before the Second World War. The Frankfurt opening shot is a 600-meter street in Legnica, once Liegnitz, dressed with three-dimensional rubble and digital effects above eye level. The crew spent five months casting extras with period faces. Time-consuming, Pawlikowski said, and initially in doubt; satisfying in the end.

What does this change for the audience? Pawlikowski's bet is that understatement carries politics further than noise: Mann, cornered between "Mickey Mouse and Stalin," finds no way out — and realizes he has lost his fatherland. "Which a lot of people face today," the director said. "So the film has its kind of contemporary resonance."