‘Fatherland’ Review: Thomas Mann and His Daughter Travel Across Germany in 1949 in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Meticulous Time Machine of a Drama

In the elegant, silvery, and fascinating “Fatherland,” the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski presents the latest chapter in what feels like a trilogy (though maybe it will be a quartet; his last feature, “Cold War,” was released eight years ago, and he’s the furthest thing possible from a predictable filmmaker).

The movies in this unofficial series are quite different from one another, though they’re linked in striking ways. Each one is set in Europe during the Cold War; each takes on political and historical themes of unabashed momentousness; each is told in meticulously framed, lustrous black-and-white images that Pawlikowski, who started out as a documentary filmmaker, cuts together with the stark precision of a cinematic coffee-table photography book; and each, in its monochromatically austere way, falls into the category of art-object-as-awards-bait (“Ida” won the 2013 Academy Award for best foreign language film; “Cold War” was nominated for three Oscars in 2018, including best director).

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“Fatherland,” set in 1949, is about a journey taken by Thomas Mann and his daughter, Erika, from West Germany to East Germany — the twin ideological poles of the Cold War. The movie feels linked to the grand themes of “Ida” and “Cold War,” notably the Holocaust and the rise of European Communism. Yet what unites these movies most, and is the defining aesthetic of “Fatherland,” is how Pawlikowski observes the drama with a blend of intimacy and lordly detachment. “Fatherland” is an incisive and ambitious movie that wants to lay bare the torn soul of Germany after World War II. It’s also a portrait of family demons and literary celebrity. The film has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it’s as subtle as a fine wine. Yet “Fatherland,” as an experience, is so steeped in ideas that in the end it’s more heady than haunting.

It opens on a note of discordant bitterness: Klaus Mann (August Diehl), Mann’s dissolute author son, is speaking on the phone with his sister, Erika (Sandra Hüller), declaring the state of cynical despair he has arrived at. We’ll never totally learn how he got that way, but his morose funk acts as an offbeat warning about the world that’s coming.

His father, Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), the legendary author of “Death in Venice” and “The Magic Mountain,” is on hand to issue warnings as well, but of a grander variety. He’s a literary rock star to his fellow Germans (who line up to see him wherever he goes), and we watch him give several speeches — the first in Frankfurt, the robust city that’s under the sway of the Americans (one of the first people Mann meets there is a representative of the relatively new Central Intelligence Agency), and then one in Weimar, which is under Communist control, though it’s the place where the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent his adult life, and in Mann’s eyes Goethe is a god; that’s why he wants to go there. The thrust of Mann’s speeches is that Germany, after its plunge into evil, must engage in a spiritual reckoning, a new embrace of humanity, the kind that coursed through Goethe’s writing. He says Goethe “resisted the German romantic death cult” and in so doing provided the answer to “the German problem.” That, in a way, is what “Fatherland” is about: the question of how a lost society can heal itself.

Mann is presented as the Last Civilized Man of a vanishing era, whose words, spoken before audiences of officials, are lofty and inspiring. But will they make a difference? Mann, as we learn, is a U.S. citizen who lives in California (and is told that he may not be allowed to return there if he visits Weimar and shows any solidarity with the Communist government). But the movie also suggests that he has demons closer to home. Hanns Zischler, in a thick mustache, looks a lot like Mann, though it may not be a coincidence that he also bears a resemblance to Victor Sjöström, the star of Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries.” “Fatherland” comes close to fashioning itself as a companion piece to that film, with Mann as the stately but “cold” figure of learned authority, whose daughter tries to cut through his diffident façade.

The two actors are pitch-perfect, with Hüller’s Erika tart yet polite, reigning herself in until she can’t take the old man’s buried narcissism anymore, at which point she lets her feelings fly. That’s a terrific scene, but “Fatherland” could have used a few more like it. The section of the movie set in Weimer provokes a chill, because we see that the Communist officials believe in their vision of a “utopia,” even as the film cues us to see that they’re not only deluded but deceptive. (At one point, Mann learns that the nearby site of the former Buchenwald concentration camp now houses political prisoners.) The movie is letting us know what totalitarianism looks like when it’s on the rise. That Mann and his daughter, at a posh Frankfurt hotel party, glimpse so many remnants of the Nazi era — including Erika’s ex-husband, who collaborated with the regime — is another portent of darkness.

The matter-of-fact seduction of Pawlikowski’s filmmaking lies in how he stages everything with a coolly objective authenticity. In “Fatherland,” he lends this historical moment a time-machine quality, so that we feel we’re right there, in Germany in 1949, seeing the sands of history shift. Pawlikowski is ruminating on moral choice, and he’s also ruminating on God. The final scene, in which Mann and Erika visit the church where Johann Sebastian Bach had his first appointment (they hear “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” played on the church’s ancient pipe organ), speaks to both. Yet Pawlikowski, whose best film, in my book, remains the rapturous hot-house romance “My Summer of Love” (2004), works in such a deliberate way that as compelling as “Fatherland” is, it’s a movie that has already thought out everything it wants us to feel.