Fatherland, directed by Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski, stars German actors Hanns Zischler as writer Thomas Mann and Sandra Hüller as his daughter Erika.
Sandra Hüller, Hanns Zischler (c) Mubi
It tells the true story of the famous author’s return trip to a war ravaged Germany in 1949, to accept the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt, then to Weimar in East Germany, where he delivered a speech about art and culture.
After seeing this fascinating movie at a press screening and interviewing the director, I immersed myself in some research, since I had only read one novel by Thomas Mann as a teenager in Italy, The Magic Mountain (1924). Later on I had seen the movie by Luchino Visconti Death in Venice (1971) from Mann’s 1912 novella. But i did not know much about his ideas, his life and his work.
Thomas Mann
Paul Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck, Germany in 1875, moved to Munich in 1891, wrote his first novel Bruddenbrooks (1901), about four generations of a merchant Hanseaten family, drawing on his own family history. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. In 1933 when Hitler came to power he fled to Switzerland, in 1939 when World War II started, he moved to the United States with his family, taught at Princeton University in New Jersey. From 1940 to 1945 he recorded anti-Nazi speeches broadcast to Germany by BBC in London. In 1942 the Manns moved to Los Angeles. In 1950 Mann joined the protests against the jailing of the Hollywood Ten. In 1952 he moved to Switzerland, died in 1955.
The movie Fatherland takes some liberties with the facts and the chronology. The son Klaus Mann did not die during this trip, but a few months earlier. It was not the daughter who accompanied her father on this trip, and drove the black Buick sedan, but his wife Katia, and there was a driver for the car. But the emotional truth of the story remains.
Klaus Mann wrote the novel Mephisto (1936) and I remember seeing the 1981 movie starring Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Erika Mann was briefly married (1926-1929) to fellow actor Gustaf Gründgens. In the movie Fatherland she meets her former husband in Frankfurt, and he justifies his decision to stay in Germany during the Nazi regime by saying that an actor has to work in his own language.
German actress Sandra Hüller does not have these limitations. In 2023 she delivered acclaimed performances in Anatomy of a Fall and in The Zone of Interest, speaking in French and German. This year she acted in English in Project Hail Mary with Ryan Gosling and Digger with Tom Cruise. She also stars in the Austrian movie Rose, where she plays a woman who is persecuted for pretending to be a man in a 17th century village.
Sandra Hüller-Rose © Mubi
I asked Hüller, the parent of a teenager, if she was optimistic about the future of the world for younger generations. She replied that she hoped that “their brains are growing so fast that they can deal with this changed world that they live in.” But she refuses to see the future as dark, because there are “so many movements in so many countries from young people, who get on the barricades and say that this is not working for us anymore and we have to find another solution.”
If you subscribe to the New Yorker ($52 a year) you may read here an in-depth profile of Pawel Pawlikowski.
Fatherland is playing at the Laemmle Royal from Friday October 23.