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A jarring Mann: ‘Fatherland’ (2026) in review
Fatherland, which recounts celebrated Modernist author Thomas Mann’s return to a Germany in wreck and rubble, deals with great personal malaise against a backdrop of great political unease. The year is 1949 and Mann is giving a reading tour through East and West Germany, at least ostensibly hoping to edify and uplift his war-traumatised audience. It is clear, though, that Mann’s grandiloquence will not conjure a better order into being. Some of the brightest shots illuminate gaping expanses of rubble between the town halls and churches where Mann holds forth to packed crowds, and after these addresses, drunken candour and old wartime songs abound. All of this is observed by Mann’s daughter Erika, played by Sandra Hüller, who does a good job of balancing critical winces and bitter-sympathetic smiles as she is dragged between events, silent except in her capacity as an interpreter for Mann’s’ interviews to a cloying international press. She also acts as the family’s moral conscience. Her brother Klaus, played by August Diehl, is profoundly depressed and not in touch with his haughty ‘magician’ father, and when, after a devastating incident Erika also loses contact, the daughter-father drama intensifies until emotional release is forced in the film’s last moments.
I watched Fatherland shortly before the tense mid-September Berlin elections where the far-right Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) and far-left Die Linke party both gained significant ground, so at least the atmosphere, if not the specifics of the political turbulence depicted in the film, was of a piece with my surroundings. The Kino International venue, huddled near the centre of the dreadful, looming Communist concrete of Alexanderplatz also put me in mind of the East-West tensions strikingly portrayed in the film by the story’s progress eastwards, across checkpoints and into sparser rural space; my interest was primed for a scintillating political piece.
Instead, though, I found the personal drama far more compelling than the film’s political commentary, which often felt simplistic and lacking in the former’s emotional intelligence. The first scene, a study of Klaus in strikingly focused despair over a literary and personal crisis of meaning, shows the 30-something’s lithe, sinewy torso in exposing, crisp black-and-white. There’s a shadowy, blurred one-night-stand in the background above the bed (Klaus was gay but, intriguingly, the long-haired lover is genuinely androgynous), and as they move passively, perhaps indifferently, Klaus writhes about in angst and indecision while on the phone to Erika. It is one of the longest scenes of the film, and the camera’s static, steady character study reminded me of some of Bergman’s best psychological work in Scenes from a Marriage. Klaus’ initiating scene casts an ironising shadow over the ensuing bourgeois soirees on his father’s speaking tour, and his brief screen presence conveys as much character as Zischler manages to in his role as the main Mann.
I always admire when cinema makes political events moving; films as diverse as The Battle of Algiers, Paths of Glory and Steven Spielberg’s Munich have all brought me to tears with visually eloquent set pieces set in war or its aftermath. Fatherland is not so articulate. Pawlikowski relies on easter egg quasi-gags to poke fun at history’s villains, including Gustaf Gründgens, a Nazi-era thespian (though no Leni Riefenstahl; the remarkable Gründgens is a prime case study for the ‘art versus artist’ dilemma) and friend of the Manns who is portrayed as a charmless, bigoted representative of the postwar German intelligentsia in a brief, brusque interaction with Erika. I refer readers to Uncle Max in The Sound of Music for a complex, queasily likeable Nazi sympathiser, and to Mephisto for a nuanced confrontation with Gründgens himself.
Other objects of political criticism are crass, materialist American propagandists in the West and, more interestingly, a slimy, Mephistopheles-quoting Soviet general and his East German underling from the culture ministry. This last official follows the party line with Mann, but his sometimes faltering, conflicted manner concisely betrays all the sorrow, uncertainty and daunting weight of his countrymen’s past and future. Occasionally, the cinematography achieves the same political poignance: in a devastated West German town, the camera lingers on a bleach-white empty church hall, suggesting false innocence and secular angst.
Indeed, black-and-white is deployed to great effect. Many mornings on the road are shot through with searing sunlight turned eerily silver and cold by cinematographer Lukasz Zal, and the sombre aesthetic somehow enhances a closing burst of Bach from the organ of an almost-abandoned East German church, the site of Mann’s much belated emotional unloading – a scene which, albeit, has by my reckoning somehow more bathos than pathos.
I would almost venture to say that Fatherland much more resembles a certain kind of cosy, historical dramedy than a serious political piece. Mann appears too hapless and bumbling to offer us a protagonist apt to deal with the ongoing turmoil within his family and fatherland. Well-paced and clocking in under 90 minutes, it goes down enjoyably, though maybe too comfortably, but its occasional flashes of emotional incisiveness are to be commended.
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