At the opening of “Fatherland,” Klaus Mann (August Diehl) sits on a dirty floor, drugs strewn about, his lover still asleep as he talks to his sister, Ericka (Sandra Hüller) on the phone. It’s summer, 1949, and Ericka is trying to persuade Klaus to return to Germany, just for a little while – their father, the celebrated German novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), is receiving a Goethe Prize.
But Klaus has no desire to return home. There’s been a question that’s needling him lately, one he feels other people are trying to force him to confront in the wake of World War II. He left Germany because of his hatred of Nazis, but is German nonetheless – and now, Germany has been divided in half by the Americans and the Soviets, and all anyone wants to know is: which side are you on?
“Stalin, or Mickey Mouse?” Klaus says derisively.
This question is one that the other two members of the Mann family will have to confront as well over the course of “Fatherland,” Pawel Pawlikowski’s final entry into his trilogy of historical films (“Ida,” “Cold War”). “Fatherland” runs taut as a wire, wrapped up in questions about the relationship between politics and art – namely, the former’s desire to control the latter. But its heart lives in the spaces between, following two people on a road trip through a country divided – an aching examination of identity and family.
In the film, Thomas Mann returns to Germany after 13 years in exile in the U.S. He’s welcomed back with open arms by West Germany, but causes a stir when he says that he will cross the border into the East as well – primarily to visit and also accept his award in Weimar, the city where Goethe lived and died. He ignores journalists’ assertions that he will not be accepted back into the U.S. if he goes to East Germany, politely stubborn in his belief that art has no borders. Nothing – not even terrible news about Klaus – will stop him from completing his journey.
Pawlikowski and his actors are remarkably restrained in their approach to “Fatherland,” the film characterized by sumptuous black and white cinematography and long, lingering moments of stillness – stillness that calls you to notice the subtle look in an actor’s eye, or the light streaming through a window, and that only rarely is broken by an eruption of emotion.
Thomas might insist on the ability of art to move across party lines, but throughout the film we see examples of both political art and art warped by certain ideologies. A group of young men pass outside Ericka’s window in West Germany after she learns of Klaus’ fate, singing a rowdy drinking song that spurs Ericka to call them fascists and murderers. In East Germany, the music controlled by the Soviets is far more choral and formal.
Thomas’ staunch belief in the idea that art knows no borders is thwarted time and time again – and also, judging by his own work and behavior throughout the film, it doesn’t seem to be something he actually believes (at a party, he tells composer Richard Wagner’s grandsons that their father’s theater should be burned to the ground). But he wants to deeply to belong again – to belong to the Germany he once loved again – that he can’t confront the truth. Namely, that it doesn’t exist anymore.
And yet, there is some truth to what Thomas is searching for. In one scene, father and daughter remember Klaus’ fondness for Bach, and how he once said that he was the only artist who made him feel like life was worth something. That has nothing to do with politics – it’s a feeling you can’t name, a power you can’t articulate. But Thomas is searching for that truth, searching for a place where he believes he belongs, in all the wrong places. He insists that he and Ericka continue with their trip despite what has happened to Klaus, something that greatly wounds his daughter, pitting Zischler’s civil, yet stubborn countenance up against Hüller’s more simmering stillness.
Art has always been political – especially for Thomas Mann. And his desire not to isolate one part of his homeland over another is understandable, and points to “Fatherland’s” larger grappling with the meaning of the word “home.” The three Mann family members we meet are German, but they are flung across the globe as a result of war and ideology. They are three without a home, and looking for solace in the wrong places. But in the film’s final moments, Ericka and Thomas finally find the ineffable quality that Klaus found in Bach – they both break, holding onto each other, finding true belonging in each other.
