Telluride feature “Fatherland” is a frosty yet brilliant meditation on aesthetics and ideology in postwar Europe. Originally debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in May, the eighth feature film by filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski was screened at Spaulding Auditorium on Sept. 20 for Telluride at Dartmouth, an annual festival hosted by the Hopkins Center for the Arts presenting select advance screenings of Telluride films. Pawlikowski co-wrote the screenplay with filmmaker and visiting professor Henk Handloegten, who spoke at the Top of the Hop during a post-screening Q&A session.
“Fatherland” is based on a chapter in Colm Tóibín’s biographical novel “The Magician” about the German novelist Thomas Mann, though the film changes some factual and chronological details from the novel and history. In “Fatherland,” Mann (Hanns Zischler) embarks on a tour of East and West Germany in 1949 after World War II with his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) to receive the prestigious Goethe prize, awarded to individuals whose creative work is worthy of honoring Goethe’s memory. During press and official appearances, Mann attempts to reconcile a split nation by advocating for what he calls “Good Germany” — the land of Dichters, Denkers and Goethe. Yet his return to his native country after 16 years in American exile is complicated by the new politics of the bifurcated Germany and haunted by the worsening condition of his son Klaus Mann (August Diehl), who is addicted to drugs.
Despite a lean 82-minute runtime and severe condensation of original source material, the film has an expansive quality. Outside of the central father-daughter duo, the bounds of the movie are expanded by a rotating cast of American, German and Soviet players. The other characters’ short appearances peel back the facades of repressive communism, a not-so-denazified Germany and ugly American anti-intellectualism.
The film’s main strength is in its allusiveness, including its pervasive sense of unspoken loss. Hesitating to offer easy postwar platitudes or resolution, “Fatherland” instead inspires thought on topics ranging from aesthetics to ideology.
Erika perceives her father as a cipher to his family and nation onto which they can project their ideals. As for his own ideals, he appears to be a hollow man less concerned with reality than with a purposeless commitment to a Europe that has passed him by. His speeches are beautiful but sterile. The fanfare surrounding him is a political smokescreen, more a testament to the power and vanity of the notion of “Stalin and Mickey Mouse” — referring to the postwar cultural contention between totalitarian communism and capitalist consumerism — than a genuine sign of respect for German literature.
As Mann lectures the masses about “Goethe’s direct gaze” and implores Germans to resist the “romantic death cult” in the film, he is met with no more than searching stares, uncomfortable applause and a smirking Erika. His views on “the strength of art and civilized greatness” strike the viewer as fossilized remnants of the time before Adolf Hitler, the Weimar Republic and even 1914. As Mann in the film somberly acknowledges, the “Heimat,” or homeland he once knew, has long since passed into history. Even so, he continues on his quixotic journey in a Europe still reeling from near civilizational destruction.
Walking in the footsteps of the man who once encapsulated the greatness of German intellectualism, Mann appears to be a modern giant himself — a god who speaks down to humans with “Olympian phrasing and elegant words,” in Erika’s words. Yet Mann’s character bears a more pressing connection to the protagonist of Goethe’s drama “Faust” — an elderly scholar driven to despair by the vanity of knowledge to make a deal with the devil — a link that surfaces as a recurring motif in the film. Though not mentioned in the film, Thomas Mann’s last great work, “Doctor Faustus,” used the Faust myth as a metaphor for the rise of Hitler. However, Mann himself seems similar to the scholar before his breakdown.
A foil for Mann is found in his son Klaus, a former journalist and writer himself who loses faith in art after Nazism, which drew massive inspiration from German arts and culture. In a tortured monologue that opens the film, he laments, “I don’t believe in anything any more.”
Klaus Mann’s despair is easy to understand — and even if his father doesn’t share his nihilism, Thomas Mann is certainly aware of the reality. In the glittering soirées of the postwar German elite, Nazism has completely infiltrated the old sources of German artistic greatness. When Wagner’s grandchildren attempt to sell the elder Mann on a revival of the Bayreuth festival, they are met with stinging remarks about their mother, Winifred Wagner, a close confidant and supporter of Hitler’s. Once a symbol of artistic mastery, Wagner has become a byword for vicious anti-semitism. Even Mann’s Goethe prize strikes the viewer as meaningless in the wake of the Holocaust.
The film’s various allusions and thematic richness give it a mythic quality ripe for analysis. Many of the characters seem to directly parallel Goethe’s myth. Klaus Mann abandons himself to the pleasures and terrors of addiction in desperation after the war, renouncing the intellectual causes that once propelled him. Gustaf Gründgens, typified as a modern Faust by Klaus in his novel “Mephisto,” chose the lure of Hermann Göring’s patronage over his own personal integrity. Whereas Faust is offered carnal pleasure and worldly wealth, Thomas Mann is tempted by capitalism and communism, the latter which he ultimately rejects. What does lure Mann, however, is a place in the Olympus of German intellectualism, which he coldly values — at least on the surface — above family and all else.
Because the film is marked by restraint and heady emotion rather than direct explanation, a viewer uninitiated with the Mann family or postwar Europe may struggle to comprehend its full meaning. Powerful moments such as Erika’s encounter with her ex-husband, Gründgens, require some background knowledge to fully grasp. Not only divorced from Erika, Gründgens was also Klaus’s old friend and lover until he embraced Nazism to bolster his acting career. This lengthy subtext is barely explained, and the moment’s weight could easily be missed or misunderstood by an unversed audience.
However, even if “Fatherland” was not created with the average American in mind, the filmmaking — particularly the breathtakingly symmetric cinematography — will impress any viewer. The black and white tint and Pawlikowski’s signature, near-square aspect ratio lend both gravity and beauty to every shot. The movie’s command of sound, which ranges from frantic German jazz to Soviet children’s choruses, unsettles the viewer and further destabilizes the illusion of normality.
The acting is another highlight. Zischler aptly plays Mann as both a kindly representative of “Good Germany” and a man who holds both family and country at a frightening remove. Yet, though the film’s central mover, Mann is not the emotional core. Hüller’s Erika is the piece’s true heart. Through her raw outbursts and distressed quiet, the audience gains emotional access to both a decaying family and a collapsed continent.
Audiences will feel moved to a state of reflection at the film’s end, by which point the illusions of Mann’s grand tour have faded. Art, for the first time in the film, appears to be more than just politicking or background noise. As Klaus Mann’s beloved Bach swells in a crumbling cathedral, the magician’s facade falls, and the audience is left to pick up the pieces.
Olivia Sapper ’29 is a reporter from Darien, Conn., and is majoring in Government.
