The Fatherland That Never Was

Every shot in Fatherland, a concise black-and-white film by Paweł Pawlikowski, is perfectly lit. It’s a hallmark of the Polish director, who reunites here with cinematographer Łukasz Żal, with whom he collaborated on the Oscar-nominated Cold War (2018) and Ida (2013), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. All of these films illuminate the encroachment of post-war Soviet oppression in eerie-yet-beautiful monochrome.

Fatherland opens an arresting image: from inside a hotel room, a palm tree flails in a storm. The camera pans to Klaus Mann (August Diehl), sitting naked on the floor somewhere in Cannes, on the phone with his sister, Erika (Sandra Hüller), who is in Los Angeles. Erika is trying to persuade Klaus to join her and their father on a working trip back to Germany, but he vehemently refuses, vowing never to return to their homeland. His discomfort with Erika’s role as their father’s assistant simmers beneath the surface. Klaus does not follow them, and his refusal hangs over the film like an unanswered question.

Viewers are then dropped into a Buick rolling through post-war Frankfurt, several buildings still reduced to rubble. Set in 1949, the film follows the return of writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) to Germany, 16 years after he fled Nazi occupation. One of the 20th century’s towering literary figures – author of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain – Mann spent his exile years in the United States, becoming an American citizen and a vocal critic of the Nazi regime via BBC radio broadcasts transmitted into Germany. 

In the film, his homecoming is celebrated on both sides of the divided country. After his appearance in Frankfurt, he and Erika travel to Weimar to accept a second award, a decision that visibly unsettles his primary hosts in the West.

Zischler embodies the apolitical ambiguity of Mann’s stance toward the “Good” and “New” Germany with quiet precision, as he grapples with whether his speeches can make a difference. But it is Hüller who is the film’s emotional engine. As Erika, a dutiful daughter, devoted assistant and grieving woman, she conveys multiple emotions at once with little more than a sideways glance, her trademark restraint cracking at precisely the right moments with devastating effect. 

On both sides of the border, Thomas and Erika are confronted with the country’s uncomfortable new realities. At a Frankfurt press conference, Mann is challenged on his decision to leave rather than endure what others call “inner emigration,” to which he replies: “I would not be here if I had not left Germany.” Later, the contradictions of the East are made viscerally plain when a man enters his hotel room to reveal that the camps beside the hotel are being used to hold political prisoners – those who don’t align with communist ideology.

Running through all of this is a family tragedy that leaves Erika and Thomas grieving in starkly different ways. The film meditates on what home truly means when the place you once called home no longer exists, and when the family unit itself is fracturing. The final scene, set in a crumbling church and anchored by a unifying Bach composition, is both beautiful and devastating.

Fatherland leaves you carrying a grief that isn’t entirely your own, borrowed from characters who never fully let viewers in. Pawlikowski doesn’t offer a resolution, only resonance, and in that restraint lies the film’s power.

A French cinema release date for Fatherland is still to be announced.