{"id":14115,"date":"2026-05-15T00:45:29","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T00:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/14115\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T00:45:29","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T00:45:29","slug":"fatherland-review-pawel-pawlikowskis-meticulous-time-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/14115\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Fatherland’ Review: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Meticulous Time Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn the elegant, silvery, and fascinating \u201cFatherland<\/a>,\u201d the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski<\/a> presents the latest chapter in what feels, after \u201cIda\u201d and \u201cCold War,\u201d like a trilogy (though maybe it will be a quartet; his last feature was released eight years ago, and he\u2019s the furthest thing possible from a predictable filmmaker).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movies in this unofficial series are quite different from one another, though they\u2019re linked in striking ways. Each one is set in Europe during the Cold War; each takes on political and historical themes of unabashed momentousness; each is told in meticulously framed, lustrous black-and-white images that Pawlikowski, who started out as a documentary filmmaker, cuts together with the stark precision of a cinematic coffee-table photography book; and each, in its monochromatically austere way, falls into the category of art-object-as-awards-bait (\u201cIda\u201d won the 2013 Academy Award for best foreign language film; \u201cCold War\u201d was nominated for three Oscars in 2018, including best director).<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFatherland,\u201d set in 1949, is about a journey taken by Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika, an actress and writer, from West Germany to East Germany \u2014 the twin ideological poles of the Cold War. The movie feels linked to the grand themes of \u201cIda\u201d and \u201cCold War,\u201d notably the Holocaust and the rise of European Communism. Yet what unites these films most, and is the defining aesthetic of \u201cFatherland,\u201d is how Pawlikowski observes the drama with a blend of intimacy and lordly detachment. \u201cFatherland\u201d is an incisive and ambitious movie that wants to lay bare the torn soul of Germany after World War II. It\u2019s also a portrait of family demons and literary celebrity. The film has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it\u2019s as subtle as a fine wine. Yet \u201cFatherland,\u201d as an experience, is so steeped in ideas that in the end it\u2019s more heady than haunting.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt opens on a note of discordant bitterness: Klaus Mann (August Diehl), Mann\u2019s dissolute author son, is speaking on the phone with his sister, Erika (Sandra H\u00fcller<\/a>), declaring the state of cynical despair he has arrived at. We\u2019ll never totally learn how he got that way, but his morose funk acts as an offbeat warning about the world that\u2019s coming.<\/p>\n

\n\tHis father, Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), the legendary author of \u201cDeath in Venice\u201d and \u201cThe Magic Mountain,\u201d is on hand to issue warnings as well, but of a grander variety. He\u2019s a literary rock star to his fellow Germans (who line up to see him wherever he goes), and we watch him give several speeches \u2014 the first in Frankfurt, the robust city that\u2019s under the sway of the Americans (one of the first people Mann meets there is a representative of the relatively new Central Intelligence Agency), and then one in Weimar, which is under Communist control, though it\u2019s the place where the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent his adult life, and in Mann\u2019s eyes Goethe is a god; that\u2019s why he wants to go there. The thrust of Mann\u2019s speeches is that Germany, after its plunge into evil, must engage in a spiritual reckoning, a new embrace of humanity, the kind that coursed through Goethe\u2019s writing. He says Goethe \u201cresisted the German romantic death cult\u201d and in so doing provided the answer to \u201cthe German problem.\u201d That, in a way, is what \u201cFatherland\u201d is about: the question of how a lost society can heal itself.<\/p>\n

\n\tMann is presented as the Last Civilized Man of a vanishing era, whose words, spoken before audiences of officials, are lofty and inspiring. But will they make a difference? Mann, as we learn, is a U.S. citizen who lives in California (and is told that he may not be allowed to return there if he visits Weimar and shows any solidarity with the Communist government). But the movie also suggests that he has demons closer to home. Hanns Zischler, in a thick mustache, looks a lot like Mann, though it may not be a coincidence that he also bears a resemblance to Victor Sj\u00f6str\u00f6m, the star of Ingmar Bergman\u2019s \u201cWild Strawberries.\u201d \u201cFatherland\u201d comes close to fashioning itself as a companion piece to that film, with Mann as the stately but \u201ccold\u201d figure of learned authority, whose daughter tries to cut through his diffident fa\u00e7ade.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe two actors are pitch-perfect, with H\u00fcller\u2019s Erika tart yet polite, reigning herself in until she can\u2019t take the old man\u2019s buried narcissism anymore, at which point she lets her feelings fly. That\u2019s a terrific scene, but \u201cFatherland\u201d could have used a few more like it. The section of the movie set in Weimer provokes a chill, because we see that the Communist officials believe in their vision of a \u201cutopia,\u201d even as the film cues us to see that they\u2019re not only deluded but deceptive. (At one point, Mann learns that the nearby site of the former Buchenwald concentration camp now houses political prisoners.) The movie is letting us know what totalitarianism looks like when it\u2019s on the rise. That Mann and his daughter, at a posh Frankfurt hotel party, glimpse so many remnants of the Nazi era \u2014\u00a0including Erika\u2019s ex-husband, who collaborated with the regime \u2014 is another portent of darkness.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe matter-of-fact seduction of Pawlikowski\u2019s filmmaking lies in how he stages everything with a coolly objective authenticity. In \u201cFatherland,\u201d he lends this historical moment a time-machine quality, so that we feel we\u2019re right there, in the ruins of Germany in 1949, seeing the sands of history shift. Pawlikowski is ruminating on moral choice, and he\u2019s also ruminating on God. The final scene, in which Mann and Erika visit the church where Johann Sebastian Bach had his first appointment (they hear \u201cJesu, Joy of Man\u2019s Desiring\u201d played on the church\u2019s ancient pipe organ), speaks to both. Yet Pawlikowski, whose best film, in my book, remains the rapturous hot-house romance \u201cMy Summer of Love\u201d (2004), works in such a deliberate way that as compelling as \u201cFatherland\u201d is, it\u2019s a movie that has already thought out everything it wants us to feel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the elegant, silvery, and fascinating \u201cFatherland,\u201d the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski presents the latest chapter in what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6236,17631,5,17632,17633],"class_list":{"0":"post-14115","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-cannes-film-festival","9":"tag-fatherland","10":"tag-germany","11":"tag-pawel-pawlikowski","12":"tag-sandra-hu00fcller"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}