In Fatherland, an invitation to speak in two cities is enough to put an entire idea of national belonging under pressure. Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika travel through the ruins of Germany in 1949, from American-controlled Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar. Mann has a public relationship with the German language that both sides can claim to value. Neither setting can make the physical damage along the way less apparent. Paweł Pawlikowski allows those facts to coexist without asking the journey to produce a workable formula for what a returning exile owes a country.
Hanns Zischler’s Mann has some of the protective polish of a person accustomed to being addressed with a view to the record. An audience wants a novelist capable of representing something larger than the man who has had to travel there. Zischler can keep that expectation in the room with the visible limitations of an older person. A sentence takes a certain amount of energy to deliver, however well a speaker has prepared it. Watching people pay ceremonial attention to Mann creates the possibility that they will miss what Erika, who has to get him to the next appointment, is obliged to notice.
The Goethe celebrations give the trip a strong formal shape. People on both sides can claim an inheritance from the same writer while trying to establish that their own institutions are the proper place to honor him. That makes Mann’s position uncomfortable in a specific way. A man can say the same sentence to two audiences and be taken to have accomplished two different things by saying it. The film is short enough to let the repetition be heard. It gives the audience time to consider the reception of a public figure without pretending that either version of it can be entirely under his control.
Sandra Hüller gives Erika an alertness with a very different use. Her character knows how a public engagement is arranged and how much of a public figure’s freedom depends on the work others do ahead of him. Hüller is good at making that knowledge legible without presenting every act of help as self-sacrifice. A daughter can manage a father and still have a stake in what he believes about himself. Erika’s position is interesting because she can make a decision that keeps the trip going while remaining doubtful about what it will permit other people to say about them.
The film’s severe black-and-white compositions are at their best when they allow a particular awkwardness to outlast the historical point of the scene. A damaged building can become an emblem very quickly. It takes more attention to notice the route someone has to find around it. Pawlikowski’s brevity gives figures like the Manns a limited number of chances to register that practical world. It can leave a passerby thinly drawn, yet the economy also helps the film resist making every stop a lesson. The accommodations people have found in the damaged landscape are part of what makes an eminent visitor’s claims about it provisional.
Pawlikowski’s decision to make Erika the travel companion gives the film an acknowledged freedom with the historical account. It brings a figure with a public life of her own into sustained proximity with a man who can too easily become the sole subject of a film about this journey. Hüller can let her judgment be present when the attention of other people is firmly elsewhere. The portrait is better for the decision to make that discrepancy visible. At the strongest moments, the people arranging the reception and the daughter seeing it take shape appear to be occupying entirely different events.
The political invitations create pressure precisely because no one has to issue an explicit threat. A visit is already available to be used as evidence of support. The movie leaves room for Mann’s faith in the possibility of addressing Germans across an imposed border, and for the compromises needed to appear on both sides of it. The most rewarding scenes let those commitments sit beside the needs of two people traveling together. A father can think about his place in history. A daughter can think about the distance still to go. They are liable to have both thoughts in the same minute.
