‘Fatherland’ Cannes Review: Sandra Hüller Anchors a Chilling Portrait of Postwar Devastation

Spare and rigorous, severe and elegant, Fatherland traces a journey through postwar Germany — a reckoning with the personal, familial, and sociopolitical conflicts of Thomas Mann as he travels through the shattered cities of a divided nation alongside his daughter Erika, delivering lectures in honor of the two-hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth. It is a dramatic passage through a country destroyed physically, politically, and above all morally, one still wrestling with the long shadow of Nazism.

The author of The Magic Mountain moves through it all like a celebrity. A Nobel laureate, he is met everywhere by crowds, and the CIA has even assigned him security detail after he received threats accusing him of abandoning Germany in 1933, when Hitler’s rise to power sent him into exile. Mann — played by Hanns Zischler, who took a very different kind of German road trip fifty years earlier in Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road — faces another complication as well: he has agreed to accept a prize in Weimar, deep inside Soviet-controlled territory, a decision that sits poorly with many. But the man, now an American citizen, seems unbothered.

The one carrying the real weight is his daughter Erika, played by Sandra Hüller. She is waiting anxiously for word from her brother Klaus — also a writer, a communist, living in France — but the man, lost to drug addiction, doesn’t show up. And while she manages the threats swirling around her father, she runs into Gustaf Gründgens, the celebrated actor who inspired Klaus’s novel Mephisto — a story about a performer who sold his soul to the Nazi regime — and who also happens to be her ex-husband. The reunion is anything but warm. Her relationship with her father is not entirely comfortable either, but as his devoted daughter and de facto secretary, Erika absorbs that particular tension in private.

Working as usual in the traditional 4:3 ratio of classical cinema, and in a deep, meticulously composed black and white that recalls his earlier Cold War, the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski follows father and daughter through a succession of press conferences, packed public appearances, and wanderings through ruined cities. Along the way, there are encounters with famous figures of the era — Wagner’s grandchildren appear, among others — while the two receive increasingly grim news about Klaus and press on, more German than ever, on a journey that pays tribute to Goethe but is really, beneath the surface, a painful homecoming to a country that is now only the ghost of itself.

Shot in Poland, with astonishing reconstructions of a devastated Frankfurt — achieved also through what appears to be the restoration and integration of archival footage — Fatherland is an austere, elegant, if occasionally cool elegy for a lost country and a broken family that, like the nation where they were born, is trying to gather the pieces of its own ruin. The film does not dwell at length on the rich and turbulent history of the Mann family — the full arc of Thomas’s career, Klaus’s tormented life and eventual suicide, or Erika’s own remarkable story as a writer, actress, and fierce anti-fascist activist — but this brief encounter is enough to sense the weight of all of it, and the anguish of their present moment.

Near the end, a wordless scene — no dialogue, only Bach drifting from a broken organ in a shattered church — becomes the film’s emotional center of gravity. It is the moment the Polish director of Ida finds to bring everything together: a country, a culture, and a family, each confronting in their own way the slow, uncertain work of reconstruction.