Movie Review: In ‘Fatherland,’ Paweł Pawlikowski’s austere portrait of a fractured Germany

In 1949, Nobel laureate Thomas Mann returned to Germany after years in exile to accept dual Goethe Prizes. Frankfurt, in West Germany, was Goethe’s birthplace 200 years earlier. Weimar, in communist East Germany, was where he lived and died. Both cities felt a claim to Mann’s return for the bicentennial of Goethe’s birth. And Mann, who left Germany in 1933, saw it as an opportunity to address his divided homeland.

It’s this trip, along with Colm Tóibín’s “The Magician,” that inspired filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland,” in which the Polish auteur continues his exploration of family and country along the Iron Curtain.

In “Ida,” he looks at identity and trauma through a novice nun who learns she’s Jewish. In “Cold War,” a passionate love affair becomes a microcosm for lives interrupted and defined by borders and exile. In “Fatherland,” he shifts his focus from Poland to Germany, where a father (Hanns Zischler) and daughter (Sandra Hüller) grapple with the realities of their broken country, and their own family, after years away.

Like Pawlikowski’s previous two films, “Fatherland” is painterly and stark, shot in luminous black-and-white and a 4:3 “academy ratio” by cinematographer Łukasz Żal. It’s also quite short, running a trim 82 minutes. Pawlikowski’s economy of means while taking on the gravest of subjects continues to be a marvel.

If “Cold War” was a raw expression of passion and tragedy, “Fatherland” is one of depression and weariness. It’s more buttoned up, more austere, a somber indictment of any postwar optimism.

The film opens with a character who looms large but appears very little: Klaus Mann (August Diehl), Thomas’ eldest son, slumped, unclothed, near the side of a bed with a lover still sleeping in it, speaking on the phone to his sister Erika (Hüller). He tells her he can’t remember the last time he felt anything and he doesn’t believe in anything, literature or culture, anymore.

In this postwar world, everyone seems to want to know what side these Germans in exile are on. The choice, Klaus deadpans, is either “Stalin or Mickey Mouse.” He hates Germany and his father for returning. “A horrible country with horrible people,” he says.

Pawlikowski and screenwriter Hendrik Handloegten take some liberties with historical facts to feed their story. It was not Thomas’ daughter but his wife who accompanied him in 1949. Yet there is some poetry in imagining two generations making this trip together, showing the war’s ripple effects and how one generation might be coping with things differently than another. Can a displaced individual ever really return home? Can a ruin be rebuilt? Will it be the same?

The choice also leaves room for the casting of Hüller in a main role, which is never a bad idea. The actor is certainly a generational talent, who can command a scene with just a look and somehow always feels so tangibly real.

In “Fatherland,” Klaus criticizes Erika for continuing to stay by her father’s side. Once an actor, she’s turned into a kind of chaperone, confidant, assistant and speechwriter for a voice and a cause she’s not even quite sure she’s behind anymore, driving him to his stops in a slick Buick. But both are processing what they’re seeing in real time.

At a fancy party in West Germany filled with former Nazi associates, Thomas is approached by Richard Wagner’s grandsons, hoping to get his help in reviving a festival to keep their father’s music alive. Erika, meanwhile, has an uncomfortable exchange with her ex-husband, actor Gustaf Gründgens, who also became cozy with the Nazi establishment. Now, they’re looking for clean slates and redemption that the exiles aren’t prepared to give.

A journalist even cautions them from visiting East Germany at all, lest their adopted home starts to believe them sympathetic to communist ideals. When they cross the border, things look very bleak in the east in a different way, though attempts are made to distract from the blight with ceremony and song. One person, who is quickly hustled away by security, tells them that Buchenwald is operating as a camp for enemies of the regime and begs Thomas to speak of it in his speech.

In the midst of all of this, a tragedy befalls the Mann family as well, and you start to see cracks in Thomas’ veneer of moral superiority. The broken family, with all their intellect and acclaim, starts to mirror postwar Germany itself, all pomp, bluster and ideals, but with a flimsy foundation.

There may not be much hope to be found in “Fatherland” — there rarely is in Pawlikowski’s beautiful, aching films — but there is Bach, a favorite of Klaus, whose music provides an emotional release where words and ideas have failed. And sometimes that’s enough to scrape you off the floor.

“Fatherland,” a Mubi release in select theaters Friday, has not been rated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 82 minutes. Three stars out of four.