Fatherland

In a brief, contained, and dazzling film, Pawlikowski turns the Mann affair into a grand trial of European humanism—of its historical failings and its ruins. [...] The year is 1949. Mann (a monumental Hanns Zischler) returns to Germany for the first time after sixteen years of exile in California. The occasion is the Goethe Prize, awarded to him by the city of Frankfurt—American, Western—on July 25th, coinciding with the bicentenary of the national poet's birth. But Mann will not stop in Frankfurt. Aboard a Buick, he will cross the demarcation line between the two worlds born from the ashes of the Reich and receive the same award in Weimar on August 1st—in the other Germany, the Soviet one. The decision to honor both Germanies without choosing one was, at the time, politically explosive. Western intellectuals—foremost among them Walter von Molo—had implored him not to return at all, urging him not to legitimize Ulbricht’s regime with his presence. Yet the writer remained the man who, ten years earlier, had declared to American journalists: "Where I am, there is Germany." It was not arrogance, but absolute fidelity to a *Kulturnation* that transcended all political borders. [...] With the same rarefied splendor found in *Ida* (2014) and *Cold War* (2018), cinematographer Łukasz Żal captures the Germany of 1949 as a landscape of souls in transit—neither living nor dead. Ruins not yet cleared away, countrysides that have outlived themselves, skies at once oppressive and vast within the same frame. The world of *Fatherland*—in which the Polish director returns to European history as an unresolved realm—seems suspended between embodiment and disappearance. Faces emerge from the semi-darkness like... "...icons of purgatory. The black Buick is a mobile confessional. Pawlikowski measures cinematic space with a spiritual yardstick. Everything is an interior landscape. Stripped-down beauty, evil in slight relief." (Gianluca Arnone)