After festival premieres in Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, New York, and London and its selection as Poland’s Oscar entry, Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” is opening in theaters worldwide. The film follows German writer Thomas Mann’s journey through postwar Germany. One of the season’s standout films and a deserving winner of the best director prize at Cannes, it has prompted critics to draw comparisons between Europe in the 1940s and Europe today. Anton Dolin spoke with Pawlikowski about the similarities and differences.
— Would you say “Fatherland” completes a trilogy that began with “Ida” (2013) and “Cold War” (2018)?
— I wish my ideas came together as neatly and logically as film critics imagine! “I think I’ll make a trilogy about postwar Europe, and I’ll shoot it in black and white.”
Back then, “Ida” grew out of a period of confusion and searching, out of my exhaustion with trying to make “normal movies.” Everything irritated me; I wanted to change something. With “Ida,” I felt as though I’d gone back to cinema’s starting point: black-and-white images, static shots, a small budget, minimalism. Those constraints worked beautifully. I found the work easier and more interesting.
That was also when I met Łukasz Żal, who’s now my cinematographer. We immediately knew we were a good fit. That’s how I’ve shot films ever since: I compose every shot like a photograph, don’t show too much, and don’t move the camera unless it’s absolutely necessary. The story and the relationships between the main characters are all that drives the action. It’s a challenge! So is the somewhat contradictory task of making a meticulously composed film in a documentary style. Documentary footage is inherently spontaneous and doesn’t offer the control over framing that I’m after.
— Your new film resembles the previous two in its visual style and period setting, but it’s also different. For the first time, it centers on real people — Thomas Mann and his family — and events that actually happened.
— That came about through a series of coincidences. It started when my German producers sent me a biography of Mann. It was an incredibly absorbing read, but there was no way to turn it into a film — it covered far too much, too many stages of his life and too many events.
Biopics don’t interest me, and I don’t dare take on a TV series. One episode caught my attention: the writer’s trip to Germany in 1949. I started looking for other sources and reading everything I could about it. Thomas’s own diaries and letters, his driver’s memoirs — because on that trip he was actually accompanied by his driver, rather than his daughter Erika. But Erika’s writings proved useful too: there was another trip a year later, this time with her. They went to Weimar for an anniversary celebration in Schiller’s honor.
The research took quite a while. I was drawn to the lives of the Mann family — Erika’s dilemmas, Klaus’s personal drama. And suddenly I decided to try to distill it all into a single road movie, fitting the events that interested me into five days and adding a few important supporting characters from the Manns’ lives.
— Why Thomas Mann in particular?
— During the war, he became a kind of respected institution in his own right. He managed to maintain an impeccable reputation throughout those years. You can’t say that about the early years of Nazism — Mann certainly had things to reproach himself for then.
The situation felt far too familiar to ignore. A system collapses, and aggressive narratives rush to fill the void — each doing everything it can to draw you into its orbit.
Analogies are never exact! Back then, there weren’t any “digital bubbles” with their simplistic agendas, but there were other, rather similar bubbles. Thomas Mann tried to overcome them, to burst them open with universal human values: culture, literature, and the humanist tradition. He was the “good German,” the ideal embodiment of a view from the other side, someone who could offer common ground… Of course, it didn’t work.
But Mann’s story also shows what happens when you have a public mission and something in your personal life that doesn’t quite fit with it (the suicide of his son Klaus — Meduza).
The reasons were, let’s say, historical: Klaus wasn’t just a drug addict but a lost soul — a German without a Germany, a writer without a language he could write and publish in. None of his attempts to write in English succeeded, and he didn’t know whom he was writing his books for. Unlike his father, Klaus was neither an institution nor a Nobel laureate.
Still, you can’t explain it all through external circumstances: there was a tangled web of relationships within the family. Almost a love triangle, with Erika at its center: she loves both her brother and her father, both are very fragile and weak, and she wants to help them both but doesn’t know how.
It turned into something like a Greek tragedy against the tragic backdrop of postwar Europe, divided between two visions of the future, neither of which seemed entirely satisfactory.
— The Cold War seems to be the period that interests you most. Is that only because of the parallels with the present?
— It resonates, of course. There’s no denying that. But what exactly resonates? The world today is too complicated; we can’t fully understand what’s happening around us. I certainly can’t. If only I could read an intelligent book about what’s going on in the world now, written, say, 20 years from now… We’ve ended up in what feels like a science-fiction story.
But I grew up during the Cold War, and it shaped my parents in Soviet-controlled Poland. It’s easier for me to identify with that generation and the political world of my childhood, with “analog people,” with an era of relative clarity. Back then, the West symbolized freedom and liberal values for us, and the Soviet Union meant subjugation. That was clear! I certainly feel some nostalgia for that world, where things were simpler.
— Which particular similarities between that era and today might have influenced the making of “Fatherland”?
— None of it influenced me consciously. It was more a vague feeling that there were already far too many similarities.
Klaus’s opening monologue is very close to how I feel: What can you believe in, what can you hold on to, when you feel as though you’re sinking into quicksand? It’s very personal. So is Thomas’s situation.
For instance, I wasn’t thinking about Putin’s Russia, although Russians keep telling me how interesting and relatable they find the film. Emigrants in particular. But I’m an emigrant myself. I left Poland at 14, lived in Britain, Germany, and France, and spent years not knowing what language to write and make films in, or what audience to address! I went through a Russian phase, too — I was deeply fascinated by the country. That’s passed now, though, for obvious reasons…
— Aren’t you worried that historians and experts will criticize you for inaccuracies and altered facts?
— I don’t pretend that “Fatherland” follows what actually happened step by step. Quite the opposite: the facts are just a framework for my screenplay, and I allow myself as much invention as the plot requires. This film isn’t a reconstruction or a biopic. My conscience is clear.
I still felt uneasy at times, and I consoled myself with the thought that I was trying to capture the emotional truth. For instance, when Klaus killed himself, his father, Thomas, was in Stockholm, not Germany. But he’d gone there to give a lecture on Goethe, and he didn’t change his plans to attend his son’s funeral on the French Riviera. He shut out his emotions, he was angry with Klaus… Erika didn’t go either; she felt paralyzed. I think I portrayed all her dilemmas and inner torment truthfully.
I certainly imagined and invented a lot, but I always started from the truth — except, perhaps, for one thing: No German ever saw Thomas Mann cry.
— What about Mann’s speeches on Goethe? At times they sound almost like parodies in your film, although the texts are authentic.
— There’s a simple reason for that effect: Context matters too. I don’t think Mann’s speeches were ill-timed or foolish at all. He just had no chance of being heard and understood. He was certainly right to invoke “Faust” and utopian ideas about building a new society when addressing East Germany’s pro-Soviet authorities. In Mann’s view, utopia is unattainable because the flaws and risks are already built into the ideal, before anyone even tries to put it into practice.
Still, I think Mann felt more warmly toward his East German readers and listeners. At least they were trying, in their own way, to rid themselves of Nazism and start building a new, fairer society. The West was mired in confusion and chaos; people there weren’t even setting themselves those goals. Don’t forget, Stalinist repression wasn’t common knowledge in Europe at the time.
And here’s another historical fact, though the circumstances were a little different. Mann really was asked to mention the persecution of dissenters in East Germany in his speech, and he decided not to because he thought his mission was something else, something “more significant.”
— How did you end up shooting a film about Germany in Poland?
— We spent a long time choosing locations very carefully and traveled all over Germany. The screenplay was complicated, the budget wasn’t huge, but we needed a certain level of accuracy. We concluded that it would be easier to find the ruins we needed in Poland. Many of them are sets we built ourselves. I’d say the landscape isn’t all that different. We didn’t want to cut archival footage into what we were shooting, and it took work to recreate an authentic setting in front of the camera.
And then… casting, finding extras in the towns and villages where we filmed. That took an especially long time. I didn’t want anyone on screen who looked like someone from today. We needed people from a very, very wide range of social backgrounds, so we put a huge amount of time and money into it. But I believe it worked and really shaped the film’s look and feel. Łukasz Żal is a true painter; he’s extremely exacting, and I’m happy with the result.
— Thomas Mann is an immensely interesting character for a drama — or a comedy. What about as a writer?
— He’s become increasingly important to me over the years. I can’t say I love his work all that much. I have a complicated relationship with the novels.
Five years ago, I finally slogged through “The Magic Mountain.” It all depends on what you value in literature, whether you can enjoy meticulous, elegant, detailed descriptions of human feelings. When I was young, that irritated me; it seemed mannered. But this time I was able to finish it and enjoy it. Still, I rate the novellas more highly — “Tonio Kröger,” “Death in Venice.”
At any rate, I respect Mann as a writer. That just wasn’t what prompted me to make this film. It’s as a central character that he interests me. The language he created for himself in his books became his identity. He hid in a castle of words, and he didn’t deny it. Hiding the truth about himself, including his sexuality, he sublimated it in literature.
— And what’s your relationship with Goethe and Bach — the film’s other points of reference?
— Like Thomas Mann, Goethe lived a very long life and went through many different phases, from the Romantic Sturm und Drang movement and the wave of suicides he inspired to classicism. What Mann revered in him, and tried in his own way to emulate, was that ability to synthesize, to bring different elements together — rather than revel narcissistically in his own development as an artist. To try to understand humanity rather than one particular person, to bring people together rather than divide them: That was his overarching ambition. Thomas Mann thought he could try applying that approach to postwar Germany, drawing on the poet’s wisdom to overcome the weaknesses of different ideologies.
Bach, of course, is also a cornerstone of art, with all his work rooted in his faith and his devotion to the Luther Bible.
Art often confronts us with unbearable questions: Whose side are you on — Stalin’s or Mickey Mouse’s? I understand that those questions are legitimate, but I feel I’d betray myself as an artist if I made that choice and gave up a fuller picture of how the world works. But sometimes that very loyalty to broad truths is a betrayal of yourself, because it can make you lose sight of individual people and their pain.
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Interview by Anton Dolin