On the Road With Thomas Mann: Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is a postwar period piece mapping a Germany whose broken halves reflect distorted mirror images: Prosperity and austerity signify twin existential crises. The convivial capitalist surfaces of the West betray guilt and uncertainty as surely as the surveillance state of the East. In hotel staterooms and military checkpoints, in empty cafés and crumbling cathedrals, doublespeak proliferates and doppelgängers abound.
“You and your father make a great double act,” exclaims an onlooker to Erika Mann (Sandra Hüller), the eldest daughter and traveling companion of Nobel laureate Thomas (Hanns Zischler). The latter is enjoying celebrity status in his homeland with glitzy speaking engagements on either side of the Berlin Wall. After 16 years in the United States, he’s being welcomed warmly in both precincts under the sign of Goethe, whose 200th birthday provides the pretext for an all-in celebration of homegrown genius, framed by existential questions about the Heimat. Meanwhile, the household axiom of Erika’s childhood—that “Little Erika must salt the soup”—has made her a woman-for-all-season(ings): sounding board, translator at press conferences, wardrobe coordinator, hairstyling consultant, substitute spouse. Also some light typing and the occasional denial (on her father’s behalf) of Communist sympathies. You know what they say: Behind every great Mann …
It’s not as if Erika is wired for self-effacement. As her journalist pal—and probable ex-lover—Betty (Anna Madeley) reminds her during a reception in Frankfurt, Erika is herself an accomplished writer, the author of School for Barbarians, as well as a pacifist, actress, war correspondent, and anti-fascist crusader. In 1932, Erika sued a German newspaper for libel for calling her a “flat-footed peace hyena”; a year later, she fled to Switzerland and got a British passport through her husband-of-convenience W.H. Auden. (The film leaves these exploits off-screen, along with her subsequent harassment in the United States by zealous witch-hunters in the FBI.) Suffice it to say… https://newrepublic.com/article/216355/pawlikowski-fatherland-film-road-thomas-mann