Fatherland Review: The Good German

The 2026 midterm elections have raised a certain hope in America: that the last half century of a rising tide of right-wing extremism and a nascent dictatorship cannot only be defeated but can be ended. The question now is, what’s next?

That’s an issue of national identity, a concern shared with Fatherland. In this historical drama, director Paweł Pawlikowski completes what can loosely be called his Cold War trilogy that began with 2014’s Oscar-winning Ida and continued in 2019 with the Cannes-lauded and Oscar-nominated Cold War. The connecting thread – beyond the silvery cinematography of Lukasz Zal – is how Pawlikowski looks at that era as a continuation of the damage and boundary shifts inflicted by World War II, and shows that the political is always personal.

He also does this from a profoundly Central European perspective. After two films that came at that issue through primarily Polish stories, this time he heads directly to the wreckage of the Reich, and the challenges facing German émigrés returning to the country they fled.

In Fatherland, postwar German identity is summed up in the fractious relationships between the real-life Manns, arguably the most important literary family in 20th century Germany. If you don’t know that, Fatherland may seem a little obtuse, since much of the subtext is about the Manns and their place in German culture. More accessibly for those not well-versed in the publication history of Lotte in Weimar, it focuses on Nobel-winning patriarch Thomas (Hanns Zischler) and his eldest children: his daughter/driver/secretary, Erika (Sandra Hüller), and his dissolute and alienated son, Klaus (August Diehl). Cigarette-smoke thin, Klaus’ unrelenting stare pierces both father and sister, cursing and indicting their bonds even as Erika clashes with her father over whether Germany can ever be redeemed.

In the divided climate of 1949, every word is loaded with meaning. Even a commonplace term like fatherland – can it ever be free from the pollution of how the Nazis adopted it? Almost as mortifying is when people are oblivious to the terms they are using, as evidenced by Thomas’ tiny wince at an American journalist’s mangling of Goethe’s name. 

The evocation of the Faust author and that tiny act of misreading is key to Pawlikowski’s exploration of art as a cultural and political football. After decades as a refugee in the U.S., Thomas is in Germany to receive not one but two Goethe awards – one in American-held Frankfurt, the other in Russian-occupied Weimar. Who owns art, Pawlikowski asks, and can an artist be held accountable for the actions of their fans? This becomes pertinent not only in the bleak comedy of the rival Goethe prizes, but in a scene in which the grandsons of Richard Wagner, Wieland (Enno Trebs) and Wolfgang (Theo Trebs), implore Thomas to support their quest for his cultural rehabilitation. Why should a man who died six years before Hitler was born be forever smeared as the Führer’s favorite composer?

There are no easy answers, as summed up in a champagne-fueled showdown between Erika and the vulpine Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff), her ex-husband, Klaus’ ex-lover, and Gestapo leader Hermann Göring’s favorite actor. Meanwhile, her aging idealist father struggles to hold on to the idea of the Good Germany while both East and West try to use him for their own propaganda purposes. In mirroring scenes, he delivers the text of his famous “Goethe and Democracy” speech on both sides of the divided Germany, to very different receptions, neither of which is what he hopes for.

The Academy ratio of Zal’s camera gives Fatherland a sullen claustrophobia, and for most of its brief duration Fatherland feels smaller and slighter than either Ida or Cold War, two films that were driven by wit and passion. Fatherland is far more cerebral and cold because its central figures have to be diplomatic. Thomas’ cross-border travels only happen at the whim of the superpowers, and much as he may roll his eyes at the Ugly Americans in the audience, he’s no more enraptured by the heavy-handed cultural seductions attempted by his welcoming Soviet hosts. If you’ve heard one military choir over dinner …

Yet this understatement is merely prelude to one of the most stunning and meaningful scenes in Pawlikowski’s already spectacular career. It’s a quiet moment that cuts through the horror and manipulation, one that liberates both the artist and the audience to say that maybe the most political act of all when it comes to art is to be free to appreciate it.

Fatherland

2026, NR, 82 min. Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. Starring Hanns Zischler, Sandra Hüller, August Diehl, Joachim Meyerhoff, Enno Trebs, Theo Trebs.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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