Nations and Narratives in Fatherland (2026)
In the austere hotel rooms, award ceremonies, and ruined churches of Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland (2026), the author Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika wade through the ravaged landscape of a divided Germany. The year is 1949, and hobbling away from the destruction wrought in the Second World War, the two Germanies must choose narratives upon which to build their identities.
Walking from the cinema through the brightly lit, misty Berlin streets, my parents and I discussed the film. We concluded it was beautifully shot but perhaps lacking in vitality and a strong narrative core. Then my mother asked, “Why make this sort of film now?”
Fatherland, inspired by Mann’s real-life journeys to Frankfurt and Weimar to accept a Goethe Prize for his literary eminence, is about nations and the stories they tell. Or rather, about how and why they tell them. The figureheads of Germany’s literary and cultural history, from Goethe to Wagner, to Mann himself, are rhetorically manoeuvred to construct a postwar German identity and polity that’s both forward-facing and self-referential. Pawlikowski folds the narratives of the Nazi regime, the German Enlightenment, Germanic heroic legend, and modernism into one another. Shall the famed composer and antisemite, Richard Wagner, whose music served as a potent cultural emblem of German identity for the Nazi regime, have his legacy rehabilitated? Shall Gustaf Gründgens, an actor, director, and Nazi collaborator, continue his life as a respected performer, uninhibited by his past alliances? Even Thomas Mann is nothing more than a symbol, manipulated by both East and West Germany in their warring attempts to stake a claim on Germanness.
The film implicates artists of all kinds, perhaps even art itself, in the fascist project. To return to my mother’s question, when a nation’s mythology unravels, someone must be ready (though not necessarily willing) to create a new one. While the alleged phenomenon of a ‘global rise in fascism’ is difficult to define and quantify, and implies a contested, universal baseline of ‘non-fascism,’ there’s certainly something to be said when the electoral politics of ostensibly progressive Western nations are rapidly shifting rightward. Old nationalisms are being revived and imbued with vital cultural relevance. When a nation’s citizens don’t recognise their surroundings, what fragments might they cling to?
Fatherland questions this very reaction. In the film, Nazism is a blight on human life, but fertile soil for Germany’s rich cultural history to find new importance in service of the nation. During the aftermath of the Second World War and the regime’s collapse, that history — the recognisable fragments of a nation’s past, surely lost but essentially untouched by an aberrant ideology — is drenched in the blood spilled by the Nazi regime. Nazism in the film is therefore not so much an event or a period as it is a black hole that warps everything that came before it and followed it in its own image. Perhaps ‘warp’ is the wrong word, since the operas, the actors, and the composers slot so easily into the fascist framework, collapsing any chronological history into a tangled, culpable sum of national identity.
In Fatherland, the artist is no longer the hapless victim of their work’s corruption, but an agreeable, malleable asset. Pawlikowski questions their political neutrality and the identity affirmation they may offer during periods of national and narratological uncertainty. What cultural vestiges are being reworked in the present day and assimilated into a nation-state’s new cycle of mythmaking? Are they worth rehabilitating once this cycle inevitably collapses? Fatherland suggests, “Perhaps not. They were never that blameless to begin with.”
Image from Public Domain Image Archive
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