Sandra Hüller as Erika, Thomas Mann's daughter[Missing Credit]
While the film will likely shine a spotlight once more on Mann, famed for The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, Pawlikowski first discovered him in his teens, when he was living in Germany. “I actually did my abitur in Germany, so Thomas Mann...I had to bloody read him! I wasn’t terribly excited by his writing when I was young, I preferred more visceral, emotional writing. Now, with age, I admire it more and more.”
The project began after he was sent a biography of Mann, who fled to Switzerland when Hitler came to power and moved to the United States when the Second World War broke out. Pawlikowski had no desire to create a full-blown biopic, but there was one incident that drew his attention: Mann’s return to Germany in 1949, after 16 years in exile, to collect the Goethe Prize.
Pawlikowski freely admits he has played fast and loose with history. It was not Erika who drove Mann in his Buick across Germany, but a chauffeur. Likewise, his son Klaus’ suicide, which features in the film, happened three months earlier, when Mann was in Stockholm. “I threw in a lot of stuff, and then started fusing it and distilling,” he
shrugs. The road trip was also reduced to just five days, but it was enough to create an impressionistic look at “the break-up [and] division of Germany”.
Beginning with a stunning sweeping shot through Frankfurt, Fatherland isn’t simply a glorious-looking time-capsule, but a film that explores the aftermath of the twentieth century’s most defining moment.
“The past is a battlefield now for people reinterpreting it,” he says. “Whereas what I did is...I showed that it’s complicated. I showed it through humans who are steeped in it and who are conflicted, and who are not there to illustrate some kind of theory.”
Pawlikowski’s own past is equally fascinating. His mother Zula was a Catholic-raised ballet dancer from an upper-middle class family. She was only 17 when she met his father, Wiktor, a doctor. “He was ten years older. She was a hot-headed girl who ran away from home…it was very romantic,” he says. Yet it was a relationship destined for trouble. “Even before me, they started betraying each other. My father was the major culprit because he was a womaniser. She was only young and looked up to him. When she discovered what he was up to, she gave as good as she got.”
Curiously, his father never talked about his roots. As Pawlikowski recently told the New Yorker, when he was young,“I didn’t have a clue my father was actually Jewish.” Only in his teens did he discover that his grandmother – his father’s mother – had been murdered in Auschwitz. Born in 1957, Pawlikowski’s own experience of antisemitism came in the late Sixties, as Władysław Gomułka, the leader of Poland’s Communist Party, scapegoated Polish Jews in a desperate cling to power.
Many left the country including his father, a departure that tore his family apart. Two years later, Pawlikowski and his mother departed Poland for a year-long spell in Britain– where many years later Pawlikowski would make his first two features, Last Resort and My Summer of Love, the film that gave Emily Blunt her first role.
“I didn’t even know I was staying. It was a holiday – a holiday I never came back from. London I loved – it was very exciting. I was into rock’n’roll. But then I ended up going to some bizarre school for Polish expatriates near Henley-on-Thames. That was a nightmare.”
Pawlikowski relocated to Wuppertal, Germany, where his father had settled. Both his father and mother had remarried, but eventually Zula followed him to reunite the family. “Exile does something…you have these other partners,” he says. “Maybe infatuations or a comfortable relationship with somebody who is local, then you realise they never understand you as well as this other person, with whom you have a shared past together. You know where you come from. Not in a patriotic, mystical [way]. But common experience.”
After returning to England to further his studies (including a spell at Oxford for a Ph.D on the poet Georg Trakl), he eventually ditched academia and wound up at the BBC in the late Eighties, where he began to make documentaries for the show Bookmark. It was around this time he met his late wife Irina, who sadly died in 2006, leaving Pawlikowski to put his career on pause and look after their two children (he returned to directing with 2011’s The Woman In The Fifth, starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas).
Post Ida, Pawlikowski’s success has seen him celebrated as one of world cinema’s finest. But how hard it is to mount such a personal film these days? “The budgets are shrinking,” he acknowledges. Now the industry is “totally science-based”, with film financing conducted by algorithmic calculations, based on cast, director, subject matter and aesthetics. “When people see a black-and-white thing on streamers, they run away,” he explains. “You make it in black-and-white, you have to take the [budgetary] hit, and it’s unstoppable.”
He seems accepting of this situation, perhaps knowing there’s little he can do. “With each year it’s less, and they say, ‘Oh, look, Brady Corbet made a film in Hungary for $10 million,’” he half-jokes, referring to Corbet’s three-hour epic The Brutalist which saw Adrien Brody win an Oscar for playing a Jewish-Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor. “So that suddenly that becomes the [bar].”
Whatever he does next, the chances are it will be set in the past, if only to teach us about the present. “I’m really attracted to history as a living thing, and the fact that it’s actually quite complicated,” he says. “The more you look at it, the more complicated it gets. Nowadays we have the opposite problem. Well, I mean, life is super complicated, but most people just plug into a narrative, and then everything makes total sense…which scares the hell out of me.”
Fatherland is in cinemas from today
