Corey Robin at his own website:
Fatherland, the new Paweł Pawlikowski film about Thomas Mann’s 1949 trip to Germany, may be the most powerful film about the current moment—really, the last ten years—that I’ve seen. It’s not about the current moment at all, in fact. It’s about Mann’s olympian, and doomed, effort to remain a man of culture, a voice of liberal civilization, in the face of that civilization’s total collapse. In other words, it’s about the current moment.
As Thomas and his daughter, Erika Mann, played by the brilliant Sandra Hüller, tour a Germany divided in two and still struggling to get back on its feet, they confront the detritus of the barbarism that has consumed Europe and the gentility of the collaborators who helped bring that barbarism about. The relationship of the Manns to those collaborators is personal: one is an ex-husband of Erika, another two (the grandchildren of Richard Wagner) look to Thomas as their patron saint and potential savior.
More here.
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