An elegant, eighty-two-minute slice of Thomas Mann’s visit to a divided Germany in the summer of 1949, Fatherland (2026) is disguised as a literary biopic. Mann travels to Germany with his daughter Erika to accept two parallel Goethe prizes: the first from Frankfurt, the second from Weimar. This is the first time he has been to Germany since fleeing for Switzerland in 1933, and Hanns Zischler plays the novelist’s fragile grandeur with melancholic sincerity. Nevertheless, it is Erika Mann, played by Sandra Hüller, who is the film’s true star and subject. Her disappointment with the Germans she encounters—in turns shockingly unrepentant, or stunned to silence—sets the film’s tone, and her venomous jabs furnish its moments of levity. Through her eyes we see how deep the gulf separating Thomas Mann’s personality from what he had come to mean for others is, the planet of his fame being very remote from the fatherland of his family relations. The absurdity of becoming a figurehead for anything is redoubled by the two Germanies, their competing awards and nascent political systems, which together seemed to describe the world itself until one of them disappeared and the world moved on.

In a scene towards the end of the film, Thomas Mann is giving the second of the two acceptance speeches, for the Goethe National Prize awarded to him by the German Democratic Republic. Amidst increasingly strained mentions of dialectics inserted at the behest of Sergei Tulpanov, the director of propaganda for the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, Erika slips out of the auditorium. She wanders around Weimar and into an overgrown cemetery, her gaze finally resting on a faceless statue. In the next scene, Thomas Mann is startled by a photographer’s flash as he’s contemplating Goethe’s death mask. It seems as if he might have realized that, although he walks among the living, he is already wearing his own death mask, having become a figurehead and a legitimating authority for postwar German culture. But could he possibly have realized this? Or, is it a trick of the light, visible only to our eyes?

It is through Erika’s that we see most of this, and it’s the looks she gives that pose this movie’s animating questions. By giving his speeches to both sides, is Thomas Mann speaking to the contradiction of Germany divided between two antagonistic blocks? Or is he indifferent to the distinction, being concerned most of all with his own legacy? The film suggests the choice between the Americans and the Soviets is based on a false premise—a choice between “Joseph Stalin or Mickey Mouse,” as Klaus Mann quips in an earlier scene, in more colorful words than his father could conjure. In the most pessimistic reading of this story, Thomas Mann comes across as an empty canister, a living visage of his own death mask. But whether one sees this as a characteristic of his singular temperament, as an indictment of the liberal politics he stood for, or a condition general to the aging intellectual, is a choice the film leaves open to the viewer. This film is, on one level, about the difference between nuance and indifference. Liberal political thought has always, and continues to be, structured by this fuzzy distinction.