Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
HEre is an impossible, static picture whose brevity and control can’t contain human suffering and history. It is directed and written by a Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski and shot in brilliant monochrome by Lukasz Zal; it is a film about exile and betrayal, the impossibility of going home and reconciling the artist’s children to become more important.
What happened in 1949 and a German novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann – who fled the Nazis before the war in California and became a US citizen – has returned home, visiting for the first time in Frankfurt (now in West Germany) to receive the prize named after Goethe, whose place of birth. It is Goethe’s social philosophy and political skill that Mann will articulate in many of his speeches.
Mann, brilliantly played by Hanns Zischler, is accompanied by his long-suffering older daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller); he is received with enthusiasm and, given his importance, offered the CIA contract. But he confuses and embarrasses his hosts by explaining his intention to receive a second prize in Weimar, where Goethe lived, but which is now in the communist east and perhaps tainted by its association with the chaotic state of Weimar that gave rise to the Nazis. Mann greets the communist authorities there and leaves the same in an unknown state.
In this way, Mann apparently wants to float in history – and maybe he can float away from America after the war that he will not have in common – to travel to the west and the east of Europe, to appear in all the successful areas and to avoid the political decision on our arrival. But while this is happening, Erika – played with a common bayonet of wisdom by Hüller – is painful. She misses her beloved brother Klaus (August Diehl), who is also an exiled American writer suffering from depression and drug addiction. (The movie opens with a sad, poetic song about loneliness between Erika and Klaus as they talk on the phone.) Later, in the middle of Thomas Mann’s visit, he and Erika receive some terrible news about Klaus – news that Thomas reluctantly wants to ignore and continue on his journey of success.
And it’s Klaus who takes center stage unexpectedly. His book Mephisto is about a vain actor who sells out to the Nazis – and was more politically courageous than Thomas – and it comes from Erika’s ex-husband, the actor and head of Göring Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff), who fearlessly shows himself at Thomas’s party. in Soviet prison. Gründgens is also trying to fight Erika, who punches him in the face, as Thomas in another part of the room tells Wagner’s grandchildren that he has no intention of supporting the return of the Bayreuth festival and says that his stadium should be burned down.
This political anger could not remove what would become the “Mephisto problem” that was growing in Thomas’s own life. It wasn’t that he would now think that he had neglected Klaus, or that his fame had caused Klaus to lose confidence in himself; it’s because Klaus’s giant creature despises him. Able to walk freely through the iron curtain, he can feel above any Mephisto-type marketing to the Americans or the Soviets, but then where is his commitment? That Germanyindeed, but the Germany which was the root of his (and Goethe’s) greatness is gone; Germany is dead and perhaps Mann himself, with his American passport, is now a ghost.
At a press conference in Frankfurt, Mann was criticized by a German journalist for not choosing the option of “internal migration” within Germany – i.e. enduring brutality – rather than leaving the country. Mann does not answer that “emigration” is a good myth of post-war Germany, but he directly states that without emigration he would not have survived. However the methods of the film, which was deeply affected by the tragedy of his son, is that survival itself is questioned. Perhaps Mann feels that the German national spirit has not survived – disturbed by geopolitical divisions, political politics, the cold war and the negative memory of the Nazis – and that its language and culture were corrupted, as described in books such as Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil and George Steiner’s Language and Silence.
It is Bach’s music that is supposed to bring a measure of redemption and emotional release to father and daughter, but Pawikowski offers nothing dramatic or dramatic in this picture.
