The Spiritual Corpse of Thomas Mann

Admittedly, Thomas Mann was 74 years old when, in 1949, he embarked on his first journey to Germany – recounted in "Fatherland" – to receive a West German Goethe Prize in Frankfurt and an East German Goethe Prize in Weimar. But was he really the whingeing, insufferable old man portrayed in Paweł Pawlikowski’s film, which won Best Director at Cannes? According to Luca Crescenzi’s chronology in the Mondadori Meridiani series (Novels, 2 vols., 1398 and 1568 pp., 80 euros each), the reality was quite the opposite: in 1951 he wrote The Chosen One, and in 1954 The Confessions of Felix Krull, Industrialist. The following year, Mann died at the age of eighty, yet Fatherland seems to foreshadow his death by some time, so that it is the corpse – albeit still capable of breathing – of the great author that is driven around Germany by his all-too-patient daughter Erika.

It is, first and foremost, a spiritual corpse: the Mann portrayed by Hanns Zischler is a grumpy old man who bears no resemblance to the wit that would characterise the two later novels – the story of a saintly Pope born in the Middle Ages from a chivalrous act of incest, and of a roguish adventurer who blends into the upper middle class. It is also a literary corpse: in around an hour and a half of film, which follows him almost right up to his retirement, Mann is never shown reading or writing anything other than stony-faced speeches to be delivered before astonished crowds – or, I fear, crowds as sleepy as the cinema-goer who happened to be sitting next to me at the cinema. Setting aside the German acting, which invariably carries an Inspector Derrick-like aura, the film succumbs to two enduring preconceptions about writers. The first is that literature, like culture in general, is inherently solemn and grave; otherwise, it is deemed insufficiently serious. God forbid, then, that Mann should pick up a pen and enjoy himself. The second is that the lives of authors are inherently dull, and a film that portrayed them realistically would be even more soporific, as it would depict a man sitting for hours on end reading and writing. This is, in essence, what the poet Axel Martini also observes in another of Mann’s ironic gems, Royal Highness: one might conclude that Pawlikowski either has not read it or fell asleep while doing so.