VATERLAND
82 mins | Age recommendation: 14+
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By Pawel Pawlikowski, with Sandra Hüller, Anna Madeley, August Diehl
After the end of World War II, Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann and his daughter, the actress, author, and cabaret artist Erika, embark on a journey through a Germany in ruins—from Frankfurt in the American occupation zone to Soviet-controlled Weimar. On the occasion of the Goethe anniversary, people on both sides of the inner-German border hope for words of comfort, approval, and forgiveness from the greatest of all storytellers. Amid euphoric Wagner heirs and literarily sophisticated generals, Germany’s most important writer is courted and sometimes even berated, while the drama of his own family quietly escalates. It is the first time since the war that Thomas Mann has returned to his homeland, from which he had once fled into exile. A journey into the wounded German soul, meant to heal—for Erika and “the Magician,” as his children often called Thomas Mann, it becomes a journey into the very depths of their being.