#thomas-mann

#thomas-mann

The movie confronts Germany's post-World War II trauma in a family road movie centered on three characters: the Nobel Laureate novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), his daughter and assistant Erika (Hüller), and his son Klaus (August Diehl). The movie kicks off with a bravura five-and-a-half minute locked off single take of Klaus in Cannes, sitting naked on the floor by a bed with a sleeping young man.

Pawel Pawlikowski's new film is another exploration of the early Cold War period. It's framed as a road movie undertaken by Thomas Mann (played by Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Huller), as they travel in a Buick from Frankfurt in West Germany to Weimar in East Germany, in 1949.

Morten Hi Jensen's approachable and informative study of The Magic Mountain positions Mann as a writer who was contradictory to his core: an artist who dressed and behaved like a businessman; a homosexual in a conventional marriage with six children; an upstanding burgher obsessed with death and corruption. Very much the kind of man who would send someone a book and tell them not to read it.