Pawel Pawlikowski's "Fatherland" is one of the most anticipated films among the 21 titles vying for the prestigious Palme d'Or this year. 

The Polish filmmaker returns to Cannes after winning the festival's best director award in 2018 with "Cold War." The historical romantic drama set between Communist Poland and Paris went on to win the top European Film Awards and earn multiple Oscar nominations.

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 Hüller), as they travel in a Buick from Frankfurt in West Germany to Weimar in East Germany, in 1949.

According to the synopsis of the film, "Fatherland" also explores "themes of identity, guilt, family and love, amid the turmoil and moral confusion of postwar Europe."

While Pawel Pawlikowski declined to give an interview to DW before the Cannes premiere of his film, the biographical work's storyline is already sparking renewed interest in the iconic Mann family. 

What defined the relationship between Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika? How did the prominent exiled family of intellectuals view postwar Germany — and how did the Germans perceive the Manns? And why was the year 1949 particularly important for them?

Thomas Mann's iconic legacy

Thomas Mann, 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, fled Germany in 1933 due to the Nazis' rise to power. During his exile years (1933-1952), which he spent primarily in Switzerland and the United States, he became a prominent voice against Nazism. 

Having established his renown with novels including "Buddenbrooks" (1901) and "The Magic Mountain" (1924), Thomas Mann became a prominent critic of fascism during Hitler's rule, securing his legacy as a key 20th-century democratic intellectual.

Most famously, Mann's "Deutsche Hörer!" (Listen, Germany!) series of speeches, delivered via the BBC between 1940 and 1945 during his exile in the US, document his resistance work.

A particular bond with his daughter Erika

When Thomas Mann's first child was born in 1905, he openly expressed his disappointment that it was a girl: A son would have been "more poetic, more of a continuation, a new beginning of myself," he wrote in a letter to his brother, Heinrich Mann.

"And yet this daughter, among his six children, became the most important one for the father's poetic and political endeavors," says Irmela von der Lühe, author of a biography on Erika Mann.

Indeed, Erika played an influential role in getting her father to actively speak out against the Nazi regime in early 1936. Though he was a known opponent of Nazism as early as 1930, the novelist had remained publicly silent on the topic once Hitler took power; Erika threatened to break ties with her "un-emancipated father" if he didn't drop this cautious approach.

"She had personally clashed with the Nazis very early on," von der Lühe tells DW.

A child of the Roaring Twenties and a talented cultural figure in Berlin, Erika Mann embraced the era's bohemian and experimental lifestyle — until she realized that her generation should have invested more energy in protecting the progressive rights and freedom they enjoyed under the Weimar Republic's democratic constitution. 

The year before Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, Erika was denounced by the Nazis' paramilitary militia for having publicly read a pacifist poem. It affected her acting career and contributed to strengthening her anti-fascist convictions.

In January 1933, Erika Mann co-founded a political cabaret called Die Pfeffermühle (The Peppermill) in Munich. She wrote most of its material; the satirical pieces were often anti-fascist. After two months, the Nazis closed the theater company, and forced the ensemble into exile.

Through their mother, Katia Mann, who came from a wealthy Jewish industrialist family, the Mann children were also considered Jewish under Nazi racial laws.

In exile, Erika Mann took on a second successful career as a reporter and author, aiming to warn the world about how quickly democracy had broken down under Hitler, despite Germany's renown as being "the land of poets and thinkers."

"That's what I've always found significant about her, and which in my eyes is, unfortunately, very relevant again today," says von der Lühe.

What happened in 1949

Just four years after the end of World War II, Germany was still in ruins, and ideologically divided: October 7, 1949 marked the official establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a new socialist state based on the postwar Soviet Occupation Zone in East Germany.

After the war, Thomas Mann announced that he would not be returning to live in his home country. He argued in his publications that all Germans shared responsibility for Nazi crimes; this theory of German collective guilt alienated those who had remained in Germany. After all, didn't the Mann family spend all those years living comfortably in exile, while so many others suffered under Hitler? 

Thomas Mann returned to Germany for the first time since his exile for a visit in 1949, as part of the celebrations marking the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He was invited to receive the Goethe Prize in the West German city of Frankfurt, while the East German city of Weimar offered him an honorary citizenship and the Goethe National Prize .

In a speech he delivered in both cities, Mann noted that he did not recognize any ideological divisions or occupation zones: "My visit is for Germany itself, for Germany as a whole," he said.

But Erika condemned the project. Irmela von der Lühe notes that the invitation was even at the center of the second major falling-out between Erika and Thomas Mann, after their disagreement about taking a public stance against the Nazis in 1936. Erika felt that her father shouldn't go "to a country where he had been so viciously attacked in the media in recent years," explains the Mann expert.

Those attacks included threatening letters from West Germans; the 1949 Germany visit was under police protection.

Complicating matters, it was also the year Klaus Mann committed suicide. The second child of Thomas and Katia Mann, Klaus was also a committed anti-fascist author, and Erika had been exceptionally close to him.

Among the many factors that contributed to Klaus' profound disillusionment was the way he had been treated in the US, where the Manns were suspected of being communists. Erika felt Thomas Mann's celebrated stop in Weimar would be perceived as legitimizing communism.

Even though Pawel Pawlikowskli's "Fatherland" is based on existing historical figures, its premise is completely fictional. During his well-documented journey from Frankfurt to Weimar, Thomas Mann was accompanied by his wife, Katia. Erika didn't join them — because she had deliberately decided to boycott the tour of their former home country.  

Edited by: Sarah Hucal