Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain. It is directed and co-written by the Polish film-maker Paweł Pawlikowski and shot in lustrous monochrome by Lukasz Zal; it is a film about exile and betrayal, the impossibility of going home and of reconciling an artist’s children to their secondary importance.

The setting is 1949 and the celebrated German novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann – who fled the Nazis before the war for California exile and US citizenship – has returned home, first visiting Frankfurt (now in West Germany) to receive an award named after Goethe, whose birthplace this is. It is Goethe’s enlightened civilised wisdom and apolitical artistry Mann will pointedly evoke in his many elaborate speeches.

Mann, played with withdrawn politeness by Hanns Zischler, is accompanied by his long-suffering grownup daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller); he is received with rapturous acclaim and, given his importance, assigned a CIA liaison. But he disconcerts and embarrasses his hosts by expressing his intention to accept a second award in Weimar, where Goethe actually lived, but which is now in the communist East and perhaps tainted by its association with the chaotic Weimar republic that ushered in the Nazis. Mann greets the communist apparatchiks’ acclaim there with the same diplomatically opaque withdrawal.

In this way, Mann evidently aspires to float free from history – and in all probability to float free from that postwar America with which he can hardly have less in common – to straddle Europe’s west and east, to make an appearance in both victorious zones and to avoid a partisan political choice in this homecoming. But while this is happening, Erika – played with the usual bayonet of intelligence by Hüller – is an anguish. She deeply misses her adored brother Klaus (August Diehl), who is also a writer in American exile and suffering from depression and drug dependency. (The film in fact begins with a bleak, prose-poetic duet of loneliness between Erika and Klaus as they speak to each other on the phone.) Later, halfway through Thomas Mann’s visit, he and Erika receive some terrible news about Klaus – news that Thomas grimly intends to ignore and carry on with his triumphal tour.

And it is Klaus who takes centre stage unexpectedly. His novel Mephisto is about a vain actor who sells out to the Nazis – and so was arguably bolder in his real-life political engagement than Thomas ever cared to be – and was based on Erika’s ex-husband, the actor and Göring courtier Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff), who brazenly shows up to the Frankfurt party to celebrate Thomas with a self-pitying tale about his brief stay in a Soviet prison. Gründgens also presumes to attempt banter with Erika, who slaps his face, just as Thomas in another part of the room is telling Wagner’s oleaginous grandchildren that he has no intention of supporting the return of the Bayreuth festival and says its theatre should be burned to the ground.

This rare flash of political temper cannot erase what is to become the growing “Mephisto crisis” in Thomas’s own life. It isn’t simply that he might now feel that he neglected Klaus, or that his own colossal prestige inevitably eroded Klaus’s own writerly self-belief; it is that Klaus’s great creation reproaches him. Able to move freely across the iron curtain, he can feel he is above any Mephisto-type sellout to the Americans or the Soviets, but then where is his commitment? To Germany, of course, but the Germany that was the root of his greatness (and that of Goethe) is gone; Germany is dead and perhaps Mann himself, with his American passport, is now a ghost.

At a Frankfurt press conference, Mann is reproached by one German correspondent for not having chosen the martyred path of “internal emigration” within Germany – ie mutely enduring the tyranny – rather than leaving the country. Mann does not reply that “internal emigration” is Germany’s convenient postwar myth, but crisply says that without leaving he would not have survived. Yet the film’s pathos, brought into a sharper focus by his son’s heartbreaking fate, is that survival itself is called in to question. Perhaps Mann senses that Germany’s national spirit has not survived – compromised by geopolitical division, partisan politics, cold war acrimony and the terrible memory of the Holocaust – and that its language and culture have been therefore contaminated, as suggested in books such as Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil and George Steiner’s Language and Silence.

It is the music of Bach that is to bring some measure of redemption and emotional release for both father and daughter, but Pawlikowski does not offer anything emollient or elegiac in this taut, literate picture.