Ghosts of Amrum
J. Hoberman
The story of Amrum—a German movie about the last days and immediate aftermath of World War II as experienced by a twelve-year-old boy on the isolated North Sea island from which the film takes its title—is both familiar and exotic. Drawn from the autobiographical writings of the actor and filmmaker Hark Bohm, most familiar for his eleven collaborations with R.W. Fassbinder, it centers on the child’s burgeoning recognition of his parents’ sin. Unable to direct it due to his failing health, Bohm, who died at eighty-six a month after Amrum was released in Germany, entrusted the project to the German-born Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin, whom he had mentored.
Although not without violence, Amrum is less excessive than the movies for which the usually rough-and-tumble Akin is known, like Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007), but it continues his long-standing interest in Germany’s outsiders. The people who populate the island Amrum are Frisian, an ethnic group indigenous to Europe’s northwestern coast, from the Netherlands through Germany to southern Denmark. (They make an appearance in Beowulf warring with the Danes, who held Amrum until Prussia annexed it in the 1860s.) The Frisian language, spoken by an estimated half-million Europeans, is actually closer to Old English than to German. Shot largely on the island where Bohm spent the war, Amrum is apparently the first movie to make extensive use of the North Frisian dialect.
If the location is unusual, the premise is not: children are war’s innocent victims. Germany’s defeat brought a flurry of European films on the subject of war orphans, often playing versions of themselves and sometimes appearing amid the rubble of devastated cities. The Italian neorealist films Shoeshine (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948) are best known, but the cycle includes the Hungarian and East German equivalents Somewhere in Europe (1947) and Somewhere in Berlin (1946); the last Yiddish-language film made in Poland, Our Children (1946); and the later, more polished French feature Forbidden Games (1952). All were produced in countries that suffered civilian losses; considering their casts, all but Forbidden Games might be considered psychodramas.
A second wave of movies about childhood wartime experiences appeared around the time of the war’s fortieth anniversary. Based on autobiographical material, these were sometimes directed by the actual children grown to adulthood. The greatest example is the Soviet director Elem Klimov’s harrowing Come and See (1985), which shows the horrors of Nazi-occupied Byelorussia through the eyes of a traumatized fourteen-year-old. More obviously retro are three films from 1987—John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, and Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, based on J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel—and, some fifteen years later, the Holocaust survivor Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (based on Władysław Szpilman’s memoir). Two Japanese anime from the same late-Eighties moment—Barefoot Gen (adapted in 1983 from the manga classic Gen of Hiroshima) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988)—are in a class by themselves.
Amrum may be the last of these memory films. An idyllic, insular realm of beach grass, sand dunes, and thatched roof cottages, the Amrum of April 1945 is nevertheless besieged and divided. British bombers fly low overhead, heading home after dropping their payloads on Hamburg. A dead sailor of indeterminate nationality washes up on the beach. Food staples run short, and so do tempers.
Native Amrumers are suspicious even of those resident “mainlanders” with island roots. The local kids resent and reject the refugee German children relocated from Poland in advance of the Red Army. The local bigshots are Nazis, while their neighbors and even family members harbor a sullen hostility to the regime, or at least to “Hitler’s war”—in part because they have immigrant relatives fighting in the US army. Since the decline of the whaling industry that supported the island for centuries, its men have gone abroad to find work. As one islander points out, there are more Amrumers in New York than on Amrum.
Bohm’s stand-in, Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), is the son of a German officer (a former professor with an interest in eugenics), born in Hamburg but boarding in his mother Hille’s ancestral home. (The imposing house seen in the film, with an entrance gate fashioned from colossal whale bones, was actually found in southern Denmark.) Nanning belongs to the Jungvolk, a junior version of the Hitler Youth; Hille (Laura Tonke), who at one point defends her ethnic purity by citing nine generations of forebears living on the island, is a Nazi fanatic. When the boy innocently repeats a comment made by the potato farmer for whom he works (Diane Kruger) suggesting Germany’s imminent defeat, Hille sees that the woman receives a threatening visit from a Nazi group leader, explaining to her son that “backstabbers need to be punished.” Consequently Nanning is ostracized from the farm as a “rat.” The sense of free-floating persecution is mirrored both by the schoolchildren who taunt the “Polish” kids and by Hille’s implied hatred of Jews—her cousin, now gone to America, had a girlfriend whom she and her husband denounced and sent to her death in a concentration camp.
Hille is heavily (and allegorically) pregnant. When, on April 30, the radio reports news of the Führer’s demise, she goes into labor and gives birth, after which she sinks into a deep depression. Her despairing cry—“What kind of a world is this for a child to grow up in?”—is the question with which Nanning is already grappling. Hille refuses any food but a slice of white bread with butter and honey. All three are by this point rare commodities, and her son embarks on a quest to secure them, first across Amrun and then over the mud flats to his Nazi uncle on the neighboring island of Föhr.
Each item requires an additional test—Nanning must beg, steal, or kill so as to acquire something else to barter—as well as help from a kind or exploitative adult. Other obstacles also need to be overcome, be they a group of starving refugee children who seek to mug him or the incoming tide between Föhr and Amrum. Making the flooded crossing, Nanning sacrifices his aunt’s bicycle but protects a sugar bowl by holding it aloft like liberty’s torch.
Amrum is typically described as a coming-of-age story, but it is also a children’s adventure narrative in the manner of a Grimms’ folk tale predicated on “the difficult task” (die schweren Aufgaben). The kicker belongs to a subset of these stories wherein the powerful figure who has tested the protagonist reneges on their promise. “We lost the war because of crybabies like you,” Hille tells her returning hero. “Be a man!” Nor is that the final word.
As it happens, my own family by marriage also has World War II–era ties to Amrum. This story, like Akin’s film, has elements of a German volksmärchen. Adopted at birth, my wife was raised as Shelley Katowitz in a largely Jewish, working-class neighborhood of the Bronx. A fairy tale might refer to her as a foundling. She looked nothing like her parents, who were sometimes asked, not necessarily unkindly, where they got “the shikse.”
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Unrequited Love
A New Seminar Series with Daniel Mendelsohn
Author, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn follows the theme of unrequited love in works by Homer, Sappho, Dante, Goethe, Jane Austen, W. Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, and more.
“Thou lov’st me not, / And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will. / Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot, / To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.” So writes Lord Byron in “Love and Death”, describing a phenomenon that (alas!) most of us have experienced—and, more to the point, that has inspired some of the most brilliant and wrenching works of literature. In this five-part NYRSeminars season, we will be examining the phenomenon of unrequited love throughout its evolution as a subject in Western literature. We will begin with the classics, examining texts by Homer, Sappho, the tragedians and the Latin love elegists, and then move to the Middle Ages and early modern period, reading works by Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare in which the poets address themselves to cruelly unresponsive women. From there we will segue to the novel, which takes over as the preeminent vehicle for examining hopeless love: from Goethe and Jane Austen to Somerset Maugham and Marcel Proust.
