Fatih Akin's Amrum Reveals a Forgotten Wartime Island Story

The North Sea island of Amrum can be a childhood paradise. This is evident in the film, which avoids the pomp and circumstance of costume film aesthetics. The island is portrayed with great respect, with the sky, the sea, the endless beach, the Kniepsand, the waves, the birds, the grass in the dunes bending in the wind, and the **Öömrang**, the unique Friesian dialect spoken only on Amrum. The actors have taken meticulous language lessons. However, Amrum, the focus of the story, is far from a childhood paradise at this time, due to the war, which has long since sent its effects to North Friesland, as shown in the film's vivid images. Allied bomber squadrons fly over the island, a drowned pilot is washed up on the beach, and refugees arrive. The Red Army is fifty kilometers from Berlin. The island's harsh, weather-beaten, and life-hardened nature is reflected in the faces of the actors, such as Diane Kruger as Tessa, a farmer who plows with a horse, and Detlev Buck as a fisherman who simply answers 'Yes' when asked if he's afraid of the sea. The wind, the tides, World War II, and the last days of Nazism form the backdrop, but the emotional core of the film is something else: the love of a twelve-year-old boy, Nanning, for his mother, who is a convinced Nazi. The film 'Amrum' is directed by Fatih Akin and stars Jasper Billerbeck, Laura Tonke, among others. Germany 2025, 100 minutes. In cinemas from 9.10. It shows how difficult it has been for the West German society to face the fact that their own ancestors were involved with the Nazis, as seen in surveys where people claim their grandfather was not a Nazi. The mother in the film is definitely one. When she hears that farmer Hille has called the war 'a piece of shit', she reports it to the NS local group leader as 'undermining military strength'. After the war is lost, she is desperate: 'In what world will my children live now?!' The scene that could have easily gone wrong is when this mother mourns the death of Adolf Hitler. She believes in the Nazi worldview that saw the Frisians, the Nordic people, as the archetype of the Aryan race. Her sister, who did not share this belief, is called a 'nihilist'. After the collapse of the 'Third Reich', she falls into a deep depression while Nanning tries to fill the role of the provider. The film is based on the memories of director Hark Bohm, who wanted to make it his last film but was unable to due to age. A novel based on the script was written by Philipp Winkler and published in 2024. The film is now directed by Fatih Akin, who has removed an episode about a piece of bread. It is a 'Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin'. The two directors are said to be friends. This deleted scene revolves around a piece of honey bread. In her grief, the mother wants to eat nothing else, and the son desperately tries to find the ingredients, which is a challenge in the war economy. This honey bread is something that in film language is called a MacGuffin, a rather incidental object that drives the plot forward. Making such a banal object handle the great emotional drama - even Oedipal, charged with endless tension by the Nazi background - is a risk. How constructed and inappropriate it could seem! Yet it works.

The honey bread pulls one through the film. Nanning gets the wheat flour from a doctor. At a beekeeper's, he learns that bees need sugar water to produce honey at this time of year. He gets the sugar and eventually the butter from an uncle, also a convinced Nazi, who lives on the neighboring island of Föhr; Nanning almost drowns on his return when the tide comes in. Finally, Nanning gets a baker to bake a touching little white bread.

This works because the film takes the feelings as seriously as the landscape of Amrum. The debutant Jasper Billerbeck plays Nanning. He is not a shining boy, at first one might overlook him, but he works his way into the affection of the audience.

Big Moment, Filmed at a Distance

Laura Tonke plays the mother. The way she manages to make the hardness of this character clear without denouncing her is crucial to the whole film. When the newborn cries and Nanning wants to comfort it, the mother says, "Let her cry. It strengthens the lungs." She doesn't say it maliciously, she really believes it. And when the honey bread is ready, she doesn't want to eat it in her grief. Nanning has a breakdown and wants to bury himself in her lap. But she shakes him and admonishes him: "Be a man."

Fatih Akin films this from the other corner of the room, but he also lets this scene - a big cinema moment - play out clearly. The Stockholm syndrome of this mother-child relationship shines through. The Nazis not as snarling Prussians, but in the emotional close-up.

A second storyline revolves around Nanning's uncle Theo. He, like many Amrumers, has left the island and eventually emigrated to America. But he couldn't save his wife, a Jew, who was deported and killed. When Nanning learns about this family tragedy, Uncle Theo appears to him in a dream sequence. I have no guilt, says Nanning. That's true, says the uncle, but I will always think of it when I see you.

Not only in this scene, but with his whole attitude, this film makes it clear that it can be painful to look at Germany's past, but that there is no livable alternative to it.

Towards the end, a scene sticks out in its forced emotionality. Nanning and one of the refugee children say goodbye to each other in a pathetic way. It's overdone, but it points beyond the film. Hark Bohm has told the story of unequal youth who have to get along in "North Sea is Murder Sea