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 longstanding 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.”

It would be many decades before that question was answered. Because adoption records were sealed in New York state (and because her adoption was a gray-market deal, unbrokered by an agency), Shelley had no way to access her birth certificate until the Adoptee Rights Bill was signed into law in late 2019; several years after that, she received the document identifying her birth mother as Helen Quedens, a twenty-four-year-old woman bearing a distinctive and distinguished Amrumer name. (It appears in the movie, attached to the butcher shop where Hille meets with disgrace after pocketing a sausage for her hungry children.)

Searching online, Shelley learned that Helen’s parents, Jonny and Alma Quedens, were native Amrumers who immigrated to New York after World War I and periodically revisited the island. Indeed, Alma and her teenage daughters, Helen and Edith, were living on Amrum, where Alma operated a guest house named for Edith, when World War II broke out in September 1939 and effectively precluded any return to New York (where Jonny remained, running the family delicatessen). Thus Alma, who was a German national, and her American-born daughters, who may or may not have been considered “enemy aliens,” lived through the traumas experienced by Amrum’s characters. Helen, a forced laborer in a mainland factory—very likely a munitions plant—survived the island’s most notable wartime catastrophe, the July 1944 strafing of the commuter ferry between Amrum and the mainland.

Amrum ends with Nanning and his family leaving (or expelled from) the island. For Shelley’s mother and aunt it was not so simple. After the war Amrum was overwhelmed with displaced persons, including concentration camp survivors, war orphans, and ethnic German refugees. Food, fuel, and housing shortages were endemic, although presumably the sisters sheltered at their mother’s crowded guest house. However, they were unable to return home to New York until 1947 (a year before Shelley was born) via the repurposed transport ship SS Ernie Pyle. Their mother followed several years later.

In 2023 Shelley and I made our way to Amrum along with our grown daughter, traveling via Hamburg on several trains and a ferry. Shelley, who had been in touch with a local genealogist and proud Frisian nationalist named Jens Quedens, was feted as a long-lost child of the island—no less beautiful than it appears in the movie—and given a grand tour, complete with Viking ruins.

She felt grounded. In truth she did very much resemble the local population. Our daughter and I did not, and as a Jew with one German Jewish grandmother I felt obliged to look into the extent of antisemitism and pro-Hitler sentiment on the North Frisian islands. Both existed, as Amrum acknowledges (although the island has no historical markers on the subject and I found no books on the 1930s or 1940s in either of the well-stocked Quedens-owned bookstores). Frisians may not have considered themselves German and even, as shown in the movie, resented Germans. Still, they were Aryans. A knowledgeable source described the island to me as “very brown” (as in brown-shirt) and noted that the thatched cottage where we were staying, across from a picturesque church cemetery well populated by Quedens family “talking graves,” had been a Nazi gathering place. A period photograph showed a swastika-like rune painted on an exterior wall.

We also learned that Alma’s guest house had, in fact, previously belonged to a Jewish Berliner named Laura Mosler; presumably it had once been one of the few places on the island where Jewish vacationers could stay. With the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and the “Aryanization” of Jewish property, the Nazis confiscated the Mosler guest house (still standing and in use). Frau Mosler, then in her seventies, was deported to Theresienstadt. She survived but never returned to Amrum.

Alma surely profited from the deal. She retired to Amrum with her husband and operated Edith Haus until her death in 1980, five years after Helen’s. The only glitch, as a now-aged resident who remembered the family explained, was that sometime in the 1950s Alma had to pay something to someone. We assumed these were reparations due Laura Mosler or her descendants, but didn’t ask—so far as we were concerned, reparations had already been made when Shelley was given to her parents.

“You can’t choose your parents,” was Akin’s reply when asked about his interpretation of Bohm’s story. In another interview he asked, “What do you do when your mother is a Nazi?” That a child might recognize a parent’s unrepentant, criminal complicity and love her nonetheless is Amrum’s heart of darkness, and perhaps Amrum’s as well. Cutting from a freeze-frame close-up of Nanning facing an uncertain future, the movie’s last images—actually the first to be shot—show an age-ravaged Bohm alone on the remote island, gazing across his boyhood beach.