Ghosts of Amrum

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...