A mother's screams of pain carry a woozy double meaning in a thematically saturated scene in the World War II drama "Amrum." The woman, a devoted Hitler lover in northern Germany, has just learned via the radio that the Führer is dead. The announcement is given just as labor pains announce the imminent birth of her next child.
One world is ending, and a new one is just about to begin; "Amrum" is full of such satisfying symmetries. It's based on the childhood memories of German actor-director Hark Bohm, who turned 6 years old shortly after the war in Europe ended in 1945 and who died in November at age 86 but had time to shoot a touching cameo that appears at the end of the film. Bohm -- who co-wrote the picture with its director, Fatih Akin -- was, like his protagonist, born in Hamburg, which was a bombing target during the war, but waited out the conflict with some of his family on the remote North Sea island of Amrum.
Taking place just before and just after Hitler's suicide on April 30, 1945, "Amrum" exhibits the flip side of homefront life depicted in John Boorman's beloved 1987 memory movie "Hope and Glory," about enduring the war in Britain. It centered on a boy about the same age as Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), the protagonist of "Amrum" through whose anxious blue eyes we are treated to an oblique perspective on the era.
Nanning, whose father is a Nazi officer whose fate we do not learn until the end of the film, is a 12-year-old who works sowing potatoes for an anti-Nazi local farmer, Tessa (Diane Kruger). As the war winds down badly for Team Germany, Nanning’s mother, Hille (Laura Tonke), rants about “backstabbers” and threatens to turn in Tessa for her subversive remarks. A portrait of Hitler hangs proudly on the wall.
The political situation emerges at a remove from the story, which is essentially about a boy’s desperate love for his mother amid trying circumstances. Shattering events lurk in the fog of misunderstanding through which the kid fights to find things that will please her. After giving birth, Hille falls into a post-fascism depression and refuses to eat. Remembering that she once said she craved white bread with butter and honey -- all scarce commodities during the war, especially in this backwater -- Nanning sets off on a mini-odyssey to gather them.
Made on a minimal budget, "Amrum" is a plaintive, affecting look at how anxious children's love can be and how resourceful they may become under even the most grueling circumstances, though Nanning doesn't understand his efforts have little relevance to the true source of the mother's anguish. Maintaining an appropriately German reserve and steering briskly clear of overt sentimentality, Mr. Akin nevertheless delivers an emotionally rich cinematic experience that doubles as an intriguing back-door glimpse of the costs of the Third Reich's aggression.
Told in an unforced, anecdotal style, sticking closely to a child's point of view, the film is a kind of diorama of human failings, many of them gently suggestive of larger issues pertinent to the war. Just as Hille's hatred for alleged backstabbers reiterates a false claim Hitler used in his rise to power decades earlier, the macro-bullying of the German state is reproduced in miniature form in Nanning's regular confrontations with local children, who make a habit of beating and robbing him while denouncing him as a hated outsider -- a "mainlander." His native Hamburg is less than 150 miles away and his mother traces her lineage on Amrum back nine generations.
Meanwhile, the perversion of ordinary goods to serve a fully militarized state is encapsulated in the difficulty the boy has in finding white flour: None is available because it's being used to stanch wounds. Nanning duly reports to the local doctor's office where he is granted a small bottle of the "medicine." The kid's effort to secure some sugar (which he has learned he can trade for honey) from a Nazi relative involves visiting another island accessible on foot at low tide while dressed in Hitler Youth attire. He then struggles to cross the waters between the two islands at high tide. The risks he takes to please his mother form a metaphor for what lengths people might go to when motivated by love of the Fatherland.
A wise elder compares Hitler to Captain Ahab in "Moby-Dick," with Germany as his doomed Pequod. That's a take I hadn't encountered before. When it comes to the horrors of the 1940s, so rich is the history that we'll probably never reach the end of fresh approaches to it. "Amrum" is a stirring example of how childhood reminiscence can stand for so much more.