German “Amrum” talks about the children and the Nazi guilt.

This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.

Nanning is twelve years old when he realizes that he doesn’t belong anywhere. His beautiful parents’ home in Hamburg is destroyed and the children on the island of Amrum see him as a mainland, upper-class boy.

His ancestors were indeed whalers from there and the family has one of the nicer houses, but is it blood, class or the choices you’ve made in life that make you a person? His kind Nazi mother claims the blood and her library is full of books on the subject written by his SS father. But what does it mean now, in the spring of 1945, when Hitler sits in his bunker with a gun to his temple?

Nanning only has one thing to hold on to. A mission: to get white bread with butter and honey for her mother, a wish she thoughtlessly rejects when she refuses to eat in her room out of grief over Germany’s defeat.

The wheat flour is outsays the one-armed baker. Bees don’t make honey, says the beekeeper. Potato farmer Tess (Diane Kruger) had promised him butter as a daily wage, but she told him to run away after his mother reported her to the police for unpatriotic views.

The boy doesn’t give up and, like in a fairy tale or a film by the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, his persistence leads him from one challenge to the next. On the way he learns everything about survival on the island – seal hunting, flounder smoking, rabbit slaughtering, beekeeping, tide calculation – but also something about the dark history of his family.

The film by the German-Turkish director Fatih Akin (“Against the Wall” and “Without Mercy”, 2017) initially seems too clean, too rigid, too orderly for its heavy subject matter. The aerial photo of the surreally beautiful sand island misleadingly resembles a tourist advertisement. The farm workers are dressed like environmentally conscious residents of Vasastan (who, in and of themselves, are dressed like potato farmers from the 1940s).

Nanning himself He looked strangely well-fed and washed for someone who toiled in the fields after school. We won’t talk about his home. There the little sister plays on a sheepskin trap while mother and aunt play the piano four-handed and the Atlantic silver light caresses well-sanded wooden floors and white window frames.

But when Nanning goes hunting for “enemies” at night with his whale knife and meets a fisherman whose catch glitters in the moonlight, purity and stiffness take on their function: “Amrum” is not a realistic drama, but a memory (more precisely, the childhood memories of actor and filmmaker Hark Bohm) that has been so sharpened and refined that it has the sharpness of a picture book and the concrete symbolic language of a fairy tale.

Unlike Kiarostami’s little heroes, Nanning arouses mixed feelings. We are used to reading a blonde, blue-eyed Hitler Youth as a tool of evil. His mission is also not so urgent and poignant. But the hardships he is willing to endure ultimately make him the emotional center of the story.

In the dream—incidentally the film’s only misstep, since we’re already in a heightened reality—he says, “I’m not responsible for my parents’ decisions.” And his uncle in America, whose Jewish fiancée was murdered in the concentration camp, replies to him: Whether you like it or not, you will remind me of what they did to us.

It is one an impossible burden that many young people today are trying to shake off in the manosphere, fascism and climate denial. How did they become responsible for everything that happened before they were born? It is better to condone evil than to apologize for its existence with every breath.

But the uncle’s answer cannot be dismissed either. An equally absolute, emotional truth that also transcends generations and is aimed at the future.

And here we are. And “Amrum” has a lot to convey with its carefully crafted script and clear imagery. The answers lie in encounters between humans and animals, humans and humans, humans and landscape. A goose, a seal, a refugee: everyone becomes part of Nanning’s journey of knowledge. In the end there is even a glimmer of hope for reconciliation. It wasn’t necessary for the story, but perhaps it was necessary for the younger audience.

See more. Three current German films: Christian Petzold’s “Red Sky” (2014), Matthias Glasner’s “Symphony of the Dead” (2025), Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of fall” (2026).

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