When Diane Kruger started acting, she had a firm rule about the roles she’d take.
“I never wanted to be in a World War II movie,” Kruger says. “When I started out, I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a German actress. It was such obvious casting for me.”
Kruger has softened her stance, memorably playing a German film star who is an underground Allied agent in Quentin Tarantino’s alternate slice of history, “Inglourious Basterds.”
“I got to help kill Hitler,” Kruger says. “That was not just great for me, but also for my country and the world.”
She returns to a World War II setting in “Amrum,” a historical drama about Nanning Bohm, a boy whose Nazi family is struggling to accept the collapse of the regime. The film, which opened this month in the U.S., reunites her with filmmaker Fatih Akin, who directed the 2017 thriller “In the Fade” that won Kruger the best actress prize at Cannes.
“I’ve worked with some great directors, but Fatih is a filmmaker who gives you wings in the best possible way,” Kruger says. “He’s pushing you very strongly, but it’s fine, because you have this trust with him. I’d never experienced that before.”
With “Amrum,” Kruger had her pick of roles. She selected a supporting part, Tessa, a farmer who employs Nanning while making it clear she’s opposed to the Nazis.
“Tessa felt like a rebellious person,” Kruger says over Zoom from her home in Europe. “She’s someone I would have wished to be if I’d lived in those times. Also, I’m from the countryside, and my grandmother was always in the fields. As a child, I would have those summer jobs where I was bringing in the corn, raking hay and picking strawberries.”
For Akin, it helped to have a close collaborator like Kruger on set because “Amrum” was a leap of faith for the German and Turkish filmmaker. Nanning is based on the experiences of Hark Bohm, an actor, director and producer who is a staple of German cinema. The men had worked together on “In the Fade,” which Akin directed from a script he wrote with Bohm. Initially, the plan was for Bohm to direct “Amrum” with the two men penning the screenplay. However, Bohm, who died in November at the age of 86, was in failing health.
“I’m not a director who can work as a hired gun,” Akin says. “I had to work with this material until it became very personal and close to me, and until it became a film of an auteur.”
Akin says he keyed in on the tangled relationship between Nanning and his mother, a passionate supporter of Hitler who has plunged into a deep depression after the Führer’s suicide. “Amrum” ultimately asks difficult questions about complicity.
“I don’t think people are responsible for the actions of their parents, but they have some bloodline connection to them,” Akin says. “That’s a trauma that Germany is still dealing with.”
As for Kruger, she was partly inspired to revisit this painful chapter of her country’s history because it resonated with the present day. “Amrum” is being released as radical political movements are gaining strength around the world and authoritarianism is on the rise.
“I’m in a place in my life where I’m thinking about what world my daughter’s going to grow up in,” Kruger says. “There’s a sense of history repeating itself. I’m feeling hopeless about what is happening in the world, because I feel like I have no power to change anything. And when you become a mother, it’s very difficult to explain to your child what is going on and why this is happening. Given my country’s past, I remember being a teenager and asking my grandfather, ‘How could you go to war? How could this have happened?’ I’m still just trying to understand it all.”
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