Hainbuch’s Aeolian Harp and Nagra reel-to-reel recorder in the dunes of Amrum. Photo: Hainbuch.

Nature makes music—the wind, the waves, the rain, the rustle of leaves, the creak and complaint of trees. The human impulse to transform these sounds into something that might be called Automatic Art spawned the Aeolian Harp. Stretched tight across a resonant wooden soundboard, its strings were not to be plucked or strummed by fingers but “by the desultory breeze caress’d,” as Coleridge put it in his 1795 poem The Eolian Harp.

These natural forces played the instrument into sustained yet shifting harmonies that could imply amorphous meta-melodies to the pensive listener. This auto-harp mediated the ambient movements of this world but seemed to conjure the next or another. Placed in narrow passages, at the entrance to a grotto, or in a copse or other features of the landscape that likewise funneled the elements, the Aeolian harp sang with and in nature. When perched in an open window, its tones could roam through domestic interiors to calm or worry the wakeful, trouble or soothe sleeping minds. Even the most docile wind chime is a New Age bully by comparison.

Known to the Ancients, the Aeolian harp was (re)invented by the Renaissance Egyptologist and polymath Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century, and it soon enthralled European scientists and poets. Romantics like Coleridge were especially captivated by its Siren song.

The Berlin-based electronic music specialist Stefan Götsch, known as Hainbuch, has an Aeolian Harp. Unlike the Romantics, he also has a sturdy and adaptable tripod that allows him to place the instrument almost anywhere, including in the dunes and on the beaches and mudflats of a low-lying North Sea island right up against the Danish border called Amrum. That is also the title of the newest film, now in German cinemas, from pathbreaking, prize-winning German film director Fatih Akin. He enjoined Hainbuch to equip this beautiful yet disturbing movie with “music like the wind.”

Hainbuch wields a cool—analog of course—recording kit to capture his harp’s nature-sympathetic soundings. Back home in his Berlin studio, Hainbuch has an instrumentarium that includes an old out-of-tune piano, lots of other keyboards, as well as “nuclear instruments”—gauges and gizmos from cyclotrons and the like. Through technology ancient and modern, Hainbuch listens not just to the already audible but to the otherwise inaudible. His musical materials range from the atmospheric to the atomic.

Hainbuch is a good moniker for an ambient music-maker with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and an Aeolian Harp in his toolkit. Hainbuche is the German word for hornbeam, the ubiquitous European hedge shrub that miraculously keeps its leaves even after they turn rusty brown in the autumn. Fully clothed against icy gusts, it shakes and shimmers all through winter and loses its old leaves only when the green ones of spring push them from their spindly branches into whispered songs of farewell. Hainbuch made his reputation with a fascinating YouTube channel launched in 2011. I suppose YouTube is like the wind. Open up the casement (as Coleridge put it in The Eolian Harp) of your computer and tune into YouTube, and the instrument plays itself—and you.

Akin wrote the script for Amrum with Hark Bohm, who as a boy spent the last years of World War II on the island. Bohm makes a lone cameo at water’s edge, looking out to sea at the end of the film. He hadn’t yet turned six when the war ended, though his alter ego Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck) is twelve in the film. Auto-fiction, like the tales told by an auto-harp, is to be edited and emended in post-production.

Nanning is the oldest child of staunch Nazis, the absent father a prolific author of racist tracts that the boy finds lined up on the house’s bookshelves, though he doesn’t know what to make of them. His mother (Laura Tonke), like a good Nazi mother pregnant again with child number four, grew up on the island and has now moved back with the kids after the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 by the RAF’s Operation Gomorrah. A swastika flies in front of the family’s ancestral thatch-roofed, whitewashed farmhouse, guarded also by a giant whale-bone arch for a gate. The boy is fascinated by the novel Moby-Dick, also in the family library. The sea is in his blood. Unlike his father, we would like that blood to be called Amrumian rather than Aryan.

Nature’s sounds are as crucial to the movie as its gorgeous sights of sand and sea. Yet the first thing we hear is unnatural: Lancaster bombers approach. Like so much else in the film, the baritone chorus of doom is authentic, taken from an archive of recorded sound. Nanning and his schoolboy pal Hermann (Kian Köppke) are unfazed by the bombs that explode close by offshore. “Just ballast,” they reassure each other, crouching in the furrows of the potato field as the behemoths swoop overhead, bigger industrial and urban centers their target.

The local language, called Öömrang—a dialect of North Frisian spoken only on the island—is musical too, its melodiousness enlivened by a clipped diction that has the ring of Danish about it. Nanning doesn’t really speak it, though he understands perfectly. His mother conducts the household in the official language of High German rather than her mother tongue learned as a girl.

The Amrum natives seem almost universally to loathe Hitler. After the bombers disappear from view and from the soundscape, the farmer—a woman (Tessa Bendixen), since all the men are off fighting to the end—for whom the boys are working looks on the bright side of the calamity: “At least Hitler’s shitty war will soon be over,” she says acidly. After returning home from the fields, Nanning asks his mother if the war is lost. She proceeds to browbeat the source of this illegal, impossible idea out of the lad, with potentially grave consequences for the adult offender. The pitiless, pervasive culture of conformity and eager enforcement of fascism is thus dramatized over the afternoon soup. Nanning’s aunt (Lisa Hagmeister) also lives in the house and hates Hitler like so many of the other islanders. She tries to stop the mother’s vicious cross-examination of her firstborn Hitler Youth son. The boy deflects the questions for as long as he can, sensing innately the depraved wrongness of her remorseless interrogation. Finally, he is forced, unwittingly, to divulge the source. Sound is crucial here too. The clinical grammar and unforgiving tone of her High German, an imposition on the island from afar, beat the boy into submission.

The new baby is born, and the mother wants white bread with butter and honey. She is suffering not so much from postpartum depression as from her own realization, fanatically suppressed, that the war is indeed lost. The post–Third Reich world is not one this German mother wants any child of hers to have to grow up in. She lets the newborn cry without comforting her. Master Race medicine held that long bouts of bawling strengthened the lungs. The baby cries as relentlessly as the coming storm. Nanning valiantly searches for the scarce ingredients that will, he hopes, produce the desired delicacy. The task is Herculean in the final ration-restricted days of the war on an isolated island.

In his quest Nanning crosses treacherous tides and encounters sonorous wildlife and wild youths—starving refugees driven from the east as the Russians advance to Berlin. Hainbuch’s Aeolian harp and microphone follow the boy, as does Akin’s camera. Both pause to bask in the visions and voices of the island’s natural beauty: the cry of the wind and of the geese, the gentle-then-deadly sluice of the tide, the surge of the surf as shorebirds swarm and chatter, the oystercatchers going about their business of harvesting periwinkles, utterly unaware of the war except perhaps when the giant metal birds drone by.

On the soundtrack, birds and wind and waves are hazed and harried by the harp’s electro-acoustic overlay. These Aeolian sounds are not Romantic ruminations but instead are often harshly mechanistic, the ghostly ongoing echo of total war. These sonorities menace and grate like traumatic memories held tenuously just below the surface of shallow waters, lethal and life-giving, like those along Amrum’s shores. Hainbuch’s mechanistic transformations of the sounds found by his harp are more often soothing, imparting a nostalgic glow that makes these often troubling boyhood memories bearable. If one wants to hear just the Aeolian harp and the call of the wind and the birds, Hainbuch has provided some of this raw sonic material to Bandcamp beachcombers in The Amrum Harp Tapes.

The soundtrack draws on and vitally contributes to the allure of this powerfully understated film, but Hainbuch’s rich contributions also reveal a beautiful flaw: neither nature nor a Nazi boyhood can ever sing of and for itself. On screen, the island gleams bright, in sight and sound, even in the darkest times.

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