The Danish-German drama Land of Mine (Under Sandet) was one of five nominees for the Best Foreign Language film at the most recent Academy Awards ceremony and swept the Robert Awards, the Danish equivalent of the Oscars, last year. The story is fictional but is based on the real-life effort after World War II where 2000 German POWs, many of them teenagers or elderly men, were forced to come to Denmark to clear the up to two million landmines the Nazis had planted along the country’s western coast. Half the Germans either died or were maimed in the work, and the question of whether this constituted a war crime still hangs over Danish history. Land of Mine is sparse and taut, rarely sentimental until the very end, and doesn’t let the Danes off the hook one bit for the choice to force children to pay for the sins of their fathers. (It’s available to rent/buy on amazon and iTunes.)
The kids forced to clear the mines arrive at a Danish beach under the command of Captain Ebbe and Sgt. Carl Rasmussen, both of whom appear to be completely unconcerned with their charges’ welfare – they are human fodder for clearing the mines, and if they die in the effort, that’s the Germans’ fault for placing the mines there in the first place. One boy doesn’t even make it out of the initial training. The group includes Helmut Morbach, who is either the most realistic kid of the group or just an asshole, depending on your view; Sebastian Schumm, who is the de facto leader of the troop; Wilhelm Hahn, a naive kid oblivious to what’s ahead of him either in Denmark or after a return home; and the twins Werner and Ernst Lessner, who plan to go home and become bricklayers to help rebuild Germany now that the war is over. There’s no question over their volition here: the boys are barricaded in their little hut at the end of each work day and aren’t even fed for the first few days at the beach.
Sgt. Carl, played by a relative novice actor in Roland Møller, is the moral center of the film, and his evolution over the course of the film becomes the movie’s conscience – he doesn’t want to think of the boys as people, comes to see them that way once the suffering and death begin, then is reminded of how they all ended up in this situation in the first place before he has to make one final decision to do the ‘right’ thing. Møller’s performance is dominant because most of it is so understated, and because his character gets the emotional complexity Ebbe’s and even the boys’ characters lack. That makes the ending of the film a little harder for me to accept – it’s the one true moment of sentiment, and the only part of the script that didn’t ring true. When he develops a little camaraderie with the boys, it seems only natural; he’s with them all day and starts to see them as real people, and struggles to transfer his hatred of the Nazis or the Germans over to them once he knows them. Whether the end works may depend on how much you buy into his personal transformation from the initial scene of abject hatred to the last day of work on the beach.
The characters of the POWs aren’t that well defined, but the young actors playing them at least give them depth in their emotional responses to the series of catastrophes that follow their assignment to the beach. They’re afraid every day, and every time the script seems like it’s giving them a few moments of calm, another mine explodes, setting off a new chain of emotional reactions in the survivors. Joel Basman delivers a strong performance as Helmut, the least likable of all of the boy soldiers, while the twins, Emil and Oskar Belton, playing Ernst and Werner get a small subplot of their own that gives Emil in particular a powerful scene in the back half of the film. The script also adds little details, like Sebastian answering a question about whether his father’s still alive with a long pause followed by a remote “I don’t know,” to flesh out the emotional states of these children even without giving us much in the way of biographical details.
Land of Mine is almost old-fashioned in its anti-nationalism; the easy thing to do in any historical drama about World War II is make any German characters the villains and move outward from there, but the protagonists of this movie are all Germans and don’t show the slightest hint of Nazi sympathies or even of German nationalism. They’re just kids, and all they want to do is survive and go home. The Danes are the nationalists, carrying forward their rage at the Nazi atrocities on to prisoners of war who had nothing to do with the mistreatment of Denmark. Sgt. Carl has to face the reality that the kids who’ve been conscripted to clear these mines are victims of the Nazi regime too, and the difficult decisions that the script gives him could apply to any conflict and any attempts at postwar reconciliation too.
Keith: I’m reading your book and I want to tell you something about Lou Whitaker. I’m sorry, but I don’t have a better way to reach you and this is a bit too long for a tweet.
Lou Whitaker was a Jehovah’s Witness. Long before I became a wine writer, I was a young sportswriter in Florida and I covered baseball in spring training. I was assigned to cover the Tigers for two seasons. A couple of the veteran Detroit sportswriters warned me against talking to Whitaker. They said I would regret it. But I was young and most of the players just ignored the local Florida sportswriters, so anybody who I could get an actual sit-down, multi-minute interview with, especially a big star, I was happy about.
I did interview Whitaker, and we talked quite a lot about his faith. I wrote a story that I have long forgotten (so it probably wasn’t very good, though I was a Bill James reader so it probably wasn’t awful either.)
During the course of the interview Whitaker asked me if I would be interested in learning more about Jehovah’s Witnesses. I knew nothing and am curious about many things, though it’s unlikely I would have converted. Mainly I was just being polite, so I said sure. I gave him my address.
Subsequently the Jehovah’s Witnesses came to visit me a number of times. This wasn’t a terrible outcome, but it was undesirable. They would come, I would make tea, we would sit and talk about Jesus. These were hours I would have rather spent sleeping. I could have always just slammed the door in their faces, but they were never anything other than exceedingly polite, so I did not.
Whitaker continued to be friendly to me after the interview and story, but all, and I mean all, of our subsequent conversations were about Jesus and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He left Lakeland for Detroit at the end of March, but the polite church people kept coming to my house, even without me giving them any encouragement other than politeness (I soon stopped making tea), until I left that apartment. I told one of the old Detroit sportswriters that and he laughed and said, “I tried to warn you.”
Upshot is, I believe Whitaker was ignored in the Hall of Fame balloting because of his religious beliefs. He was earnest and, if you’re not interested in talking about Jesus, borderline insufferable about them. I can imagine how his relationships evolved with the sportswriters who warned me not to talk to him. He must have had this reputation around the league. I’m surprised sportswriters won’t talk about it now but I imagine it’s embarrassing, even post-Tebow, to say you didn’t like someone because he was too Christian.
That’s all. Keep up the good work. Thought you’d like to know this.