Things are looking up for German film - The Edukators has jokes, foreplay and even political discourse. But its star Daniel Brühl still needs to choose roles carefully, he tells Stuart Jeffries.

German terrorism isn't what it used to be. Once it involved bombs, shootouts, mailing bits of hostages to Frankfurt businessmen to get them to pony up the dough. Today, if a new, purportedly hip German film called The Edukators is anything to go by, it has become more effete. The film's putatively radical protagonists break into rich people's houses while they are out, pile the furniture in a heap and leave slightly insulting notes telling the victims to mend their materialistic ways. They don't steal anything, but drive off into the night feeling pretty smug about themselves. This Milk Tray radicalism may make Baader-Meinhof veterans giggle into their copies of Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, but still.

"Yes, it is quite funny, isn't it," agrees Daniel Brühl, the hunky if diminutive 26-year-old actor with chiselled jaw, well-sculpted lips, carefully assembled designer stubble and pretty eyes. "Maybe Hans Weingartner [ The Edukators' director], because he's Austrian, he has a better sense of humour than us Germans."

Hold on for one second. Austrians have a better sense of humour than Germans?

"Oh yes. Isn't that well known?"

In The Edukators, Brühl plays Jan, one of these young radicals who, with his friend, Peter (Stipe Erceg) drives through nocturnal Berlin listening to ostensibly voguish music in a van to the posh suburbs where they give the homes of the wealthy extreme makeovers. It's a bonding thing and, furthermore, helps them to keep it real in a political sense. They are Edukators, you see. (The film was actually called Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei, a biblical quotation meaning "the fat years are over".)

Then Jan and Peter's cosy world of night-time raids falls apart. Peter has a girl called Jule (Julia Jentsch) and when he goes away for the weekend, she falls for Jan's aforementioned pretty eyes and designer stubble, not to mention his radical politics. During Jan and Jule's weekend romance, he listens to her in a way that her boyfriend Peter never has and learns that she is deep in debt after pranging some toff's Merc when her car was uninsured. Now she has to repay that icon of materialistic Germany in ruinous monthly instalments.

Jan decides to takes her along for a spot of nocturnal redistributive justice at the house of the materialistic toff, but things go wrong. Hardenberg, the toff, returns home and the couple take him hostage. Then Peter comes back from his weekend and, though angered at being usurped by Brühl's character, readily agrees to taking Hardenberg to a rustic cabin where they will issue ransom demands. Of course, this is very distant from their erstwhile vanilla terrorism, since it involves guns and the possibility that they will have to murder Hardenberg.

There follows a great deal of cabin-based discussion about socialism v conservatism, innocence v corruption, age v youth and so on, particularly prompted by Hardenberg, who turns out to have been totally rad in the days before he sold out to the Man. The discussion prompts a re-examination of the foursome's values and, sweetly, even enables Peter to achieve closure on his relationship with Jule. It's a film that, with its blend of gunplay and foreplay, gags and political discourse, captivated Germans, and may well do something similar here.

In this, The Edukators promises to be rather like Goodbye Lenin!, the charming and funny 2003 German picture in which Brühl also starred. Goodbye Lenin! was about a family of East Berliners on the eve of the fall of the wall in 1989. Brühl played a young man who is arrested in front of his mother during a political protest. She immediately suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma for several months. By the time she comes round, the GDR no longer exists. Because she has to avoid excitement, the son tries to set up the GDR in her flat, fabricating communist-style radio and TV broadcasts etc - with hilarious consequences. At the same time, the film tapped into the surprising phenomenon of Ostalgie (ie nostalgia for communist East Germany) among young Germans, as captured in Jana Hensel's bestseller, After the Wall.

Brühl, one might think, is in danger of getting typecast. As critics have noted, in Goodbye Lenin! he played a Berlin-based, idealistic anti-capitalist. In The Edukators he plays a Berlin-based, idealistic anti-capitalist. And in the film he's currently making he plays a young, idealistic anti-capitalist. True, the character he plays (a real-life anti-Franco anarchist called Salvador Puig Antich) is not Berlin based, and yes, he did play a Polish violinist in Ladies in Lavender, but these are tiny holes in the thesis.

"Berlin is the city where you find most of the interesting people," says Brühl. "There's a lot of subversive activity and, along with Hamburg, it's the real centre in Germany of cultural life. Berlin is my favourite city."

It is, I point out to Brühl, also the centre of that right old mouthful, Unbefangenheit, or easiness, which has become the watchword of the new German slackerdom. Where did that come from? "What has changed," says Brühl, "is that there is an interest among German people to go and see German stories and, more specifically, there's an interest among young people in their self-esteem. There's a consensus about what Germany did in world war two. There's not a complex any more because young people do not feel guilty; they are relaxed. But we are still obsessed with examining our past. My friend is in a play about a Nazi school where very talented young pupils were drilled and educated to be Nazis. But it's not just the Nazi past - there are lots of stories to be told about the Weimar Republic, too."

In this, one might think, youthful Germans' politics are best dramatised by Michael Verhoeven's 1990 film The Nasty Girl, about a young student who does a school project about the history of her home town and exposes shameful secrets about the roles played by older members of her community during the Third Reich.

"Now people of the younger generation almost think it is hip to make films about the Third Reich. I recently saw Untergang [ Downfall, about Hitler's last days] and not only was the film about Nazism, but the trailers were all for movies about Nazism, too! One of the films is about two kids at Munich University who fought against the Nazis and were killed. These are often good films."

For Brühl, this is a welcome trend, since he thinks that German cinema has been in the doldrums since the great days of Fassbinder, Von Trotta and Wenders. "It used to be really horrible. For about 11 years there wasn't a German film worth seeing. Thankfully, there is now a really good movement in Germany. It's getting better."

The Edukators is part of that new movement, while being a film that nods at old German films that tackle the country's postwar agony over the virtues and vices of terrorism - such as Margaretha von Trotta's 1981 The German Sisters, or Stammheim, the 1986 picture about the jailing of the Baader-Meinhof group. "I guess what's different about films set in the late 1960s and early 1970s is that today there is no real radical movement among young people. There's a lot of frustration but everybody's really passive. So what really interested me was the idea of playing a politically committed guy, a rebel."

Are you a rebel and, if so, do you have a cause? "No, I was never doing anything myself. The director used to be a bit of a rebel. That was his interest and, in a way, I play his alter ego. It was important for him to make it clear that we are not hardcore terrorists and not a sort of Baader Meinhof group in present-day Berlin. We wanted to point out the contradictions of what the Edukators do. The script was like a question mark. There's no clear answer to the contradiction.

"It's easy to be a rebel when you're young," says Brühl. "Thenyou want a bigger car and a bigger house. I experienced that myself. As long as you are conscious of that and you don't get decadent because of your success, it's all right."

Whether he remains untainted by his own success is an open question. "It's sad but true but if you have a commercial success you become valuable. This is how it works, unfortunately, and that's what has happened to me. There are much more offers than before. It's tough because I want to be very careful. My father [ German TV director Hanno Brühl] is a good adviser. He didn't want me to become an actor because he said they were stupid and vain. Now he's proud of me and we work together."

Brühl's mother is Spanish which explains, among other things, his birth name (Daniel Cesar Martin Brühl Gonzales Domingo), his fluency in Spanish and his desire to live, at least for a time in Barcelona. It also explains why he is now starring in a film about the life of the Catalan anarchist, womaniser and bank robber Salvador Puig Antich, who was the last person to be garotted in Spain in 1974 under Franco on a trumped-up charge, an execution that prompted protests around the world and civil unrest that sped Spain's transition to democracy.

Brühl is quickly amassing a filmography of clever decisions. Even Ladies in Lavender, in which Brühl appeared as a shipwrecked Pole opposite Dames Judi and Maggie in Charles Dance's directorial debut, was critically well received.

"It was a real privilege and an honour to work with the two dames," he says. "It was great to see how they work. After their long careers they still have freshness and there's no routine in their acting."

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw wrote that "the handsome young stranger unlocks long-hidden feelings". And not just for those venerable dames, but for many others. Brühl is, after all, that rare thing - a Teutonic male hottie. A fact which, one might be forgiven for thinking, shows how Germany is changing beyond cinemagoers' wildest imaginings.

The Edukators is on limited release