I was nineteen
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | I was nineteen |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1968 |
| length | 115 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Konrad Wolf |
| script | Wolfgang Kohlhaase , Konrad Wolf |
| production | DEFA , KAG "Babelsberg" |
| camera | Werner Bergmann |
| cut | Evelyn Carow |
| occupation | |
| |
I was nineteen is a DEFA production that tells the story of the young German Gregor Hecker, who returned to Germany in April 1945 as a lieutenant in the Red Army . 11 years earlier, his parents had emigrated with him from Cologne to Moscow. As a member of a propaganda unit, he was supposed to persuade the last remaining Wehrmacht soldiers to surrender immediately before the end of the Second World War.
The film processes the personal experiences of the director Konrad Wolf and his friend Captain Wladimir Gall . A central question is how the German cultural nation , which produced a Johann Sebastian Bach and with which Hecker only has the language in common, could succumb to criminal National Socialism .
action
On April 16, 1945, Gregor Hecker and his small troop, in the wake of the 48th Army , moved west through Brandenburg from the Oder .
When the column arrives in Bernau , which has since been cleared again after being occupied by Soviet armored personnel carriers, Hecker is unceremoniously appointed as the town's commander. With a handful of people he tries to set up a command post.
Hecker's department makes quarters for the staff and comes across a surprised army directorate of the Germans. The German stage major Behring wants to deregister properly by telephone in Soviet captivity, which is met with disbelief by his superiors.
In Sachsenhausen Hecker and Sascha Ziganjuk meet their leader, Wadim Gejman. He tries to save a German soldier from the revenge of Soviet soldiers who have just liberated the concentration camp . Gejman can first prevent the German soldier from being shot. As they make their way towards the camp, however, a shot can be heard that announces the soldier's fate. In the camp, Hecker and other Soviet officers are demonstrated by a former prisoner using the example of the gas chamber and shot in the neck of the systematic and devious mass murder. Shortly afterwards, they meet a landscape architect who tries to excuse the phenomenon of National Socialism as inevitable and inherent in Germany. But Hecker and his parents, with their decision in favor of socialism, are living counter-evidence.
On April 30, 1945 Gejman received the special order to negotiate the handover of the Spandau Citadel and took Hecker with him as an interpreter. Together they step in front of the barricaded gate of the armed fortress. The fortress commander Colonel Lewerenz and his adjutant climb down to them with a rope ladder. While the other officers in the fortress discuss the surrender, the commandant explains the code of honor for German officers in front of the gate. In response to the report that the offer of surrender had been rejected, Gejman asked to be able to contact the officers directly. The two Soviet officers climb into the fortress together with the Germans.
While Gejman tries to make the officers aware of the hopelessness of their situation, elsewhere in the fortress an SS-Obersturmbannführer awards a Hitler Youth who had destroyed a Soviet tank and shot a member of the crew. The SS man praised the youth's willingness to make sacrifices and incited the adjutant about the “betrayal” of the Wehrmacht officers in this “fateful battle”. His plan to shoot the parliamentarians is prevented by the adjutant, who uses the opportunity to escape. A little later the fortress surrenders.
After the success in Spandau, the good-humored driver Dsingis (Kalmursa Rachmanow) slalomed truck wrecks on the deserted motorway on May 1st. In one of the shot-up trucks, Hecker encounters a blind German soldier who, in turn, takes him for a German. Despite his serious wound, he looks hopefully into the future, not knowing that the Russians have crossed the border.
There is a May Day celebration in the evening. Hecker fell drunk and heard his mother's voice complaining that he was doing everything too early: smoking, drinking schnapps. Later he witnessed the outburst of feelings of a liberated German communist who loudly called for all Nazis to be hanged. The general present reassures him that vengeance is not a good adviser, especially not for the future.
On the way back to Spandau the next day, where they are supposed to support the commandant's office, Hecker and his companions drop two of the communists. One is installed as mayor in a place that has been abandoned by the old rulers. Hecker chats with the other on the journey until they part ways at a checkpoint.
In the meantime it's almost normal, but the calm is deceptive. German troops break out of the Berlin pocket and try to get west, disguised as Soviet units. Hecker and his comrades can barely escape a surprise attack. In the new situation, her maxim of avoiding bloodshed is no longer a priority.
They settle down at a small river crossing and use loudspeakers to try to get the German soldiers to surrender. At first they do not succeed. But when Hecker turns to them with a simpler message, the first come and surrender. Soon the three Soviet soldiers took a good number of prisoners. The situation seems normal again; Ziganjuk sends another tank to reinforce them.
Gregor finds a kindred spirit in Willi Lommer, a German NCO from Berlin. In a fire attack by marauding SS troops on the prisoner group, Lommer and the Soviet unit take up arms. After the firefight, the SS troops withdraw, but Ziganjuk has fallen. Full of anger and pain, Hecker shouts after the shooters through his loudspeaker to pursue them, to catch them and to chase them from all over the world so that they never shoot again.
Before the column of prisoners started moving, Lommer gave Hecker a letter for his family to ask them to hand in. Hecker promises him. While Lommer's captivity is now beginning, the small unit gets into the bullet-strewn truck and drives away.
dramaturgy
The events of the film are told from the perspective of the hero Gregor Hecker and encompass the days from the beginning of the Soviet offensive on the Oder on April 16 to May 2, 1945. The events are chronologically dated like in a diary and narrated in a documentary-sober manner. Impressions of various people and German war crimes such as the war of aggression against the Soviet Union , the fate of the Soviet prisoners of war or the scorched earth strategy in the Eastern campaign , but also of the persecution of the German anti-fascists as well as flight and expulsion are composed like a mosaic, but fates are not rounded to recognize.
background
With the support of the Soviet Army and the National People's Army, filming began in January 1967. I was nineteen and was produced with a budget of 2,077,000 German marks . The film was released in GDR cinemas on February 2, 1968; the day before it had its world premiere at the Berlin Kino International . Around 2,500,000 visitors saw him in the first six months. Overall, it reached 3,317,966 viewers in the GDR.
For the scene of the handover negotiations in front of the gate of the Spandau Citadel, the gate in the Küstrin Fortress was recreated. Some of the exterior photos therefore do not match the actual conditions in Spandau. The exterior views were partly inserted from archive holdings and mostly took place at original locations in the Mark Brandenburg (motorway bridge over the Havel near Töplitz , double bridge over the Oder-Havel canal near Borgsdorf - Pinnow , Bernau near Berlin , Sanssouci Palace ). Further recordings were made in the DEFA studios, today's Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam , as well as in the former VEB Lokomotivbau Karl Marx / Orenstein & Koppel in Potsdam-Babelsberg, which has also been part of the Studio Babelsberg AG film site since 2006 as an extended studio space.
His résumé enabled DEFA director Konrad Wolf to also address taboo topics from the post-war period, such as the rape of German women by Red Army soldiers. He tried to portray this topic with extreme caution and discarded his original film idea of frightened, fleeing women who visit the city headquarters by having a young girl say the following instead: "Better with one than with everyone!"
Reviews
“The multi-faceted anti-war film based on the memories of Konrad Wolf describes the horrors of the war without pathos or obscurity and makes clear the guilt of the Germans. In doing so, he strives for the highest level of authenticity, dispenses with idealizations and depicts people with their peculiarities and weaknesses. Despite the partisan emotionality, there is enough space for your own associations. "
“The protagonist's difficulty and effort to understand the scenery of Germany in 1945 is reflected in the way in which this often fragmentary and elliptical material is presented; it is shaped by the living experience, not yet surrounded and killed by the crust of historical classification and 'coping with'. "
"It is primarily a film about human behavior, thinking in that time, very subtle, closely observed, communicating many details and atmospherically dense as well as emotionally haunting - this creates a plastic mosaic of those last days of the war."
Awards
- 1968: National Prize, 1st class
- 1969: Heinrich Greif Prize, 1st class
- 1969: Best youth film at the Halle youth film week
- 1975: Art Prize of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship (DSF)
literature
- Holger Südkamp: I was nineteen. On the cinematic and political significance of Konrad Wolf's DEFA film. In: European histories - discussion papers. Interdisciplinary work on historiography, narratives and constructions of history from antiquity to the present. Issue 3, Volume 2/2005, Graduate College "European History Representations " at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, ISSN 1860-3106 (available online as a PDF version )
- Wolfgang Jacobsen & Rolf Aurich: The Sun Seeker - Konrad Wolf. Construction Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-351-02589-0
- Michael Töteberg: Metzler Film Lexicon. Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart / Weimar 2005, ISBN 3-476-02068-1
- Günter Engelhard: 111 film masterpieces: the private video museum. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1989, ISBN 3-596-24497-8
Web links
- I was nineteen at the Internet Movie Database (English)
- I was nineteen at filmportal.de (including premiere poster, scene draft, historical film program, photos)
- Movie review
- I was nineteen with the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ^ Rabenalt, Peter: Film dramaturgy. Cologne Berlin 2011, pp. 143–144
- ^ Bernhard Chiari: War and the military in the film of the 20th century. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-486-56716-8 , p. 482
- ↑ Entry ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at film-zeit.de
- ↑ Holger Südkamp: I was nineteen: On the cinematic and political significance of Konrad Wolf's DEFA film (PDF; 481 kB). European Histories , 2/2005, ISSN 1860-3106 , p. 12.
- ↑ The most successful GDR films in the GDR . Insidekino.com.
- ↑ Brandenburg State Center for Civic Education: About the film "I was nineteen" by Konrad Wolf ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. www.politische-bildung-brandenburg.de, published on April 29, 2010, accessed on November 11, 2015.
- ↑ Potsdam Latest News: Karl-Marx-Werk www.pnn.de, published on June 15, 2013, accessed November 11, 2015.
- ↑ Der Tagesspiegel: Studio Babelsberg lays the foundation stone for new “Berliner Strasse” www.pnn.de, published on July 30, 2014, accessed November 11, 2015.
- ↑ a b see supplement magazine to the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger of March 5, 2007, p. 14
- ↑ I was nineteen. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed January 11, 2017 .
- ^ Ulrich Gregor : Geschichte des Films, 1968, ISBN 3-570-00816-9
