I Was Nineteen
by Konrad Wolf
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Actor: Alexej Ejboshenko, Galina Polskikh, Jaecki Schwarz, Vasily Livanov, Wassili LiwanowDirector: Konrad Wolf
Brand: First RUN Features
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); German (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-10-23
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: FIRST RUN FEATURES
DVD Reviews of I Was Nineteen
DVD Review: Great film-making but heavy on Communist lies
Summary: 4 Stars
This movie is well-made and stands out amongst European films for its quality. Do not expect historical accuracy though. The most hilarious scene in the film is when a commissar from Stalin's Russia asks a German how one man like Hitler could be made omnipotent. MMMM you mean like Stalin and the unquestioning obedience on pain of death you give to your leader?
Although the film takes place around Berlin; they take the Spandau fort in one scene (where Speer and other top Nazis are later held following their war crimes convictions), nothing is shown of the hundreds of thousands of German women who were raped by Russian soldiers during this period in Berlin. Thousands committed suicide after repeated rapes. The Russians raped, pillaged and robbed their way through Germany, especially around Berlin, and they were savage, inhumane animals to a very large degree. I'm sure there were decent soldiers as the hero is portrayed to be (I wonder if in real life he raped three or four women himself, probably), but there were many hundreds of thousands in this sector of the front who weren't. Scenes depicting humane commissars and germans shooting at other germans to enable their own surrender are so far from reality that only a committed Communist would even attempt to put this on film.
An honest portrayal of this time would have shown both the Nazis and Communist Russians as the vile, inhuman animals they were. Because it's a propaganda piece made in a Marxist slave state during the 1960's (East Germany), the Communists are laughably portrayed as decent. If you can imagine the depths of living in a repressed Stalinist system, the East German film-makers are so slavish, they feel unable to even mention enormous human rights violations against their own people for fear of reprisal from Big Brother.
Take this film with a grain of salt.
Description of I Was Nineteen
Based on the secret diary kept by acclaimed German filmmaker Konrad Wolf while he was a soldier in the Russian Army, I WAS NINETEEN is the director's most personal film. A highlight of the DEFA collection, Wolf examines his own past through the poetic story of a young German, Gregor Hecker, who as a child fled with his parents to the Soviet Union, but who eventually returns to Germany as a soldier after WWII with the victorious Soviet troops.Suddenly Gregor finds he is different from his comrades in arms, for this defeated land is his home and the Germans he meets upon his return are his compatriots. Gregor is a victor, but also one of the vanquished. As the Soviet troops advance into Germany, Gregor attempts to understand the Germans he meets along the way. His perspective is that of a nineteen year-old, inquisitive, occasionally uncomprehending, and repeatedly dismayed by the atrocities and lies he encounters. Gregor falls in love and simply cannot understand the death of a friend in the last hours of the war - the final death in a long line of deaths that pave his way from Moscow to Berlin.
An austere, independent minded work of art, the film not only contains many stories about the last days of the war, but also tells Wolf's own story and uses actual documentary footage from the documentary "Death Camp of Sachsenhausen" (1946), which was one of the first post-war German films about the Nazi period.
The DEFA Collection refers to the state-run studios of the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Located in the historic "film city" of Babelsberg near Berlin, DEFA was part of one of the world's oldest and most distinguished film traditions. It produced films in nearly all genres including documentaries, feature films, animation and more.
I WAS NINETEEN is ranked by film critics to be among Germany's 100 most important films of all time.
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