I Was Nineteen (1968)

Original title

Ich war neunzehn

Directed by

Konrad Wolf

Genre

drama film, war film

Country

German Democratic Republic

Runtime

1h 55m

Rated

12+

Rating

7.4 of 10 from 20 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

In 1945, a young German man returns to his home country as a lieutenant in the Soviet Red Army. He confronts the ruins of Nazi Germany and struggles with his own sense of belonging and identity.

contemplativeauthenticslow-burnsombergroundedhistoricalintrospectivereflective

What happens

I Was Nineteen (German: Ich war neunzehn) is a 1968 East German film produced by Konrad Wolf for the DEFA studio. The film tells the story of a young German, Gregor Hecker (Jaecki Schwarz), who fled the Nazis with his parents to Moscow and now, in early 1945, returns to Germany as a lieutenant in the Red Army. The film strives to maintain an aura of authenticity and pay homage to history by intersplicing fictional sequences with real documentary sequences and having references to popular/well-known music and literature at the time. The film depicts the personal experiences of the director Konrad Wolf and of his friend Vladimir Gall in fictionalized form and deals with themes of the meaning of "homeland". During its original run, it sold 3,317,966 tickets. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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