Liberation or Defeat? (2): Konrad Wolf's "Ich war neunzehn"

Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen) was filmed in 1967 with the support of the Soviet Army and the Nationale Volksarmee (the GDR’s army). The plot begins on 16 April 1945 and sees the Red Army advancing towards Berlin.

It was shot on location in Brandenburg and Potsdam-Babelsberg, near the DEFA studios. It premiered in East Berlin shortly before the Prague Spring, in which the Czechs were “liberated” by Warsaw Pact troops, among them East Germans (the last time Germans had invaded Czechia was in 1939).

The DEFA was under the control of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, which saw film primarily as a propaganda medium. “Anti-fascist” films had been a tradition in the GDR since the very first DEFA production, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us, 1946), and they naturally served above all to portray communism in a heroic light and the Soviets as liberators.

The DEFA was founded under Soviet supervision in the eastern occupation zone. A high-ranking official of the Soviet Military Administration announced its propagandistic goals in a ceremonial speech:

… the eradication of the remnants of Nazism and militarism from the conscience of every German, the struggle to educate the German people, especially the youth, in the spirit of true democracy and humanity...

I Was Nineteen tells the story of a young Soviet lieutenant of German origin whose parents were communists and emigrated to the Soviet Union after Hitler came to power. He returns to his former homeland as a stranger and a soldier, and is repeatedly confronted with his origins, which often embarrasses him. His main task is propaganda work: he uses loudspeakers to call on Wehrmacht soldiers to surrender.

The young lieutenant Gregor Hecker (Jaecki Schwarz) is an alter-ego of the director Konrad Wolf (1925–1982), who processed his own war experiences in this film. Wolf was of Jewish origin and came from a family of staunch communists; his father Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953) was the author of the anti-fascist, anti-antisemitic drama Professor Mamlock, which was filmed in 1938 in the Soviet Union and again in 1961 in the GDR by his son Konrad.

The Wolfs returned to Germany in 1945 and quickly became part of the GDR establishment, not only in the cultural sphere: Konrad’s older brother Markus (1923–2006) was the notorious head of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (Main Directorate for Reconnaissance), a department of the Stasi mainly responsible for foreign espionage, from 1952 to 1986. So the Wolfs fulfilled many stereotypes about “Jewish bolsheviks”, active both in culture and politics.

Wolf himself emphasised the almost “documentary” nature of his 1967 film: “Extensive documents, political, military and historical literature” combined with his own diary entries formed the basis of the screenplay, which was co-written with his frequent collaborator Wolfgang Kohlhaase (1931-2022).

Wolf remembered:

Added to this were Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s experiences on the other side, the experiences of a young German who had grown up in fascist Germany. This enabled us to show people today everything as it really was...

The script, “Weg in die Heimat” (The Way Home), was approved in 1966 by “Arbeitsgruppe Babelsberg” (a committee that controlled the ideological content of films) with the following words:

Such a review of an important stage in our national past, the aesthetic design and the recognition of this tremendous historical achievement of the “German Democratic Republic” serves the development of national and socialist self-awareness. The effective presentation of this theme would also be an important artistic contribution to the struggle for the solution of the national question.

So the “national question” was considered a very important thing by the GDR ideologues. The film aimed to question, stage and interpret history for the purpose of defining a national identity, even (cough) “national and socialist self-awareness” – in contrast to a National Socialist consciousness, which was also semantically disposed of with the preferred catchphrase “fascism”.

How real can a reality be when it is staged by a committed communist and produced by a communist state with strict control over the film industry, which celebrated the film as a showpiece of its cultural output? Especially since Wolf definitely saw himself as a director with a “stance”, and it is no coincidence that many of his most successful films revolved around National Socialism. In his own words:

As long as there is war in this world, as long as classes remain in irreconcilable opposition and as long there are thousands upon thousands of people in the world who are locked in relentless hostility – often without even understanding the mechanisms of war – this theme will remain relevant. Especially for our people, there can be no true and genuine friendship with the peoples of the Soviet Union – even for the generations that come after us – if we are not aware of this shared part of our past. This also applies to other peoples who have suffered under fascism. School knowledge alone is not enough.

For this attitude he had been celebrated in 1959 by the GDR magazine Deutsche Filmkunst:

With his films, Wolf wants to educate people and warn them so that the terrible days of the past will never return. Art is not an end in itself for him; like his father before him, he regards it as a weapon.

Thus, I Was Nineteen is completely in line with GDR orthodoxy. As in today’s Federal Republic of Germany, the interpretation of the defeat of 1945 as “liberation” was state doctrine in the GDR. In Wolf’s film, the Russians and Soviets are the forces of socialist, progressive, enlightened good, fighting the fascist, capitalist evil with righteous anger and holding the instigators of a criminal war accountable for their misdeeds.

However, the film also aims to bring the German people on board the Soviet socialist bandwagon, and therefore distinguishes between German fascists and communists and those who have the potential to become the latter. The Germans that Hecker encounters are essentially divided into those who have already seen the light and those who haven’t (yet). In one iconic scene, he even meets a German soldier who is literally blind and believes he is talking to a comrade.

There is symbolism in this scene. The soldier’s blindness is also metaphorical, as he is blinded by Nazi ideology. But Hecker, representing the Soviets, hasn’t come to kill the blinded Germans, but to help them see the light of communism.

Here are some of the Germans Hecker meets: The mayor of a small town who has quickly cut his swastika banner into a red flag and welcomes the Russian soldiers with champagne glasses; an educated, yet conformist “Bildungsbürger” with a large library and record collection who lives near the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, delivering world-weary philosophical monologues to ease his guilty conscience; a Nazi official who is surprised by the Soviets while sitting at his office desk and asks for allowance to call his superiors in Berlin in order to sign off his duty properly (his request is granted).

And a young girl who asks Hecker for accommodation, saying: “Better with one than with everyone.” This was probably the most delicate way possible to allude to the rapes committed by Red Army soldiers, but the girl is immediately rebuked by a female Russian soldier who angrily accuses her of the crimes committed by the Germans in the Soviet Union.

This Russian woman clearly has no qualms about German women being raped by her compatriots, but the desperate German girl, who is rightly worried and certainly innocent of committing atrocities in occupied Soviet territory, immediately goes on the defensive: “I didn’t do anything. Not me! And even if it’s true, what can I do about it? How does that help me now?”

In another scene, newly liberated German anti-fascists are invited by the Russians to a May Day celebration in the occupied Sanssouci Palace, where they are entertained and addressed as “comrades”.

One of the German communists angrily demands that everyone “who wears a uniform” be hanged: “Exterminate the rabble with sticks and stones, otherwise it will start again in 20 years.” The zealous comrade is called to order by a Russian general, who says that while these feelings are understandable, “you can’t make politics with feelings, and revenge is a bad advisor, especially for the future”.

In the next scene, a liberated German proletarian with a wrinkled face advises the (presumably Jewish) officer Gejman (Vasily Livanov, who later became the great “Russian Sherlock Holmes” admired even by Queen Elizabeth II) on how he, as a German teacher in Kiev, should explain to his students the incomprehensible fact that Hitler was able to come to power:

German anti-fascist: Industry paid him, the Reichswehr supported him, the whole military clique... they handed him power on a plate!

Gejman: But how am I supposed to explain that, Goethe and Auschwitz? Two German names in every language?

German anti-fascist: It’s my language too.

In another scene, the surrender of Spandau Fortress is shown as a “courteous capitulation”, an event that apparently actually took place. Gejman and Hecker appear at the gate as parliamentarians and are hoisted up by a rope ladder to negotiate with a group of Wehrmacht and SS members who show varying degrees of indoctrination (some still believe in the final victory).

The commander of the fortress is a jovial and somewhat eccentric Swabian (“This is my second lost war”) visibly weary of war. A young and rather dashing Wehrmacht officer with an Iron Cross, who is ordered by a Waffen-SS commander to shoot the Soviet envoys, lets the two men go and uses the opportunity to desert. The “fascists” are therefore by no means demonised, at most occasionally caricatured (especially when it comes to the Germans’ supposed “blind militarism”). Even the negatively portrayed characters remain human.

There were ideological reasons for this. After all, the film aimed to build a kind of historical “bridge”, a narrative to make the audience understand how this defeated fascist country could rise from the ashes and become the glorious GDR.

Hecker, who like Wolf comes from an emigrated communist family, but is not portrayed as Jewish (nor played by a Jewish actor), initially feels like a foreigner in his old homeland. His character serves as a connecting link between socialism (spearheaded by the Soviet Union) and the German nation, between the Russian and German people, between the Soviet Union and the future GDR.

However, there are numerous human, historical and ideological divides, hurdles and distances to overcome.

The most impressive episode in the film is probably the last one, which literally shows a divide that must be overcome. Like the episode with the blind soldier, the scene is both symbolic and concrete. It takes place in the first days of May, Hitler is already “kaputt” and Hecker and his troop rest at a small river crossing.

On the other side of the bank, he sees the Germany passing by that has become alien to him, shattered and defeated: refugees with suitcases and ox carts, women, children, old people, miserable-looking Volkssturm recruits with rifles slung over their shoulders, wounded soldiers. He urges them to surrender and cross over to the Russian camp.

Gradually, people cross the river. They are treated well and fed by the Russians. A particularly successful scene shows Russian soldiers, German prisoners of war and German civilians eating together. They are all silent; only the clattering of spoons on plates and tin cans can be heard.

Another symbolic figure appears: the prisoner of war Willi Lommer (Dieter Mann), an earthy Berliner who has long since lost faith in the Endsieg (final victory).

He is one of the already “enlightened” Germans and quickly befriends Hecker. When a scattered group of stubbornly “unenlightened” Waffen-SS soldiers unexpectedly appears on the other side of the river and opens fire on the Russian camp, Lommer grabs a weapon lying nearby and fires alongside Hecker at the “fascists”.

The political message of this scene needs no further explanation. Similar heroic changes of allegiance can be found in other GDR films such as Die Abenteuer des Werner Holt (The Adventures of Werner Holt, 1966), but also in West German productions such as Steiner – Das eiserne Kreuz II (The Iron Cross II) where the protagonist defects to the Americans.

This brief fight at the end of the film is one of the few scenes showing warlike “action”. I Was Nineteen shows a war almost without horror, violence or fighting. The Russian advance on Berlin is swift, almost cheerful and without any significant resistance. The Red Army seems to consist only of sympathetic, good-natured and level-headed people, even if they occasionally show angry contempt for the “fascists”.

The liberation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp is briefly hinted at and its horrors evoked through the insertion of a “documentary film”. Here, too, the Soviets appear as authorised prosecutors and exposers of crimes, almost like police officers who have come to arrest and apprehend criminals. However, the “documentary film” used is a 1946 DEFA propaganda piece, Todeslager Sachsenhausen (Sachsenhausen Death Camp), staged in a wooden, didactic manner and very obviously “acted”.

It is emphasised that people of all nations were victims in this camp, but especially Russian prisoners of war. As usual in early post-war propaganda both in the East and the West, the film does not postulate a special role for Jews among the victims of National Socialism.

Of course it also doesn’t complicate matters for its viewers by mentioning the “Speziallager Sachsenhausen” (Sachsenhausen Special Camp), installed by the Soviets after the war at the very same location, where thousands of people died between 1945 and 1950 (including the great German actor Heinrich George).

Nor does it mention the true story of Paul Sakowski. He is shown in the film as one of the camp’s executioners, explaining to Soviet officers in a dry matter-of-fact tone the function of a gas tap and a “neck-shooting device”, which were “restored” for the purpose of filming and removed again in 1952. But Sakowski was himself a prisoner at the camp, forced to work as a henchman and severely abused. A committed communist who (like Konrad Wolf) came from a deeply red family, he had first been arrested and mistreated by the Gestapo when he was only fourteen.

None of this was mentioned by the Soviets in their propaganda film. Instead, they presented him as a willing participant in Nazi killings of Russian prisoners of war. (It is very possible he was speaking “dialogue” that they had fed to him.) But things got worse afterwards. The Soviets proceeded to build him up as the “Executioner of Sachsenhausen” and sentenced him in a Stalinist show-trial to life imprisonment with hard labour at the infamous Workuta Gulag (where he was assigned again to bury corpses of inmates).

He was sent back to Germany in 1956 where he remained imprisoned until 1970. Sakowski was thus an exceptionally tragic and unlucky fellow who spent over 30 years of his life in detention: in a Nazi concentration camp, a Soviet gulag and various NKVD and GDR prisons.

But misrepresentations of him continued until shortly before his death in 2006. He was featured in a 2002 documentary, Henker (Henchmen). In Berliner Zeitung historian Annette Leo criticised the filmmakers harshly, accusing them of “manipulation” and even “forgery”. They had used footage of an interview she had conducted with Sakowski, but edited it in a very misleading way:

In the interviews conducted by Regina Scheer and myself in 1997 on behalf of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation with Paul Sakowski, he vehemently denied having been an executioner. He repeatedly said that the Russians had beaten this confession out of him. In truth, he had never killed anyone; he had only had to erect the gallows and then remove the dead bodies and place them in coffins.

You can believe him or not. You can interpret it as his way of dealing with his memories, as a desperate attempt to draw attention to his predicament as a prisoner. However, the authors of the film simply omitted Paul Sakowski’s version. Instead, they edited all of Sakowski’s statements in the interview in question, in which he talks about the executions, the murder of Soviet prisoners of war, and violence and death in general, as if he (like the other interviewees in the film) were reporting on his own activities as an executioner. (…)

Sakowski, who is now seriously ill and lives in a nursing home, is no longer able to defend himself. After being repeatedly exploited by changing regimes throughout his life, he is once again being objectified in ‘Henker’. This time by filmmakers who claim to be serious, but who are not exactly squeamish about historical truth and human dignity.

Whatever the truth may be, the information provided by Annette Leo gives us a glimpse how many layers of falsehoods and distortions, one heaped upon the other, can cover a single life story entangled in the tragedies and carnages of World War II.

To return to I Was Nineteen, the attempt to get closer to historical reality by using this propaganda film excerpt disguised as a “documentary” backfires aesthetically pretty hard on Wolf’s intentions. This has been noted not only by naughty right-wing revisionists such as Yours Truly, but by the author of a paper written for the University of Cologne in 2005, from which I have taken many facts and quotations about the film:

If one considers this in conjunction with Wolf’s above-mentioned statements, it becomes clear that Wolf realised that he could only work with “real” documentary footage from Sachsenhausen, as anything else would have been implausible, a reasoning which is understandable to a certain extent.

However, there is a problem with the excerpts themselves. The documentary film seems implausible, bizarre and staged, almost fictional, due to the sobriety of the “executioner” and the Soviet officers present. In addition, the whole thing is interrupted by Gregor’s shower scenes, which confuse the viewer. A 1968 survey of young viewers showed that not all of them understood these scenes as documentary footage. In addition, 27% found the excerpts unconvincing.

As expected, today’s Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education) is not quite as critical when it comes to recommending the film for school lessons and does not say a single word about its staunchly communist background. The parents of the protagonist Gregor Hecker are merely described as “politically active”, while the author focuses on the weakest parts of the film, complaining that its anti-fascism is not thorough enough “from today’s perspective”.

Gregor Hecker is less an actor than an attentive observer. He tries to understand how the atrocities of the National Socialists could have come about... In history lessons, it can be discussed whether the explanations offered in the film – German subservience, Prussian sense of duty, blind fanaticism – are sufficient from today’s perspective.

Apart from that, I think it is fair to say that I Was Nineteen is steeped in GDR ideology, but genuine at least in some major parts, similar to The Adventures of Werner Holt. Despite all the historical distortions and the educational intent, this visually powerful film contains many scenes and characters that feel “authentic” and undoubtedly reflect Wolf’s own first-hand experiences.

I Was Nineteen is, at its non-ideological core, a legitimate piece of subjectively experienced history. However, one should not forget that there are countless other stories from the Second World War that show quite different perspectives which never made it to film and probably never will.

I am thinking, for example, of the book by a man who, like Wolf, was born in 1925 and fought on the other side of the front as a very young member of the Waffen-SS: Wolfgang Venohr’s harrowing account Die Abwehrschlacht (The Defensive Battle) shows clearly that even this section of the German fighting troops cannot be condemned or demonised across the board (as both Kurt Schumacher and Konrad Adenauer publicly affirmed in the 1950s) as is usually done today.

It is more likely that in the future we will continue to see films mainly about German atrocities. A recent example is Der Hauptmann which deals with the bloody “Captain of Köpenick”-like story of another 19 year-old German born in 1925, Willi Herold.

Finally, I want to emphasize that the young Red Army soldier Konrad Wolf did not see himself as a “liberator” of the German people.

This is what he wrote retrospectively:

I was a member of the Soviet Army. My feelings were not significantly different from those of my comrades and friends in the army. I saw the soldiers of Hitler’s Wehrmacht as my enemies, who had started this criminal war. They had destroyed a country that was very close to me. People I had grown up with were subjected to severe suffering. Only when we entered German territory, I had mixed feelings for the first time. (1977)

Today, we speak of liberation with historical justification, but back then we did not use this term in relation to the Germans – and certainly the Germans themselves didn’t feel this way! For me, it was not the “zero hour”: for me, it was the twelfth hour, the climax, the goal that had finally been reached. A great celebration. Satisfaction. (...) I was in Majdanek, in Sachsenhausen, I experienced Warsaw during the uprising and afterwards. For me, Berlin was a symbol of where it all came from, the suffering, the millions of dead, the madness, the fanaticism. Berlin was no longer a city, it was a corpse. (1964)