I Was Nineteen

(Ich war neunzehn, Konrad Wolf, East Germany 1968, 115 min., DCP, German w/subtitles)

New DEFA Restoration. In 1968, the East German film studio DEFA produced two feature films about the 1945 liberation of Germany by Soviet troops. Both films tell autobiographical stories but while director Heiner Carow’s film that we will show Friday, January 27, was banned during post-production, director Konrad Wolf’s I Was Nineteen became one of the studio’s most celebrated films. Wolf tells the story of young Gregor, who returns to Germany as a Red Army soldier after having fled his native country with his family as a child. The studio endorsed the close ties between Germans and Soviets in the figure of Gregor, but the film actually paints a complicated picture of a young man struggling for his identity. Cosponsored by the Humanities Department at the Eastman School of Music as well as the Department of History, the Film and Media Studies Program, and the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures—German Program at the University of Rochester.