I was 19

I was 19 is an evil little movie released in 1968 and produced by DEFA, the East German film studio at Babelsberg, near Berlin -- this was where UFA had its film studios in the twenties. Konrad Wolf directs a film derived from his memoirs and diaries written during 1945. Wolf was the son of Jewish communist and emigre from Cologne to Moscow. In 1945, he returned to Germany as a lieutenant and translator in the Red Army. Wolf was an estimable East German director; a couple of his films Solo Sunny and Divided Heaven enjoy good reputations as being cautiously dissident works. But no trace of dissidence is visible in I was 19. The picture is an unashamed fan's note, a mash letter, to the noble, kindly, and gentle Red Army. Throughout, the piety that the picture displays to East Germany's Soviet masters is nauseating. Further, the movie has a nasty, menacing sub-text: a repeated motif is a character belligerently shouting the threat "We will find you! We will hunt you down!" I assume that this motto is intended to strike fear in anyone not inclined to the rosy vision of German - Soviet relations portrayed in the picture -- if you are not with us, you are a crypto-fascist, a Nazi-sympathizer, and have no doubt, the informer society of East Germany is designed to "find you," to "hunt you down." Wolf has carefully studied Tarkovsky to determine how stylized and ellliptical he dares make his narration -- throughout the film there are shots and episodes that look like diluted Tarkovsky: Wolf shows us the same watery meadows, limpid flooded rivers, lagoons, hulking medieval fortresses -- for instance, the Spandau towers which seem to be surrounded by a grey lake. Indeed, the film's opening shot -- which shows a hanged man on a ramshackle raft is a startling image and worthy of the Russian master. It's clear that Wolf examined Tarkovsky's works -- which were generally suppressed and heavily criticized shortly after their release -- to determine just how far he could go without incurring the wrath of the censors in Berlin and Moscow. Although the obvious Tarkovsky reference is My Name is Ivan, more of the imagery in the movie seems derived from the Russian's great, suppressed epic Andrei Rublev -- particularly the final scenes on a barren prairie where captured Germans are being tenderly treated by their sweet-tempered Red Army captors. Curiously, Wolf also wants to display an understanding of the film syntax of the French New Wave -- a couple scenes, particularly a striking didactic exchange between a German intellectual and the Russian soldiers, are edited in an abrupt, jumpy analytical style: the debate seems similar to some of the didactic Marxist exchanges that Godard stages in his films like Weekend and La Chinoise. (A long tracking shot during a song about the Spanish Civil War echoes the circular pan during the Mozart performance in Weekend). Other parts of the picture look like denatured Truffaut. The movie is periodically powerful, but its pro-Soviet point-of-view is so vapid, pervasive, and persistent that pretty soon you are rooting for the Nazis. For instance, Wolf has the audacity to intercut shots of his young Communist hero showering with what purports to be a filmed interview with an actual concentration camp executioner. Unfortunately, the footage of the supposed Henker is given dramatic emphasis by a spectacular brooding score that sounds like Shostakovich and edited in a way as to appear totally and completely staged (I have no idea whether the imagery is real or fake -- my point is that it feels totally faked). This unfortunate effect is coupled with the executioner's observations that the victims of his cyanide gas were "almost all Russians." Not Jews, mind you -- but poor, innocent Russians. The essay accompanying the film suggests that Wolf somehow implies the wide-spread, indeed, apparently universal, practice of terrorizing enemy civilians by rape used by the Red Army in Germany, but this is completely untrue. There's only one woman in the picture -- and the notes tell us she turned out to be a STASI informer in real life -- and she is conspicuously unraped. To get the real feel for the point of the movie, look at the little newsreel featuring the picture's hero -- the kid can't be more effusive and fawning about the herzlich kindness and generosity of the Russians who appear with him in the picture. All in all, a nasty piece of work, but definitely worth watching for the political subtext. The sad thing is that many films in the DEFA catalog are now available and, yet, not a single picture directed by the great Helmut Kautner is available in this country. Kautner had the misfortune of making delicately nuanced "women's pictures" during the Third Reich. He has been unfairly condemned for not opposing the Nazi regime and, in fact, making a half-dozen extremely sophisticated apolitical melodramas during the war -- he also made another dozen or so highly regarded post-war films. These pictures sound fascinating but none of them are available. I hope that this injustice is cured when American audiences have a chance to see Kautner's extraordinary performance in Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Karl May, which will be released on DVD in June -- perhaps, the Syberberg film, which was cast entirely with old movie stars active during the Nazi period -- will arouse an interest in the non-political films made in that era.