I Was Nineteen

In April 1945 a Red Army lieutenant named Gregor Hecker, not yet twenty, crosses into Germany with a propaganda unit. He comes back to the country he was born in as one of the victors, but the language, the streets and the people are strange to him now; he stands on the winning side and among the defeated at the same time. Konrad Wolf was telling his own story here: born in 1925, son of the writer Friedrich Wolf, taken to Moscow when the family fled in 1934, a Soviet citizen from 1936 and conscripted in 1942. He wrote the screenplay with Wolfgang Kohlhaase and Werner Bergmann shot it. To show the camps the film uses footage from the 1946 DEFA documentary Todeslager Sachsenhausen, and part of it was filmed on the site of the camp itself. The DEFA production drew more than two hundred and fifty thousand viewers in its first seven days.