April 1 9 4 5. Gregor Hecker is a 19-year old German whose parents fled from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union, and he is now accompanying the Red Army in its counterattack in Brandenburg, speaking in German over the loudspeaker and trying to persuade as many German soldiers to surrender. They arrive at Bernau where he is briefly appointed as the commander of the town; they liberate the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and question one of the guards; he and and a Soviet officer enter the Spandau fortress to negotiate about the Wehrmacht surrendering, to avoid bloodshed; the 1 May is celebrated in a building. On a meadow, a group of Nazi soldiers disguise themselves as Soviets and attack Hecker's unit, then continue fleeing. Hecker talks to them to surrender over the loudspeaker, and some German soldiers do, but then a SS unit passes by and shoots at them, killing some.
The director Konrad Wolf chronicles his own autobiographical experiences at the end of World War II in "I Was Nineteen", and thus the entire movie is made out of meandering episodes and vignettes—some are better, some are weaker—but overall it is a compelling chronicle of war madness, as well as the unusual situation where the 19-year old protagonist is an anti-Nazi German encountering Nazi Germans. War movies are often suitable for high drama due to high stakes, since the protagonists' lives are always on thin ice, but here the mood is more calm, restrained and measured. One reason may be that the budget was not that high, and thus no major action sequences were able to be staged, as instead the locations mostly play out on a meadow, far away from the front line or cities. Some moments are a bit clumsy: 32 minutes into the film, when the Red Army arrives at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, there is a peculiar use of archive footage from the East German documentary film "Todeslager Sachsenhausen" which shows ex-guard Paul Sakowski explaining how inmates were killed in the gas chamber via hydrogen cyanide—Wolf may have inserted it for the sake of authenticity, but it feels like a poor choice that sticks out like a sore thumb, bordering on copyright infringement and lazy refusal to simply film it anew. Nontheless, some situations are iconic and incredible, showing how authenticity negates war film cliches.
For instance, in one excellent episode, the protagonist Hecker and a Soviet officer walk to the gates of the Spandau fortress in the countryside, trying to negotiate a surrender of Nazi soldiers inside to avoid bloodshed. Two officers descend from a rope ladder down to them, and then invite them to climb up inside, where Wolf subtly shows a rift between two factions: the Wehrmacht and the SS, that cannot stand each other since the SS is impossibly hardline extremist and refuses to compromise on anything. One SS officer even laments to another: "One cannot rely on Italians, Romanians, Bulgarians anyway, but that our own people fail in this fateful fight, that is an incredible betrayal and it is going on for years! The negotiators should simply be shot, that's it." When no agreement is able to be reached, the Wehrmacht commander proposes a compromise to the two Soviet negotiators: "We won't attack you, and you won't attack us. You claim the war will be over any day now. So let's wait and then we will hand over the fortress within the framework of the expected capitulation of the Wehrmacht." As Hecker and the Soviet officer are escorted outside through a secret exit, the two Nazi officers that lead them, use this opportunity to simply run to a boat on a nearby lake and escape from their commanders. Communist propaganda seems to have inhibited Wolf in certain parts (Soviet soldiers raping in town is hinted at in only one vague scene of a German woman searching for shelter), but he was still skilful enough to craft a memorable film, a one where some quiet sentences will stay in your mind without the viewers even noticing it (a Soviet soldier from Kyiv asks a German Communist: "How will I explain this to my kids? Goethe and Auschwitz. Two German names. Two names of the same language").
Grade:+++
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