goethe and auschwitz
by Douglas Messerli
Wolfgang
Kohlhasse and Konrad Wolf (screenplay based on Wolf’s War Diaries), Konrad Wolf (director) Ich war neunzehn (I Was
Nineteen) / 1968
It
is mid-April 1945 in which Wolf’s fascinating film begins. From the viewpoint
of the Russian troops near Berlin, we hear a young man with a P.A. system
speaking in German to Nazi soldiers who have not yet surrendered. They are told
not only of the hopelessness of their cause, but that if they surrender they
will be protected, saved from certain death. There is no one visible on the
scene, a forlorn-looking lake, except for a small boat upon which a gallows has
been constructed, a body hanging from it with a sign around its neck: “DESERTEUR
Ich bin ein russen knecht,” “Deserter! I am a Russian lackey.”
Indeed the young man speaking on that
P.A. system, Lieutenant Gregor Hecker (Jaecki Schwartz) might almost see
himself in the dead man’s visage, for Hecker, whose family escaped at the
beginning of the war to Moscow, now fighting with the Red Army, is of German
heritage, a nineteen-year-old boy who was born, much like director himself, in
Cologne. His German background and his ability to speak German is why he has
been assigned this role, and probably why he is traveling, like a human mascot,
sleeping against the shoulder of Wadim (a Russian teacher turned soldier)
(Vasilil Livanov), and sitting, at other times, next to the music-loving Sasha
(Alexej Ejboshenko), Gregor’s easy-going superior.
By the very next scene, as the soldiers
reach the city of Berneu, near Berlin, Gregor is called for by the troop’s Commander,
he is suddenly transformed into a Commandant, ordered to take over the city,
transforming the few remaining residents into law-abiding citizens of the new
Soviet order. The immensity of his sudden rise in power is brilliantly realized
visually by Wolf, as the young man stands in the middle of the street in utter
confusion as reads, time and again, the written proclamation in disbelief.
Throughout all of these early scenes Wolf
creates tension simply by throwing his major figure into a series of vast responsibilities
that nearly overwhelm the nineteen-year-old—and any sympathetic audience.
Berneu, at first, appears almost like a ghost town, with only a young,
frightened girl (Jenny Gröllmann) left. She has just witnessed the dead body of
the woman she has lived with, a suicide victim, and is terrified of what may
lay ahead for her in a city of occupation troops.
Well she should have been when one
realizes, that, in fact, thousands of German women were raped by the Soviet
occupiers, their fathers and husbands shipped out and lost in Russian Gulags.
The closest Wolf’s film comes to this truth is the immense hostility with a
Soviet woman soldier (Galina Polskich) greets the young girl when she comes to
beg a place to stay near Gregor—certainly comprehensible when we realize he is
the only German-speaking male left. Terrifying
the child, the Red Army woman gloats, “now, she too, is frightened.”
Gregor is sympathetic, but also clearly
confused. What is his relationship with the German girl, with the German
language he speaks, and the German people of whom he is now in charge? If he is
now rules a kind of a “ghost-town,” he is also clearly haunted by its ghosts.
Due to Soviet cinematic
restrictions—previous films by Wolf had been delayed or confiscated—the
director does not honestly pursue any Soviet misconduct save the unnecessary murder
of one discovered ex-Nazi. Here the Soviets, typified by Gregor, Wadim and
Sascha, are presented as heroes attempting to find a way to save the Germans
more suffering and to help them build a new country out of the horrors of the
old. We might well describe this film, accordingly, as utter propaganda, were
it not that one might imagine the East German audience of 1968 could read
between the lines.
And those important gaps in the film’s
story do not diminish the questions it does address: how to rebuild a nation of
individuals who have been so perversely hateful, sadistic, destructive? To give
Wolf credit, I Was Nineteen does
explore some of the events of the concentration camps, presenting them through
a kind of pseudo-documentary of the gas-chamber showers and descriptions of
concentration camp life between cuts of the young Gregor showering, surely in
an attempt to wash his own association with his German roots away. A later characters
explanation the rise of Nazism as the German’s endless history of obedience to
all leaders, and an declaration by one concentration camp survivor of the war
as being a product of the manipulation of industrialists and corporations,
however, is clearly inadequate. What Wolf makes clear is that Germany, East or
West, can never free itself for rest of its history from the World War II
events. If Germany might be associated with Bach, Goethe and other great
artists and thinkers, it will also now be associated forever with Auschwitz.
Any attempt to explain what happened to students of the future cannot escape
the inevitability of speaking about both:
Goethe and Auschwitz. Two
German names. Two German names in every
language.
Through the character of Gregor, Wolf
continues throughout this film to explore the tears of sensibility between the
Germans and the Soviets—less in political terms than in very personal emotions,
the pull of his roots and his detestation of his countrymen’s actions.
Throughout this film, we encounter various types of Germans, including the
honor-bound soldiers of a garrison about to be captured. Sent to try to
convince the Nazi enclave to surrender, Wadim and Gregor nearly lose their
lives. But ultimately, the Germans are necessarily convinced to abandon their
impossible position. Logic, even in this absurd world, wins out.
In another scene, as their truck once
again overheats, Gregor walks a short distance to a stream of water, suddenly
discovering a lone German soldier, now blind, waiting in his overturned
vehicle, certain that Gregor is one of his returned comrades. The painful
confusion of this misled and certainly dying soldier, can only, once again,
reflect Gregor’s own pulls between his native language and his role in life.
Only the taste of a cigarette he hands the lost soldier reveals his origins:
the tobacco is from the Caucasus mountains. But even then, the blind survivor
presumes he has been serving as a German there. Finally, Gregor, no longer able
to speak, walks off.
At a
final outpost, where Gregor has been once again enlisted to broadcast to straggling
German soldiers to give themselves up, we witness a similar standoff. This time
reason again prevails, as dozens of Nazis surrender and are brought into
protection at the farm where the Soviets have holed up. But, at the last
moment, SS troops speed up in trucks, shooting down and killing their own men
in order to prevent them from turning themselves in. In the shootout, Sascha is
also killed.
Confused and passive for much of the
film, Gregor suddenly accepting his own German background, also declares his
allegiance not just to Soviet forces but to a kind international determination
to track them all down, to destroy any Nazis still ready to destroy those who
do not embrace their blind fury.
Throughout Wolf’s film, no matter how one
might feel about its cultural forgetfulness, we are moved by his sensitive
attention to the human beings caught up in this tragic battle: focusing on
simple everyday acts, people simply speaking to one another and participating
in the necessary activities of drinking and eating, singing, listening to
music, washing, reading. Food is particularly important. In nearly every scene
in the film, characters, Russians and Germans, eat, sometimes serving up simple
meals, at other times, as in the grand Russian celebration, cooking up
prodigious amounts of food. No matter how divided Wolf’s figures are
politically, he presents them as human beings simply trying to survive. It is
through that nobility of human expression that Wolf’s cinematic art ultimately
becomes something more than a propagandistic tract.
Los Angeles, December
28, 2012
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