Homecoming as a National Founding Myth: Jewish Identity and German Landscapes in Konrad Wolf’s I was Nineteen

Ofer Ashkenazi

doi:10.3390/rel3010130

Abstract

Konrad Wolf was one of the most enigmatic intellectuals of East Germany. The son of the Jewish Communist playwright Friedrich Wolf and the brother of Markus Wolf—the head of the GDR’s Foreign Intelligence Agency—Konrad Wolf was exiled in Moscow during the Nazi era and returned to Germany as a Red Army soldier by the end of World War Two. This article examines Wolf’s 1968 autobiographical film I was Nineteen (Ich war Neunzehn), which narrates the final days of World War II—and the initial formation of postwar reality—from the point of view of an exiled German volunteer in the Soviet Army. In analyzing Wolf’s portrayals of the German landscape, I argue that he used the audio-visual clichés of Heimat-symbolism in order to undermine the sense of a homogenous and apolitical community commonly associated with this concept. Thrown out of their original contexts, his displaced Heimat images negotiate a sense of a heterogeneous community, which assumes multi-layered identities and highlights the shared ideology rather than the shared origins of the members of the national community. Reading Wolf from this perspective places him within a tradition of innovative Jewish intellectuals who turned Jewish sensibilities into a major part of modern German mainstream culture.

Highlights

At first glance, Konrad Wolf‘s 1968 film I was Nineteen (Ich war Neunzehn) is a story of a triumphant homecoming
Dan Diner‘s oft-cited reflection on the ―negative‖ symbiosis locates it in post-World War II West Germany, where the presence of Jews generated a sense of ―contradictory mutuality‖ that places Auschwitz as a major point of reference for both Jewish and German identities, and enabled the formation of post-Holocaust German nationalism [29]
The guiding principle of this film‘s imagery is to manipulate the cultural imagination associated with the notion of Heimat in the post-World War II German nationality

Summary

Introduction

Konrad Wolf‘s 1968 film I was Nineteen (Ich war Neunzehn) is a story of a triumphant homecoming. In undermining the generic imagery associated with the concept of Heimat (especially since 1933, when the perception of Heimat as a concept revolving ―around the central themes of race, blood and German destiny‖ was standardized under Nazi rule [2]), Wolf sought to override the notion of collective identity it entailed: namely, that of a homogeneous community molded by its ―authentic‖ attachment to the national landscape. A sober supporter of German socialism, Wolf did not believe that the socialist credo alone would solve theJewish problem‘; he rather interpreted Socialism as a distinctive, critical viewpoint, according to which guidelines for a new path in German (and GermanJewish) history could be marked

German-Jewish Dialog in the East-German Heimat

I was Nineteen: A Homeland without a Home

Conclusions