Remembering History: The Filmmaker Konrad Wolf

Abstract

1944. A young Red Army soldier German by birth but whose parents had emigrated with their young children to the Soviet Union for political reasons returns to Germany. He comes with the triumphant Soviet Army, as a conqueror in his defeated homeland. Now begins the process of self-discovery and self-questioning: What does home mean in this unknown, native country? This is the background to the film Ich war neunzehn, Konrad Wolf s contribution to the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1968. The struggle to find oneself, the difficult path toward self-awareness, recalls patterns from the grand tradition of the Bildungsroman in general and from popular working class literature of the Weimar Republic in particular. Wolf's films describe this process, but they are less concerned with the end point of that difficult path than with the struggle itself. For this was Wolf's own formative experience: Each person must take the first steps on the often contradictory path in search of home, in discovering his place in the struggle for the only possible future of his people. After emigration and return, that has been and remains the crucial experience in my development (Wolf 1984, p. 900). In Wolf's case, consciousness of one's own place in history is not simply a personal problem; it also implies the larger question of German