homecoming as a national founding myth jewish identity and german landscapes in konrad wolf’s i was nineteen同学会作为国家建国神话犹太身份和德国在康拉德狼的风景,我19岁.pdfVIP

Religions 2012, 3, 130– 150; doi:10.3390/rel3010 130 OPEN ACCESS religions ISSN 2077-1444 /journal/religions Article Homecoming as a National Founding Myth: Jewish Identity and German Landscapes in Konrad Wolf’s I was Nineteen Ofer Ashkenazi History Department, University of Minnesota, 1110 Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA; E-Mail: oashkena@; Tel.: 1-651-442-3030 Received: 5 January 2012; in revised form: 13 March 2012 / Accepted: 14 March 2012 / Published: 22 March 2012 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 a