A 14-year-old boy tells WWI to shove it — and his entire bourgeois family loses their minds.
In August of 1914, amidst the public ecstasy surrounding the impending war, Hans Gastl, the young son of a Munich bürger, makes a decision: he will not take part in this war. This resolution signifies a turning point in his life; a farewell to his class and his family.
Acting
Jan Spitzer's simmering teenage defiance carries every frame.
Direction
Günther frames domestic spaces like psychological battlefields.
Director
Egon Günther
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
DEFA's most expensive production to date, greenlit partly to prove East German cinema could match West Germany's 'Young Törless' in literary prestige. The irony of state-funded art criticizing class conformity was not lost on censors.
The novel's author Johannes R. Becher later became East Germany's Minister of Culture — the same bureaucracy that would have imprisoned a real Hans Gastl. The film's production history is its own quiet hypocrisy.
XG
