When You Are Fourteen

Ilona is the oldest of five children. Besides school, she has to help take care of her younger siblings. Annegret says that her parents were only able to go to school for 7 or 8 years because of the Second World War. She says that her classmates should try harder in class. Bernhard, at 14, "is already aware of the need to be a soldier." At least, that's what the film commentary claims. Should soldiers one day become superfluous, Bernhard would like to become a forester. But that won't happen anytime soon. The GDR of 1969 wants to be defended. This is how the children are taught in the GDR education system from kindergarten age, and this is also how this fourth film from the long-term observation of the children of Golzow - who are now about fourteen years old and attend the eighth grade of their village school - puts it. For 8 years, East and West Germany have been strictly separated by the Wall and barbed wire. The cold war between East and West is in full swing. This is also noticeable in the film. The 8th grade has been the year of the "youth inauguration" for most GDR youth since the late 1950s. Almost all of the Golzow students take part in this substitute and competing event to religious rites of passage such as the Protestant confirmation or First Communion for Catholics. In Sunday best, often procured with great effort, they are admitted "into the circle of adults" in a festive atmosphere. In addition, young people in this phase of the GDR have to decide in the 8th grade whether they want to start an apprenticeship or remain students. Others transfer to a school in the district town at the beginning of 9th grade, which prepares them for the Abitur. Later, the 10-class school becomes the norm throughout the GDR; leaving school after the 8th grade is then the absolute exception. Like many other eighth-graders, the Golzow youths go on excursions in preparation for their initiation. They visit the Goethe House in Weimar, but also the concentration camp memorials of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. An excursion to the nearby petrochemical combine in Schwedt serves as vocational orientation. What the film does not tell: Those who refuse to take part in the consecration of young people and the state's ideology in general have their chances of personal development in their careers considerably reduced in the GDR. University places were reserved primarily for students who swore allegiance to the state. Those who refused to show loyalty or openly criticized the political situation had a hard time even being admitted to the Abitur. For the coveted university places, boys are often forced to "voluntarily" sign up for 3 years of army service. The advertisement for the "service at the weapon" begins early - already GDR kindergarten songs sing the soldiers of the national people's army. The youth dedication vow, which almost all Golzow eighth-graders also say, begins in 1969 like this: "If you are willing, as young citizens of our German Democratic Republic, to work and fight together with us, true to the constitution, for the great and noble cause of socialism and to honor the revolutionary heritage of the people, then answer: 'Yes, we vow'". One of the few to refuse the 1969 youth dedication is Marieluise, whose parents are evangelical Christians. Her father insists that his daughter not bow to the state pressure to take her initiation. In 1975, the DEFA team dedicates a film of its own, "Ich sprach mit einem Mädchen," to Marieluise.