"For years, we young filmmakers in West Germany considered I Was Nineteen to be the best film to come from the East, despite the interference from DEFA, the state production company, which supervised the script, casting, shooting and editing." —Volker Schlöndorff, Guest Director's Selection, 2016 Telluride Film Festival

“One of the best-known DEFA productions in history. The film’s narrative structure, editing style, camera movement, and dialogue are highly progressive for the time and seem closely related to techniques later employed by the directors of the French New Wave.” 
—New York Jewish Film Festival 2015

"Topnotch! Effective acting." —Variety

"The autobiographical structure allowed [Wolf] to formulate an individual's personal search for home, for Germany, into a general issue of national identity."
—Marc Silberman, German Cinema-Text in Conte

"An autobiographical masterpiece!" —filmportal.de

"As far as I am concerned, this is the best film—in a short eternity—that has been made in Germany."
—Hermann Kant, author, in the Berlin Forum, May 1968

"Rarely in the arts have postwar Germans been so precisely portrayed. But along with this differentiated, distanced, critically stringent and bitterly frank depiction, there is also human understanding and unbiased perceptions without any clichés. This truthful portrayal is painful but also healing ... After many years, we finally have a DEFA film whose aesthetic, formal quality is not out of sync with its idealistic, thematic quality. And also vice versa. This film is a self-contained and accomplished work of art - a first-class film."
— H. U. in the Berlin Neue Zeit on Feb. 2, 1968