Ed Power
TELEGRAPH
Thu, January 19, 2023
All Quiet on the Western Front
The First World War is reimagined as a symphony of mud, teen angst and terrible beauty in All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s stunning German-language retelling of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel. As with Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Hollywood adaptation, it faithfully communicates Remarque’s message about the futility of the conflict. To this Berger adds production values that have the blood-in-ears rush of a hyper-stylised video game. Violence may be hell, but Berger bathes it in a pulsating shimmer. Oh, what a lovely-looking war he has conjured.
There’s always that extra zing when a war movie takes up the German perspective. That’s particularly true of the First World War, long distilled in the popular imagination into a mash-up of Wilfred Owen, Blackadder Goes Forth and Paul McCartney’s Pipes of Peace video. Such clichés are absent from Berger’s take. All Quiet on the Western Front instead feels like a Teutonic soulmate of Sam Mendes’s 1917, which likewise re-cast the ghastliness of the trenches as a haunting Neverland.
The film, which has a staggering 14 Bafta nominations, tells the story of 17-year-old German recruit Paul Bäumer (a charismatically mopey Felix Kammerer), across the span of the war. He is introduced as a naïve adolescent who lies about his age to sign up with his equally patriotic pals. But as soon as he reaches the frontline, he has the sense of entering a dystopian otherworld. That sci-fi factor reaches its inevitable conclusion when a phalanx of monstrously boxy French tanks rumble into view, sprung free from an HG Wells nightmare.
The dreaminess leaves little room for a conventional plot (another parallel with 1917). Berger and cinematographer James Friend have instead stitched together a series of vignettes that by turns convey the banality and the terrifying white-heat of the killing fields. The effect is visceral. A grey haze descends whenever the machine guns strike up and Paul and his friends – portrayed with cheery charm by Aaron Hilmer, Adrian Grünewald and Albrecht Schuch – become snarled in smoke and mummified in muck. These vividly-drawn characters are suddenly rendered indistinguishable: a commentary, surely, on how war reduces young men to indistinguishable killing machines or targets.
The tumult in the trenches is juxtaposed with the more orthodox account of German politician Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) and his desperate efforts to bring the conflict to a close to prevent further needless deaths. He is opposed not just by the warmongering French but the Berlin military establishment. As personified by General Friedrich (Devid Striesow), they believe German honour must be safeguarded by continuing to toss teenagers into the meat grinder.
What stays with you is the eeriness. Two figures face off in a forest glade, framed by icy light. French soldiers in dehumanising gas-masks wield flamethrowers. Paul staggers from a tunnel wearing a funeral shroud of white ash. There are moments, admittedly, when All Quiet on the Western Front makes you feel as though you’re sitting through the most profound PlayStation cut-scene ever made. But the beauty is unrelenting and finally claustrophobic. Berger’s evocation of war and its horrors ultimately connects not at an intellectual level but where it truly matters: in the gut.
15 cert, 147 min. On Netflix now
Thu, January 19, 2023
All Quiet on the Western Front
The First World War is reimagined as a symphony of mud, teen angst and terrible beauty in All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s stunning German-language retelling of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel. As with Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Hollywood adaptation, it faithfully communicates Remarque’s message about the futility of the conflict. To this Berger adds production values that have the blood-in-ears rush of a hyper-stylised video game. Violence may be hell, but Berger bathes it in a pulsating shimmer. Oh, what a lovely-looking war he has conjured.
There’s always that extra zing when a war movie takes up the German perspective. That’s particularly true of the First World War, long distilled in the popular imagination into a mash-up of Wilfred Owen, Blackadder Goes Forth and Paul McCartney’s Pipes of Peace video. Such clichés are absent from Berger’s take. All Quiet on the Western Front instead feels like a Teutonic soulmate of Sam Mendes’s 1917, which likewise re-cast the ghastliness of the trenches as a haunting Neverland.
The film, which has a staggering 14 Bafta nominations, tells the story of 17-year-old German recruit Paul Bäumer (a charismatically mopey Felix Kammerer), across the span of the war. He is introduced as a naïve adolescent who lies about his age to sign up with his equally patriotic pals. But as soon as he reaches the frontline, he has the sense of entering a dystopian otherworld. That sci-fi factor reaches its inevitable conclusion when a phalanx of monstrously boxy French tanks rumble into view, sprung free from an HG Wells nightmare.
The dreaminess leaves little room for a conventional plot (another parallel with 1917). Berger and cinematographer James Friend have instead stitched together a series of vignettes that by turns convey the banality and the terrifying white-heat of the killing fields. The effect is visceral. A grey haze descends whenever the machine guns strike up and Paul and his friends – portrayed with cheery charm by Aaron Hilmer, Adrian Grünewald and Albrecht Schuch – become snarled in smoke and mummified in muck. These vividly-drawn characters are suddenly rendered indistinguishable: a commentary, surely, on how war reduces young men to indistinguishable killing machines or targets.
The tumult in the trenches is juxtaposed with the more orthodox account of German politician Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) and his desperate efforts to bring the conflict to a close to prevent further needless deaths. He is opposed not just by the warmongering French but the Berlin military establishment. As personified by General Friedrich (Devid Striesow), they believe German honour must be safeguarded by continuing to toss teenagers into the meat grinder.
What stays with you is the eeriness. Two figures face off in a forest glade, framed by icy light. French soldiers in dehumanising gas-masks wield flamethrowers. Paul staggers from a tunnel wearing a funeral shroud of white ash. There are moments, admittedly, when All Quiet on the Western Front makes you feel as though you’re sitting through the most profound PlayStation cut-scene ever made. But the beauty is unrelenting and finally claustrophobic. Berger’s evocation of war and its horrors ultimately connects not at an intellectual level but where it truly matters: in the gut.
15 cert, 147 min. On Netflix now
Why the ‘Jewish treachery’ of All Quiet on the Western Front drove Joseph Goebbels mad
Tom Fordy
Thu, January 19, 2023
In this article:
'It's not about politics': All Quiet on the Western Front showed the grim reality of life in the trenches - Reiner Bajo
In December 1930, Joseph Goebbels led an attack against the landmark anti-war film, All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the controversial, hugely successful novel published in 1928 by Erich Maria Remarque, a First World War veteran.
Last year a German-language retelling of the book was made by Edward Berger for Netflix, earning rave reviews and armfuls of nominations at the 2023 Baftas, as well as becoming the favourite to win Best International Feature Film at the Oscars in March. It is the first film adaptation by a German director. “If your [American] great-grandfather fought in the war, he came back and was celebrated and embraced,” has said Berger. “It’s just a different legacy in Germany. It’s only shame and guilt – that informs every creative decision I make.”
The original 1930 American-made film, directed by the Russian-born Lewis Milestone, depicted the bleak, traumatising reality for Germans in the trenches. In the story, a group of school chums enlist – all hyped up on the glory of war – and perish one-by-one. The film was critically acclaimed in the United States, Britain, and France; by the time it reached Germany, All Quiet on the Western Front had won Academy Awards for Outstanding Production and Best Director.
The National Socialists had warned against showing the film in Germany, though a lowkey industry preview in Berlin went smoothly enough. German critics, particularly those on the Right, disliked the film – not for any lack of artistic merit but for its portrayal of German soldiers and war disillusionment. The Nazi newspaper, Der Angriff, called the film a “Jewish lie”, while the liberal newspaper Vossische Zeitung claimed that the screening had provoked a “profound effect on the audience”.
The following night, on December 5 1930, the film premiered in Berlin’s swanky Mozart Hall. Goebbels and his brownshirts bought up a third of the tickets. Ten minutes into the presentation, Goebbels arose from his seat and headed to the exit, signalling the brownshirts to begin a chaotic disruption. They bellowed over the film – “Jews out! Germany awake! Hitler is at the gates!” – and unleashed stink bombs and white mice into the auditorium. Goebbels later boasted in his diary about the pandemonium: “After only 10 minutes the cinema is like a madhouse”. There was rioting outside the theatre and several more days of Goebbels-led trouble. The German government swiftly banned All Quiet on the Western Front.
“They banned it because there was a culture war going on,” says Alexander Watson, Professor of History at Goldsmiths University. “They didn’t ban it because it’s inaccurate. The Nazis made enough disruption that the government gave in – ‘Let’s ban it because it’s a danger to public order.’” Indeed, it was a victory for the rising Nazis. Joseph Goebbels – the party’s soon-to-be chief propagandist – understood the power of film.
Ninety-three years on, All Quiet on the Western Front remains a profoundly stirring piece of cinema – old-timey hokeyness punctuated with the bombshell-like moments of hellish violence and deep, soul-troubling sadness.
Netflix’s new adaptation realises the story on a scale way beyond the means and technology of the 1930 version. It plays like an opponent to Sam Mendes’ 1917 – told from across the battle lines – and gets deep into the filth, guts, and industrialisation of mass death. But few scenes equal a climactic moment from the 1930 film, as Lew Ayres’ hero, Paul Bäumer, carries his last surviving pal to safety – unaware that his friend is already dead. The scene was apparently inspired by a real-life incident in which Remarque had carried a wounded comrade back from the battlefield.
Remarque was called up in 1916, aged 18, and was sent towards the Western Front the following year. He never made it as far as the frontline. Wounded by grenade splinters in the Battle of Flanders, he spent most of the remaining war in hospital. All Quiet on the Western Front – Im Westen nichts Neues in the original German – was partly autobiographical but also based on second-hand accounts from fellow soldiers, some whom he’d met in the infirmary.
Im Westen nichts Neues was first serialised in Vossische Zeitung, a liberal Berlin newspaper, at the end of 1928. It was cleverly marketed – presented as an authentic account of life in the German trenches. The serialisation tripled the circulation of the newspaper, which was reported to sell out each edition. The book followed in January 1929.
Coming at a complex time for post-WWI Germany – when the country was facing reparations, a wave of militarism, and its own sense of loss – the story struck. By the end of the year, Im Westen nichts Neues had sold over a million copies and was translated into more than 20 languages.
Witness to history: Erich Maria Remarque, circa 1950
- Albert Harlingue/Roger Viollet
“There are so many war novels – you cannot count them!” says Holger Afflerbach, Professor of Modern European History at Leeds University. “Why this one? The overwhelming success shows that it was an appropriate and maybe true story about how the war was experienced by the normal soldier. It’s not about generals, it’s not about strategy, it’s about ordinary men.
“There’s a common theme in many of the soldiers’ recollections. Millions of people had to go through awful experiences – maybe they came as volunteers and discovered the realities of the war at the frontline. They were angry. This anger stayed with them for years after the war – that they had to go through it and that others had let it happen. They felt betrayed.”
The book was controversial. In Germany, the Right accused Remarque of betraying the country; his book dismantled the image of mighty German heroism. Other countries, including Italy, banned it.
Alexander Watson, whose book Ring of Steel is about Germany and Austria-Hungary in WWI, explains other reasons for its controversy. “Remarque was largely welcomed in Britain and France,” says Watson. “The impact in Germany – particularly the film – was far more complicated. Remarque presents the war as something that’s fundamentally pointless. We can say, ‘This is terrible and shouldn’t have happened’ if we’ve won. For the Germans it was much more difficult to accept because they had 2 million dead. How do you justify all those deaths to bereaved families – to say those deaths meant something – if a book comes out and says it was entirely pointless?”
The film rights were snapped up by Carl Laemmle, a German-born Jew and the founder of Universal Pictures. His son, the Hollywood wunderkind Carl Laemmle Jr, took the reins as producer. The film – a sombre, harrowing, un-heroic treatment on why war is most definitely hell – was risky for Universal. It also had the potential to transform the relatively minor studio into a major player.
Several writers worked on the screenplay, and newspapers from the time reported that Milestone had resisted calls to shoehorn a love story into the carnage. The film remained mostly faithful to the book. Remarque, when selling the rights, requested that the story wasn’t significantly altered. He wanted to maintain its anti-war message.
“There are so many war novels – you cannot count them!” says Holger Afflerbach, Professor of Modern European History at Leeds University. “Why this one? The overwhelming success shows that it was an appropriate and maybe true story about how the war was experienced by the normal soldier. It’s not about generals, it’s not about strategy, it’s about ordinary men.
“There’s a common theme in many of the soldiers’ recollections. Millions of people had to go through awful experiences – maybe they came as volunteers and discovered the realities of the war at the frontline. They were angry. This anger stayed with them for years after the war – that they had to go through it and that others had let it happen. They felt betrayed.”
The book was controversial. In Germany, the Right accused Remarque of betraying the country; his book dismantled the image of mighty German heroism. Other countries, including Italy, banned it.
Alexander Watson, whose book Ring of Steel is about Germany and Austria-Hungary in WWI, explains other reasons for its controversy. “Remarque was largely welcomed in Britain and France,” says Watson. “The impact in Germany – particularly the film – was far more complicated. Remarque presents the war as something that’s fundamentally pointless. We can say, ‘This is terrible and shouldn’t have happened’ if we’ve won. For the Germans it was much more difficult to accept because they had 2 million dead. How do you justify all those deaths to bereaved families – to say those deaths meant something – if a book comes out and says it was entirely pointless?”
The film rights were snapped up by Carl Laemmle, a German-born Jew and the founder of Universal Pictures. His son, the Hollywood wunderkind Carl Laemmle Jr, took the reins as producer. The film – a sombre, harrowing, un-heroic treatment on why war is most definitely hell – was risky for Universal. It also had the potential to transform the relatively minor studio into a major player.
Several writers worked on the screenplay, and newspapers from the time reported that Milestone had resisted calls to shoehorn a love story into the carnage. The film remained mostly faithful to the book. Remarque, when selling the rights, requested that the story wasn’t significantly altered. He wanted to maintain its anti-war message.
Outgunned and exhausted: German infantry resting during a lull in battle - Bettmann
Like Remarque, director Lewis Milestone had served – but in a very different capacity. He learned his craft in the Photographic Division of the United States Signal Corps. Based in Washington, he made training films and edited combat footage. As recalled in Andrew Kelly’s book, All Quiet on the Western Front: The Story of a Film, Milestone employed German veterans as behind-the-scenes advisors and technicians: one German veteran, Otto Biber, taught the actors how to goosestep. Also enlisted was landmark cinematographer Arthur Edeson (who also shot Frankenstein and Casablanca). Edeson’s work would prove vital for All Quiet’s first-of-their kind battles scenes.
Lew Ayres – who became a popular Hollywood star through a series of Dr Kildare films – took the lead role of Paul Bäumer, who loses all of friends after joining the 2nd Company. Ayres later caused some controversy for declaring himself as a conscientious objector during the Second World War – though he did enlist as a medic and served in the Pacific. Playing Bäumer’s closest comrade, the grizzled mentor Katz, was the likable, potato-ish Louis Wolheim. He died suddenly the following year, aged just 50.
All Quiet on the Western Front began production on November 11 1929 – the anniversary of the WWI armistice – a symbolic, publicity-friendly gesture. The film begins amped up on war enthusiasm – soldiers parading through adorning crowds, boys itching to fight. Bäumer and his friends are talked into volunteering by their school teacher, Kantorek (played with menace by Arnold Lucy). Echoing the words in Remarque’s novel, Kantorek tells his pupils that they are “the life of the Fatherland… the iron men of Germany… the gay heroes who will repulse the enemy when you are called upon to do so.” The scene is maddening – all maniacal laughter and spoiling for bloodshed. One pupil imagines putting on the Imperial uniform to show his parents at home – his mother is horrified, his father is proud as punch.
Kantorek personifies what Holger Afflerbach describes as “treacherous patriotism”. All Quiet on the Western Front is perhaps not as unpolitical as Remarque had claimed. “It is very clearly a reckoning with old-style patriotism,” says Afflerbach. “It’s this 19th century European patriotism that was taught in grammar schools. The teacher is probably the most negative figure in the entire story.”
'Treacherous patriotism': an early scene from Netflix's All Quiet on the Western Front - ReinerBajo
These early scenes play into the long-held view of Germans greeting the war enthusiastically. “When war broke out in 1914, German newspapers were talking about war enthusiasm,” says Alexander Watson. “There were pictures of big crowds gathering, singing patriotic songs, shouting things like, ‘Down with Russia!’
“But a lot of research has been done since that shows a vast majority of Germans were very scared – most people didn’t want war. There were some crowds before war broke out, but those patriotic crowds were disproportionately students – and they were often gathering before Germany looked like it was entering the war. They were gathering to support Austria. It’s difficult to say whether they wanted war themselves.
“But once war breaks out, people go. Russia mobilises first so it looks like Germany is under threat of invasion. People in Germany said, ‘We don’t want to go but we’ve got to defend the country.’ It’s not that people were war enthused – it looked like it was ultimately necessary that they went.”
After enlisting, Bäumer and his pals are like children – all excited by their new army bunk beds – but are soon face-down in the mud, or going underpants-on-the-head crazy under the constant artillery bombardments.
The film is occasionally daft by modern standards – a company of German Imperial soldiers with Yankee Doodle accents, which may have rankled some German viewers. But even now, the trench warfare and battle scenes are a thundering, hellacious experience: screeching bombs, earth-rattling explosions, scores of men cut down by machinegun fire, and severed hands left clutching to barbed wire – a precursor to The Longest Day, Paths of Glory, and Saving Private Ryan.
There’s also hand-to-hand combat; bayonets that come spearing towards the camera. “All [other battles] shown previously are tame by comparison,” wrote a Los Angeles critic after the film’s premiere. Ninety-five years since the advent of talkies, it's now hard to imagine how terrifying and real the battles must have sounded to audiences at the time.
In one scene, Bäumer bayonets a French soldier and has to face watching him die. The new film replays the scene more gruesomely – a grim depiction of a violent death and trauma – but the original scene remains equally affecting. “Forgive me, comrade,” pleads Bäumer. “If we threw away these uniforms, we could be brothers.”
Bone-shaking accuracy: a battle scene from 1930's All Quiet on the Western Front
- John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images
The film was ahead of its time in striving for historical accuracy. The no-man’s land scenes were filmed at Irvine Ranch, south of Hollywood, where they used real dynamite blasts to create shell craters, and filled them with dirty water. When a rainstorm hit the production, Lewis Milestone sent his actors out into the torrid conditions for added realism.
As detailed in Andrew Kelly’s book, a sanitary inspector temporarily shut down the production for its all-too-real conditions. The inspector was accompanied by a nurse who had spent time at a field hospital in Dijon. “It brings back to mind all the terrible anguish of that struggle,” the nurse said.
Universal spent a reported $27,500 on real uniforms, rifles, gas masks, and field equipment from the war. The production was so epic that it went way over budget, rocketing from a planned $900,000 to $1.4 million. Publicity at the time claimed that twenty tons of gunpowder and ten tons of dynamite were used, while Universal also reported that 2,000 extras had been recruited – veterans from the American Legion and various nationalities. One veteran had shell-shock from his experiences and had to be sent home.
“Except for not using real bullets, we might as well have been in the war,” said cinematographer Arthur Edeson. “There were some close calls with explosions.” Indeed, newspapers reported in January 1930 that Lewis Milestone was almost killed in one explosion. He was hospitalised by a flying two-by-four. A German trench helmet had saved his life.
Like Remarque’s book, the film is often most powerful away from the battlefield. In one scene, the soldiers query why or how the war began, which has become a trope of WWI stories (Baldrick asks Blackadder the same before they go over the top). “Somebody must have wanted it?” ask the German soldiers about the war. “Maybe it was the English? It must be doing somebody some good. Maybe the Kaiser wanted a war?” Nobody seems to know.
“By 1917 soldiers were asking, ‘Why is this war lasting so long?’” says Alexander Watson. “There was a worry that the German government and army wanted the war to continue because they wanted to expand Germany and profit from it.”
For Holger Afflerbach, not dwelling on politics may explain the story's success. “It was not about politics,” Afflerbach says. “It was about the experience – they go through the gruesome experience and try to keep alive. It’s also the peer group experience. It's not the Kaiser that keeps them going. If they don’t stick together and look out for each other, they will die.”
Awful realism: a scene from Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - ullstein bild/ullstein bild
At times, the film is as much about hunger as death, with the 2nd Company scrambling for something – anything – to eat. It's certainly accurate: the British cut off Germany from international trade via a naval blockade. Around 750,000 Germans died of malnutrition or related diseases.
In another poignant sequence, Bäumer returns home briefly, where he’s surrounded by fusty old men who – having been nowhere near a trench – insist that the war needs to continue. “You must give the Frenchies a good licking,” says one. Bäumer returns to his school and warns Kantorek and the pupils about the less-than-triumphant realities of war. “It’s easier to say go out and die than it is to do it,” he says. Bäumer is called a coward, echoing the criticisms hurled at Remarque.
The scenes describe a discord between the frontline and folks back home. “Most people knew in 1914 that it was going to be terrible, but they didn’t know how terrible, or how long it was going to last,” says Watson. “Soldiers at the front did get very angry at the staff and generals, and there was some division between the soldiers at the front and home. In letters I’ve read you do see criticism of war-enthused people at home – who don’t know what on earth is going on – while soldiers are bearing the brunt.
“At the same time, you wouldn’t know from Remarque that German soldiers were heavily dependent on support from the home front – 28 billion letters and parcels were passed back and forth. By the second half of the war, the home front was very scarce on food but German families were still sending the soldiers whatever they could get.”
Lewis Milestone agonised over how to end the film. It was settled when a cinematographer friend, Karl Freud, said it should be “as simple as a butterfly”. In the final scene, Bäumer – his friends now all dead – spies a butterfly on the edge of no-man's land. He reaches to touch it but his hand goes limp – killed by a sniper days before the Armistice.
All Quiet on the Western Front was hailed as a masterpiece. “Universal Pictures deserves the thanks of mankind for their courage in making the picture,” wrote one American critic in June 1930.
As detailed by historian Jerold Simmons, the filmmakers had liaised with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America to navigate any material that may cause problems with domestic censors. Overseas, different countries requested different edits – all according to their own national sensitivities. The traditionally censorious Brits requested just one small edit. But Universal was most concerned with Germany, the second biggest market in Europe. The film was first shown to the German Embassy, which suggested small changes. The German censor board then approved the film with a few additional cuts.
For the Nazis – who made considerable gains in the 1930 election – All Quiet on the Western Front presented a political opportunity. The government was weak and nationalists, Nazi or otherwise, agreed that the German army should be perceived as strong. The Right wanted to maintain the myth that Germany had not lost the war on the battlefield, but because of liberal and Jewish treachery. The film had provoked a violent reaction in the post-WWI culture war.
Joseph Goebbels – who hadn’t actually fought in WWI – slated the film as a “Jewish version of a German soldier’s life”. His thuggish demonstrations raged on and the film was banned. The censor board denied that the Nazis has forced its hand. All Quiet on the Western Front was banned elsewhere, too, including Austria (where there was also nationalist uproar) Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and, oddly, New Zealand
Universal fought to re-release the film in Germany and, with some modest cuts, it was shown again in September 1931. There were no protests this time. The outrage was largely forgotten. “The film had lost its symbolic power” wrote Jerold Simmons.
Master manipulator: Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi's chief propagandist, understood the power of film - Albert Harlingue/Roger Viollet via Getty Images
The Nazis banned the film again and burned Remarque’s book when they took power in 1933. Remarque himself – who wrote further war novels, including The Road Back – fled Germany. In 1943, the Nazis beheaded his sister. All Quiet on the Western Front was not shown again in Germany until 1952, and was not seen uncut until the 1980s – though, as Alexander Watson explains, likely due to lack of interest, rather than the film’s symbolic power.
Just as the not-entirely-accurate idea of “lions led by donkeys” dictates the memory of WWI in Britain, All Quiet on the Western Front is crucial in the cultural memory of WWI – a story that has shaped the popular narrative of the war from the German perspective.
“There’s some truth in all of what Remarque says,” explains Alexander Watson. “War enthusiasm, disillusionment and anger, old men being belligerent when they’re not the ones making the sacrifices. There’s some truth to the idea that for Germany it was ultimately a pointless war. They lost it. It was incredibly destructive.
“But people got offended in Germany because it’s not ‘whole’ truth. Remarque’s interpretation was disillusionment and pointlessness – it’s only about the horror and pointlessness. That’s not how Germans wanted to see it at the time – particularly Germans who lost family members. A lot of people thought it was a necessary war of defence in spite of those horrors. The problem with Germany embracing pacifism is you can’t justify those 2 million dead. How on earth do you justify a war that is lost?”
All Quiet on the Western Front is on Netflix now; the Baftas take place on 19 February
The film was ahead of its time in striving for historical accuracy. The no-man’s land scenes were filmed at Irvine Ranch, south of Hollywood, where they used real dynamite blasts to create shell craters, and filled them with dirty water. When a rainstorm hit the production, Lewis Milestone sent his actors out into the torrid conditions for added realism.
As detailed in Andrew Kelly’s book, a sanitary inspector temporarily shut down the production for its all-too-real conditions. The inspector was accompanied by a nurse who had spent time at a field hospital in Dijon. “It brings back to mind all the terrible anguish of that struggle,” the nurse said.
Universal spent a reported $27,500 on real uniforms, rifles, gas masks, and field equipment from the war. The production was so epic that it went way over budget, rocketing from a planned $900,000 to $1.4 million. Publicity at the time claimed that twenty tons of gunpowder and ten tons of dynamite were used, while Universal also reported that 2,000 extras had been recruited – veterans from the American Legion and various nationalities. One veteran had shell-shock from his experiences and had to be sent home.
“Except for not using real bullets, we might as well have been in the war,” said cinematographer Arthur Edeson. “There were some close calls with explosions.” Indeed, newspapers reported in January 1930 that Lewis Milestone was almost killed in one explosion. He was hospitalised by a flying two-by-four. A German trench helmet had saved his life.
Like Remarque’s book, the film is often most powerful away from the battlefield. In one scene, the soldiers query why or how the war began, which has become a trope of WWI stories (Baldrick asks Blackadder the same before they go over the top). “Somebody must have wanted it?” ask the German soldiers about the war. “Maybe it was the English? It must be doing somebody some good. Maybe the Kaiser wanted a war?” Nobody seems to know.
“By 1917 soldiers were asking, ‘Why is this war lasting so long?’” says Alexander Watson. “There was a worry that the German government and army wanted the war to continue because they wanted to expand Germany and profit from it.”
For Holger Afflerbach, not dwelling on politics may explain the story's success. “It was not about politics,” Afflerbach says. “It was about the experience – they go through the gruesome experience and try to keep alive. It’s also the peer group experience. It's not the Kaiser that keeps them going. If they don’t stick together and look out for each other, they will die.”
Awful realism: a scene from Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - ullstein bild/ullstein bild
At times, the film is as much about hunger as death, with the 2nd Company scrambling for something – anything – to eat. It's certainly accurate: the British cut off Germany from international trade via a naval blockade. Around 750,000 Germans died of malnutrition or related diseases.
In another poignant sequence, Bäumer returns home briefly, where he’s surrounded by fusty old men who – having been nowhere near a trench – insist that the war needs to continue. “You must give the Frenchies a good licking,” says one. Bäumer returns to his school and warns Kantorek and the pupils about the less-than-triumphant realities of war. “It’s easier to say go out and die than it is to do it,” he says. Bäumer is called a coward, echoing the criticisms hurled at Remarque.
The scenes describe a discord between the frontline and folks back home. “Most people knew in 1914 that it was going to be terrible, but they didn’t know how terrible, or how long it was going to last,” says Watson. “Soldiers at the front did get very angry at the staff and generals, and there was some division between the soldiers at the front and home. In letters I’ve read you do see criticism of war-enthused people at home – who don’t know what on earth is going on – while soldiers are bearing the brunt.
“At the same time, you wouldn’t know from Remarque that German soldiers were heavily dependent on support from the home front – 28 billion letters and parcels were passed back and forth. By the second half of the war, the home front was very scarce on food but German families were still sending the soldiers whatever they could get.”
Lewis Milestone agonised over how to end the film. It was settled when a cinematographer friend, Karl Freud, said it should be “as simple as a butterfly”. In the final scene, Bäumer – his friends now all dead – spies a butterfly on the edge of no-man's land. He reaches to touch it but his hand goes limp – killed by a sniper days before the Armistice.
All Quiet on the Western Front was hailed as a masterpiece. “Universal Pictures deserves the thanks of mankind for their courage in making the picture,” wrote one American critic in June 1930.
As detailed by historian Jerold Simmons, the filmmakers had liaised with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America to navigate any material that may cause problems with domestic censors. Overseas, different countries requested different edits – all according to their own national sensitivities. The traditionally censorious Brits requested just one small edit. But Universal was most concerned with Germany, the second biggest market in Europe. The film was first shown to the German Embassy, which suggested small changes. The German censor board then approved the film with a few additional cuts.
For the Nazis – who made considerable gains in the 1930 election – All Quiet on the Western Front presented a political opportunity. The government was weak and nationalists, Nazi or otherwise, agreed that the German army should be perceived as strong. The Right wanted to maintain the myth that Germany had not lost the war on the battlefield, but because of liberal and Jewish treachery. The film had provoked a violent reaction in the post-WWI culture war.
Joseph Goebbels – who hadn’t actually fought in WWI – slated the film as a “Jewish version of a German soldier’s life”. His thuggish demonstrations raged on and the film was banned. The censor board denied that the Nazis has forced its hand. All Quiet on the Western Front was banned elsewhere, too, including Austria (where there was also nationalist uproar) Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and, oddly, New Zealand
Universal fought to re-release the film in Germany and, with some modest cuts, it was shown again in September 1931. There were no protests this time. The outrage was largely forgotten. “The film had lost its symbolic power” wrote Jerold Simmons.
Master manipulator: Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi's chief propagandist, understood the power of film - Albert Harlingue/Roger Viollet via Getty Images
The Nazis banned the film again and burned Remarque’s book when they took power in 1933. Remarque himself – who wrote further war novels, including The Road Back – fled Germany. In 1943, the Nazis beheaded his sister. All Quiet on the Western Front was not shown again in Germany until 1952, and was not seen uncut until the 1980s – though, as Alexander Watson explains, likely due to lack of interest, rather than the film’s symbolic power.
Just as the not-entirely-accurate idea of “lions led by donkeys” dictates the memory of WWI in Britain, All Quiet on the Western Front is crucial in the cultural memory of WWI – a story that has shaped the popular narrative of the war from the German perspective.
“There’s some truth in all of what Remarque says,” explains Alexander Watson. “War enthusiasm, disillusionment and anger, old men being belligerent when they’re not the ones making the sacrifices. There’s some truth to the idea that for Germany it was ultimately a pointless war. They lost it. It was incredibly destructive.
“But people got offended in Germany because it’s not ‘whole’ truth. Remarque’s interpretation was disillusionment and pointlessness – it’s only about the horror and pointlessness. That’s not how Germans wanted to see it at the time – particularly Germans who lost family members. A lot of people thought it was a necessary war of defence in spite of those horrors. The problem with Germany embracing pacifism is you can’t justify those 2 million dead. How on earth do you justify a war that is lost?”
All Quiet on the Western Front is on Netflix now; the Baftas take place on 19 February
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