All Still Quiet on the Western Front
Ninety-four years after the beginning of its serialization in the Berlin newspaper, Vossische Zeitung in November 1928, Erich Maria Remarque’s crushing war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front finally got its adaptation to German cinema. Released by Netflix on October 28, 2022 and directed by Edward Berger (yeah, just in time for Halloween with more blood and gore than Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger ever spilled), it garnered nine Academy Award nominations, winning four.
Berger’s loose adaptation is driven by a compelling performance by Felix Kammerer in the role of the film’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer. The pervasive sense of dread and hopelessness of the film is heightened by a strong supporting cast in the roles of Bäumer’s fellow soldiers, including Albrecht Schuch’s standout portrayal of the “shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten” veteran, Katczinsky, along with an ensemble cast in the roles of military leaders and government officials.
The woeful march towards inevitable doom depicted in the film’s source text is further bolstered by painfully lucid images of a natural world ravaged by trench warfare in which national borders have given way to the hellish no man’s lands that came to symbolize World War I. This forlorn setting is brilliantly rendered through the cinematography of James Friend and supplemented by the hauntingly minimalist music by Volker Bertelmann, both winning Oscars in recognition for their outstanding work.
Despite the critical recognition and accolades, due to its complex historical and literary origins, All Quiet on the Western Front is a film fraught with ambiguity. Serving as grim inspiration for T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” this uncompromising story of World War I told from the perspective of a common soldier carries powerful emotional force. As such, it’s a film that can be especially distressing to those not previously introduced to Remarque’s novel in high school or college as an effect of an educational system increasingly subjected to politically motivated attacks and funding cuts that amplify the impacts of inadequate institutional support for humanities curriculum.
The stakes of the narrative at the foundation of the film are further raised due to the latest salvo by conservative reactionaries engaged in an ongoing culture war fueled by authoritarian ideologies and a blatant disregard for truth and facts. These suppressive tactics are further extended through concerted efforts in many Republican-controlled states aimed at misrepresenting or effacing the experiences of minority and marginalized people and communities from the historical record, along with the ready censorship and concealment of knowledge that attends.
With the accumulation of such forces, it seems useful to provide a few words of clarification for those who may lack familiarity with the source text and its previous adaptations into film. At its most basic level, the narrative traces the transformation of the novel’s protagonist in Paul Bäumer from wide-eyed and naïve young man roused by authority figures into eagerly joining the military in defense of the fatherland.
Instead of fighting to uphold the false sense of “greater insight and a more humane wisdom” projected by their leaders, viewers see these “lads of eighteen” transformed into an “Iron Youth.” As pitiless soldiers, little more than human weapons shattered and remade through the horrors of war, with those killed in battle reduced to Erkennungsmarke, identity disks made of tin to be collected to tally the casualties. Through this experience, like the novel’s readers, the misery and inhumanity they at once experienced and perpetrated “made them see” that “there was nothing of their [leaders’] world left.”
As with the two previous adaptations in Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Academy Award winner for Best Picture and Delbert Mann’s 1979 CBS made for TV movie, Berger brings his own vision and style to Remarque’s novel, while seeking to make this classic anti-war story pertinent to the sensitivities of modern viewers. The opening sequence, for instance, is framed by several shots of a seemingly pristine natural environment at dawn through images of a forest dappled in fog and where lies a den of sleeping and nursing foxes. The mother fox looks up uneasily at the sound of a distant rumbling representing the ominous presence of humans and the desolation they bring.
Berger extends the sense of tranquility created by this pastoral scene through a long angle shot up into the trees and sky before the continuity is broken by a reverse cut to a crane shot. Viewers now look down onto a nearby landscape made into a wasteland strewn with the bodies of soldiers and horses alike, stippled with gory puddles colored by the blood of the dead. This earth, and its inhabitants, dead.
The stillness of the killing field is soon broken by the sound machine gun fire and artillery explosions, described by the poet-soldier Wilfred Owens as “the shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells.” Another cut transports viewers into the trenches where German soldiers frantically move into defensive positions, dodging artillery blasts and fiery bullets, readying to repel the looming French attack. Bolstered by the capacities of modern special effects in which realism is so often translated through gratuitous depictions of violence and an excessiveness of gore, audiences buckle in for what promises to be an unsettling ride.
Contrasted with the relative bloodlessness that typified previous generations of war movies, Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front devotes significant screentime to graphic depictions of human violence to ratchet up the sense of shock and horror associated with war. This strategy extends depictions found in a body of gritty war films such as Ralph Nelson’s searing Soldier Blue addressing the infamous Sand Creek Massacre (1970) and Arthur Penn’s depiction of the Custer’s massacre of Cheyenne at the Washita River in Little Big Man (1970), to Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981), on this same war. To these we can also add Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) and, more recently, Václav Marhoul’s The Painted Bird (2019).
In All Quiet on the Western Front, Berger shares a vision that is steady and relentless in making the dreadful and ghastly vivid in a way that eschews the tendency towards the abstraction and trivialization of the casualties of war that Dalton Trumbo railed against in the “Addendum” to his Introduction to the 1970 edition of his novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1939). Notably, Trumbo also adapted his novel into the 1971 film of the same title in making his directorial debut, while it would later serve as the inspiration for Metallica’s song “One” included on their 1988 album ... And Justice for All. Disturbing clips from Trumbo’s film would also be featured in their hit 1989 MTV music video for the song.
Berger makes skillful use of the advantages of contemporary cinematic technique to bring extraordinary intensity and terror to scenes of close-quarter combat, some of which cross over into the transgressive given their extremely graphic nature. Strategies, however, that also come with a cost.
Long before Berger’s reimaging of Kat’s senseless death, which, occurs in the novel from a stray piece of shrapnel, the grinding pain, terror and trauma of the film threatens at times to become overwhelming. And by that I don’t mean in the sense of the events or images depicted, which seem unmoored from any coherent meaning beyond the horror of war. Instead, it is in the muddling and muting of the reflections and ideas expressed by Remarque in scenes omitted from the film, such as when Bäumer takes leave to return home where he has several key interactions that bolster the emotional core of the novel.
Bäumer engages in this scene with his proud and ignorant father who wants his son “to tell him about the front.” As someone who has already seen and done the worst, Bäumer refuses, seeing such talk as “stupid and distressing.” It is a poignant moment in the novel that gives viewers access to the deep psychological effects of trauma that the inhumanity of war carries.
Revealing his own fractured psyche, in a potent expression of inner thought Bäumer goes on to observe, “I realize that he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things. I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us.”
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The crucial issue raised in this scene focuses on the difficultly Bäumer has in processing his wartime experiences—an almost universal problem combat soldiers struggle with—which frequently cross over into the realm of the unspeakable. Experiences that are beyond words.
Elaborating on this theme, the scholar, Cathy Carruth, has observed that “trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge.” As such, the experiences Bäumer details come to ironically “evoke,” in Carruth’s words, “the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence,” even as he narrates it.
The same understanding can be said to hold true for the atrocious images of violence and death as abjection that viewers of Berger’s film are bombarded with. The curious choice by Berger to not include so many of Bäumer’s most incisive reflections, including the ones noted above, however, works to obscure and distort Remarque’s message.
The absence of such profound thoughts and ideas, along with others Bäumer expresses in the novel as in the famous shell-hole sequence in which he mortally stabs a French soldier who falls in with him after taking refuge during a chaotic charge and counterattack, creates an especially jarring contrast. Berger’s abridgement, which he says was originally only “budgeted to be a four-minute sequence,” shifts the primary focus to the act of killing itself, displacing the emphasis from the profound reflections Bäumer struggles with in the novel after this gruesomely intimate act.
Berger identifies the shell-hole scene as “the heart of the movie” for its “moving” depiction of humanity in the face of war, while going on to say that if cut “would betray the soul of the book.” Yet this is precisely what he does to both the duration of the scene and the inner dialogue of the novel that is key to the tortured epiphany Bäumer has when he comes face to face with the so-called ‘enemy,’ allowing Bäumer to see himself in the dying man.
Where Berger cuts the scene short and has Bäumer rise from the crater, the novel steers readers towards an abyss in his realization that the French soldier was “only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth an appropriate response.” The subsequent omission of Bäumer’s tortured, guilt-ridden bargaining, which takes place over the course of an entire day in the novel, seriously blunts the emotional weight Remarque infuses into the scene.
For in the original, Bäumer’s thoughts ricochet from futile attempts at rendering medical aid to the fallen man and promises to tell his family the truth of his fate, to a guilt-induced vow to send money for the support of the soldier’s wife and child, and finally, a doubtful commitment to assume the dead man’s profession as a printer.
While the sense of desperation Kammerer’s performance gives the scene is striking, his expressions of “I’m sorry” and “I promise” lack the weight and fervency carried in the responses of the novel’s Bäumer. Deviations such as these deprive him and the viewer of a deeper understanding of the human toll of militarized violence in which soldiers of all sides become, in the words of another poet-soldier, Ivor Gurney, “an army of grey bedrenched scarecrows in rows.” The result of which in the film is a withdrawal toward a relativistic view of the evils of modern warfare.
At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, these omissions along with the distracting addition of the interspersed scenes of German and French military leaders and government officials wrangling over the terms of the armistice, effaces the forceful anti-nationalist, anti-authoritarian message Remarque strove to convey in the first place.
For this critique is what would lead to Remarque’s novel being “immediately denounced” by Nazi and conservative nationalists “as an assault on Germany's honor, as a piece of Marxist propaganda, and the work of a traitor.” Denunciations that then led to the book’s burning in 1933, to Remarque being stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazi government in 1938, and to the vengeful execution of his sister by beheading in 1943.
Such details highlight the sense of discrepancy that grows out of the force created by the extended scenes of violence in Berger’s film, leaving little room for the expression of Remarque’s most potent social commentary. Of Berger’s departures, most inexplicable is the insertion of scenes depicting the armistice agreed to in the Compagnie train car in Alsace-Lorraine whereby the Supreme Commander of the Allies’ military forces, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, forced the Germans to relinquish claims to this disputed territory, agree to an end to the war and unconditional withdrawal of German troops from France, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Although the scene represents an historically accurate episode from World War I, appending it to Remarque’s narrative seems unwarranted and disrespectful, especially given the book’s steadfast opposition to war and the treatment Remarque was subjected to within Germany as a result. It’s also not lost to students of history, that the circumstances of the surrender would soon became a potent source of German anger and bitterness, playing into the horrific events that would bear out in World War II more than two decades later.
With these scenes in mind, the sequencing of the film’s ending in which the deaths of both Kat and Bäumer are depicted, border on the gratuitous. While both characters die in the novel, Berger’s reimagining of Kat’s death scene as occurring after being shot by the young son of a French farmer who interrupts the theft of a few eggs comes off as excessive and with a more than a slight tinge of national hostility.
Similarly, Bäumer is deprived of the dignity afforded him in the understated death scene found in Remarque’s novel in which readers are placed in the perspective of a fellow soldier, seeing that “he had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping” and with “a face” that “had the expression of calm.” While each of the two previous adaptations offer creative depictions of Bäumer’s death, the spirit of the Remarque’s intentions remains present.
The last-minute assault perpetrated by the exhausted German soldiers relieved to hear the news of the armistice who are then ordered back to the front to carry out a last minute assault by the malicious and vengeful German General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow), which Berger creates to serve as the film’s final scene, can be viewed as adding some balance to the negative depictions of French military leaders. At the same time, however, it reduces the novel’s critique of the romance of nationalism to an easily condemnable scapegoat.
Moreover, the extreme violence of the scene renders Bäumer almost bereft of any sympathy, condemning him and many of his fellow soldiers to the permanent status of “circus-ponies,” “human animals” and “wild beasts” that their military training and war experiences reduced them to, and that, vitally, Remarque’s narrative grants him a means to rise back up out of.
While the narrative choices and creative license Berger took with the film is understandable as a reflection of his vison as a director, but also as a German who grew up in a cultural milieu defined by the notion of Kollektivschuld—the collective cultural sense of guilt and debt that comes with bearing the burden of prime national responsibility for two world wars and the Holocaust and wider acts of genocide that grew out of them. When it comes to the responsibility to the fidelity of Remarque’s novel, but also the accuracy of history, however, is where Berger’s film falls short.