Eric Maria Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front nearly a century ago. Many of his readers and his friends had traipsed through support trenches and gone over the top into the desolate No Man’s Lands of Belgium and Northern France. They had fought, killed and seen the human form brutalised beyond recognition.
The horror and absurdity of war that Remarque conjured up was shocking, even then. And the violence and cruelty of industrial warfare that director Edward Berger brings to the screen in his adaptation of Remarque’s seminal book is just as striking.
Taking his cue from Remarque’s unorthodox anecdotal style, Berger’s narrative is more a compilation of short stories than one definitive tale. Except for one notable addition, a subplot about the signing of the Armistice, Berger’s telling keeps true to the book while making use of the freedom of the story’s style to draw in ideas of his own.
In the opening shots of All Quiet, the camera moves from a natural dawn landscape to a close up of a family of foxes – young cubs feeding – and a hopeful shot up through the trees to the sky. The verdant woodland scene is soon interrupted by another of sprawling uniformed bodies on barren black turf. The bodies jerk and shudder as progressively longer bursts of machine gun fire scour the earth. What at first appears as a random act of desecration, develops into a full scale assault.
It is this sense of disconnection that brings home the agony of the front. The nameless battles and faceless frontline officers kill any sense of purpose to the mechanical onslaught. Myths of fighting for “Kaiser, God and Fatherland” are crushed in the narrative vacuum.
The patriotic innocence of protagonist Paul Bäumer (an outstanding performance by first-time film actor Felix Kammerer) and his three school friends, who exchange one uniform for another in the comradely pursuit of patriotic glory, is defenceless against the relentless conveyor belt of war that they meet at the front.
Their collective good cheer and naive idealism sees them bound through the recruiting office and into their uniforms like excitable children. Soon after, they are marching in columns to the front altogether singing to a soldier’s imaginary lady love: “girl, I do love you but I can’t marry you just yet. Wait another year, then it will be true”.
The clear voices and happy tune are juxtaposed with and dominated by a sinister engine-like reverberation that foreshadows the imminent death of their idealism. On arriving at the front, they are faced with the faceless authority of officers and the reality of warfare – emptying trenches knee-deep in water with their helmets.
When Paul is on sentry duty, he hears a sound coming from the enemy lines. Thinking it could be a night attack he fires off a round. He defended the trench. He has his first kill. The noise? A rat gnawing on corpse. The artillery barrage that follows send the young recruits into hysterics. Huddled in a bunker, there is no escape – outside is death.
Berger’s depiction of the war dismantles any illusion of dulce et decorum est by asking – what honour is to be found in such a place? None.
And yet amid the continuous and increasing cruelties of war are balanced by small moments of gentleness and good humour among Paul and company. The young boys meet old soldier Kat, who takes them under his wing. In a brief respite from trench life, Paul and Kat go on a caper, nipping into a farmhouse to pinch a goose. The exhilarating joy in the camaraderie of the unarmed raid is brought full circle into tragedy by film’s end.
When Paul and Kat return to the farmhouse for a second raid, thinking forward to their friendship after the war, the forty-year old cobbler asks what Paul an educated man would have to share with a man like him.
It is numbing. The camaraderie of the front is a facade and cannot be sustained when the soldiers return home. Their brutalisation is absolute.
Hanging over Paul’s increasingly tragic story is Berger’s distinctly German sense of responsibility for the events that followed the First World War. His film is unique in that it is the first German-language adaptation of Remarque’s work, and it carries the burden of the events following the Great War.
He noted in a recent interview that while growing up, that he was accustomed to seeing the hero stories of British and American war films.
“[They could] tell a story that has some pride in the end.”
Not so, in Germany: “in Germany, it’s nothing to be proud of, that part of history. There’s a sense of shame, guilt, horror, terror, responsibility towards history.”
In the one significant deviation from Remarque’s story, the film lays the foundations for the decades after The Great War. We meet Daniel Bruhl’s Matthias Erzberger – the Catholic Centre Party politician who led the charge for a peaceful resolution in the wartime Reichstag – as he journeys by train to talk to the allies in the final days of the war. There he meets the allied delegation, headed by Thibault de Montalembert’s curt and uncompromising Marshal Foch, who gives no quarter in the negotiations: “you ask for an armistice, so say so”.
The role of the unsympathetic Frenchman is perfectly summed up by the concern he shows about the freshness of his breakfast croissants, while the bodies of ally and enemy alike continue to stack up on the frontline. However, he is no more obstinate than one might expect from a man whose country has for five years been defiled by war.
Another loathsome military man is the social-democrat-hating General Friedrichs. Complete with blood red lapels and dramatic moustache, he is from a long line of soldiers and is himself one through and through. In the opulent surroundings of a French castle, his rants about the social democrats, who he says “will destroy mankind”, and how “these people are selling off the fatherland” foreshadow the stab-in-the-back myth that the Nazi party used to propel itself to power.
In the final hours of the war, the Prussian general sends his increasingly drunk and disorderly soldiers into one final battle on the last day of the war. This decision is made all the starker by his order to execute those who refuse to return to the line.
Telling as this prophetic political arc is, it is unnecessary. It offers a hackneyed telling of history, which detracts from the purer condemnation of war presented in the trench sequences.
It is fitting that Berger’s take on All Quiet on the Western Front came out two weeks before Remembrance (Veterans) Day – 11th November – (more fitting still for Catholics that it falls so close to All Souls). All the while, the war in Ukraine rages on. Any aspirations to honour, bravery and even camaraderie are eloquently shattered, leaving only the brutalised man. But as history goes, it’s a little cheap. There is more to the rise of Hitler than lions led by Nazi donkeys.
Photo caption: Felix Kammerer and Albrecht Schuch in All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) (Credit: Photo by Reiner Bajo – © Netflix 2022)
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