When I Googled the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, I was surprised to learn that it was Germany’s most successful literary work - a pacifist polemic that came out just a few years before Hitler banned pacifism.
It was also the subject of one of the great Hollywood movies of 1930.
Watching clips of the first film is a revelation. Just two years after the introduction of sound, the battle scenes in particular are brilliant and terrifying.
Photo: Screenshot
Interestingly, it’s never been filmed in Germany until now. In fact, even this one – produced by Spanish-German movie star Daniel Brühl – was going to be another English-language movie until it was handed to German director Edward Berger by Netflix.
The film opens with a quote from the author. “This is not a confession. It’s not an accusation. Least of all is it an adventure”.
So, don’t say you weren’t warned.
The opening scene is set on the Western Front itself – the lines of trenches between Germany and France that remained bogged down in roughly the same place for four years.
We meet a young, decent German soldier called Heinrich as he goes over the top to attack the enemy lines - and is killed almost instantly.
But Heinrich’s uniform goes on. It’s packed up, cleaned, repaired and repurposed as the uniform of our actual hero Paul Bäumer. He couldn’t wait to turn 18, so he and his friends lied about their age and signed up.
They march and sing, and finally arrive at the front to have their big adventure – like half the world in 1917.
And the adventure collapses almost immediately as the bombs start falling, the guns fire and the food runs out in the rat-infested trenches.
Because this has always been our picture of the First World War - the biggest, most futile war in history - it takes a little time to get into the mindset of people who never imagined it could be like this.
Not just Paul and his friends, but also the original readers of All Quiet on the Western Front.
And a hundred years later, ignorance about World War I is quite prevalent again, judging by online comments about this movie.
Still, even people who pride themselves on a better grasp of history are likely to be surprised more than once.
In the book Paul occasionally goes home to be appalled at his family’s ignorance of what was really going on.
But most of the film All Quiet on the Western Front takes place there. Paul and his friends’ main concerns shift from heroics, to obeying orders, to simple survival.
And we’re reminded of a hundred years of post-Gallipoli misinformation – or at best partial information.
Tactics we were told were solely developed by the Germans, turn out not to be the case.
German soldiers were just as likely to be victims of gas, tanks – a British French invention, incidentally – and horrifyingly, flame throwers.
Most horrifying in a way is what happened in the last few weeks of the War – the period mostly covered by All Quiet on the Western Front.
The French and the German negotiators agree on a ceasefire, but quibble over the details. So, the standoff goes on for days, while the slaughter continues.
When a mad German general decides on one last, suicidal attack in the last minutes of the war, the message seems to be the futility of all wars.
All Quiet on the Western Front is currently available on Netflix. And while everyone in a uniform should be forced to watch it – at gunpoint if necessary - the real message of this film is that it’s unlikely it would do any good.
