In Erich Maria Remarque’s native country, the first German film adaptation of his famous anti-war novel All Quiet on the Front by director Edward Berger arouses mixed feelings. Despite the satisfaction with the brilliant international career that the film is having – it has garnered seven British Bafta awards, including best film and best director – a career that could culminate today if some of its nine Oscar nominations come to fruition, there is unease in German film criticism about more than the usual tense debate over films based on books.
A soldier in World War I, Erich Paul Remark –real name of the novelist– fought for a couple of weeks on the Flanders front in July 1917. He was wounded and spent the rest of the war in a lazaretto in Germany.
From that short and terrifying personal experience came his novel Im Westen nichts Neues, published in 1929, which would become a worldwide bestseller and a classic of anti-war literature. The protagonist, a young soldier named Paul Bäumer, recounts in the first person the horrific existence in the trenches of the Western Front after enlisting with classmates, ignited by the patriotic harangues of his teacher.
Edward Berger introduces into the story of Bäumer –played by the Austrian actor Felix Kammerer– various subplots and new characters, including the politician Matthias Erzberger –who existed in real life and is played here by the Spanish-German actor Daniel Brühl–, who look for a quick armistice. Thus, he contrasts him with a general who synthesizes the commitment of the Prussian military aristocracy to continue the war even though thousands of soldiers die every day. German historians maintain that although there were godless generals, that too is a cliché.
Bäumer himself, who in the novel is a “thoughtful narrator” who gradually awakens to the cruelty and futility of the war that is destroying the youth, appears in the film as a simple boy who does not quite understand what is happening.
“For Berger to be seriously selling a largely self-written film as an adaptation of All Quiet Front is pretty bold. And he arouses the suspicion that it’s all clever marketing: 148 minutes of blockbuster war kitsch receive a world-renowned title, which guarantees prestige and good sales. Maybe even an Oscar”, film critic Hubert Wetzel wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Still, Wetzel admits that doing that is legitimate, and that it’s a proposition that fits Netflix, the film’s producer.
Indeed, the film is a visual and sound succession of the horrible ways in which the soldiers of the Great War died and killed: bayoneted, machine-gunned, gassed, crushed by tanks, shot at barbed wire, burned with flamethrowers, in a field Fixed, dark, muddy and scary battlefield.
For Andreas Kilb, a critic for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “the non-stop two-and-a-half-hour visual barrage looks like an inflated miniseries. The great directors in film history, from John Ford and Kubrick to Spielberg and Malick, have left their mark on war movies. By comparison, Berger’s adaptation of Remarque is little more than a footnote.
The first film adaptation of All Quiet at the Front, directed by Lewis Milestone in 1930, won two Oscars: Best Picture and Best Director. The second version, a telefilm made in 1979 by Delbert Mann, won a Golden Globe for best television film. Edward Berger’s is the third film adaptation, and the first of German authorship.
Specialists are especially irritated by the way in which Berger makes the protagonist die. In the novel, a laconic epilogue communicates that “it fell in October 1918, on a day so calm and quiet on the entire front that the army’s report was limited to a single sentence: nothing new on the western front.” In the film, Bäumer is killed in horrendous hand-to-hand combat, amidst great roar, fury and sound, during a suicidal and futile infantry charge.
