All Quiet on the Western Front

From the opening shot of fox cubs suckling in their forest den, artillery fire rumbling in the distance, the new Netflix movie All Quiet on the Western Front faces us up to the all consuming nature of war. The camera hovers high above the landscape, slowly zooming down on what appears to be a giant abstract painting of browns and grays, sharply angled stick figures splayed across the canvas. 

As it comes closer, the stick figures become dead soldiers, limbs akimbo, lying in the mud and shell holes. Sporadic bullets whiz into the ground, and the camera continues to move over the battlefield, across the destruction. Then over the lip and into the German trenches, where the chaos of battle rages full force.  All to the methodical rhythm of machine guns harvesting their young crop from the treeless battleground. 

And they were young, these soldiers, mostly just teenagers, new and naive to the daily grind of war. Our hero, Paul, a seventeen year old German college student, is introduced at an enlistment rally with his enthusiastic fellow students. A history professor incites them all to a patriotic fervor, the cadence and inflections of his rhetoric reminiscent of those newsreels of a later Hitler, another inspirational speaker who knew how to fuel a crowd. 

The book All Quiet on the Western Front is generally considered one of the great war novels in modern literature. Written in the first person and present tense by Erich Maria Remarque and published in 1929, ten years after the war, it sold 2.5 million copies in its first 18 months in print. In 1933 it became one of the first “degenerate” books banned by an emerging Nazi Germany, busy arming for another war. The party considered the book an impediment to recruiting. And a rebuke to the nationalism sweeping Europe.

I remember reading it as a teenager, and being astounded at its matter of fact depictions of both the mundane and horror of wartime. The book seemed simply to tell war as it was, or must have been. Life and death were viewed with the same impartial eye, the daily struggle just to stay warm, fed, and alive. Wet boots and hunger. Geese flying south. A bullet in the head. 

This is not the first movie made from the groundbreaking book. 

In America Universal made it into a film and, directed by Lewis Milestone, it won the Oscar for best picture in 1930. Amazingly, it was the first ever best picture winner based on a novel.

Then, shot in 1979 as a TV movie starring Richard Thomas (The Waltons’s John-Boy) and Ernest Borgnine, it was well received by critics, and re-introduced the book to a modern audience.

This newest version is a German production produced and financed by Netflix, directed by Edward Berger and starring Daniel Bruhl as Paul, the young German infantryman and narrator.  

Berger captures the book’s banality and eye for telling detail in the early scenes. In spite of its danger and violence, most of us think of soldiers going off to war at least in clean new uniforms. Berger shows the reality, the uniforms being stripped from corpses fresh from battle, transported to the rear, then cleaned in huge tanks of blood tinged water and detergent. Handed over to an army of seamstresses, they repair the bullet holes, the shrapnel tears, dry, iron and fold it all. 

Then a beautiful shot of a truck returning to the front, driving over the spectacular French countryside, through vineyards and farms, the “new” uniforms stacked neatly in the back.

After enlistment, Paul receives his with the dead soldier’s name still sewn in.

“There must be some mistake,” he says, attempting to return it. “This belongs to someone else.”

“Oh yes,” the recruiter replies, as he tears off the nametag and throws it in a pile.

“Must have been too small for him. Happens all the time.”

At the Front, Paul is handed a rifle and his war begins. 

World War I wasn’t called The Great War for no reason. Ten million soldiers died fighting across set entrenchments, repeatedly charging machine gun nests and artillery positions with no more protection than their cloth uniforms and steel helmets on their heads. It was futile and suicidal, with tens of thousands dying every day. 19th century tactics in a 20th century war. Usually a soldier wasn’t alive long enough to learn how to properly fire his weapon, much less given any knowledge that might help keep him alive.

In another early scene Paul and a fellow soldier are on night guard duty when they think they hear an enemy approaching. Paul raises his rifle and fires blindly into the night. A second later he is knocked to the ground by a bullet to his head. He is uninjured but has two new holes in his helmet where the bullet passes through. Kat, an older soldier, gives him some life saving advice.

“They saw your muzzle flash and should have killed you.” He says.

“I suggest you move ten meters to the left. Shoot and change cover gentlemen, shoot and change cover.”

He and Kat become fast friends, in ways that only soldiers in war understand. They share any packages sent from home and Paul reads Kat’s letters to him from his wife, as Kat is illiterate. He learns that Kat has lost his ten year old son to smallpox, but is unable to return to Germany for the funeral. The packages get more meager. Families back home have nothing left to share. Death is everywhere.

The film spends thirty minutes on the last day of the war, after an Armistice has been announced, but has yet to go into effect. I won’t spoil the plot, but amid thousands of soldiers ecstatic at the prospect of peace, isolated pockets of war continue on. And the random hand of death hovers to touch those who least expect it. 

All Quiet on the Western Front premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and is Germany’s entry in this year’s Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film. 

If one can stomach the realism, the film rivals and even surpasses other critical home runs brought to the screen by Netflix. Scorcese’s The Irishman, Peaky Blinders, Bridgerton, Mudbound, and 2019’s Best Picture winning Roma come to mind. It’s poetically and beautifully shot, and takes one of the great books in modern literature and turns it into a film worthy of the book. Rarely done and quite an accomplishment.