Germans are right to be incensed by All Quiet on
the Western Front: it paints them as the good guys
Nicholas
Barber
Making changes to a classic novel is always
questionable – but could there be a worse time to risk glorifying invaders?
*This
article contains spoilers for the book All Quiet on the Western Front, and the
latest film version
Mon 27 Feb
2023 10.00 GMT
Having
cleaned up at the Baftas last week, All Quiet on the Western Front is now one
of the favourites to win best picture at the Oscars in a fortnight. That’s an
exciting development for Edward Berger, who directed and co-wrote the film, but
German critics may not be so thrilled.
As Philip
Oltermann noted in the Guardian, reviewers from Berger’s homeland have slated
his first world war epic, with one key objection being that it strays so far
from the source novel by Erich Maria Remarque. “One wonders whether Berger has
even read Remarque’s novel,” said Hubert Wetzel in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “If the
characters in the film didn’t have the same names as those in the book, it
would be difficult to find significant parallels between the two works.”
He’s absolutely
right. Along with his co-writers, Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, Berger
removes everything subtle in the book and replaces it with something absurdly
bombastic, as befits a Prestigious, Important War Movie. He also omits an
astonishing number of the book’s key episodes, and shoves in just as many new
ones of his own. These changes may be annoying if you’re a Remarque purist, or
a German film critic. But they’re also troubling in and of themselves.
Berger told
one journalist that he saw the French as “the good guys in the war”, but all
too often his All Quiet on the Western Front depicts the Germans as the good
guys, while the French are cruel and spiteful villains. Remarque – who was
denounced as “unpatriotic” by the Nazis – would have been appalled.
Just think
of the novel’s opening pages. When the first-person narrator, Paul Bäumer,
visits a mortally wounded friend in a field hospital, the friend complains that
his watch has already been stolen. But that sequence, along with numerous
others that show the German troops in a less than glowing light, has been cut
from the film.
In place of
these sequences are countless new scenes featuring politicians and officers
negotiating the armistice – and, boy, does Berger love to emphasise the
contrast between the soldiers’ privation and the toffs’ cosseted luxury. One of
these scenes has a sympathetic German politician, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel
Brühl), urging France’s Marshal Foch (Thibault de Montalembert) to order a
ceasefire. But the intransigent Foch won’t budge until Germany agrees to every
one of France’s demands. “Be fair to your enemy,” pleads Erzberger. “Otherwise
he will hate the peace.” He has a point, of course. But by painting such a
simplistic, one-sided picture of the meeting, Berger seems to be laying the
blame for the rise of the Nazis squarely at Foch’s feet.
Meanwhile,
on the frontline, the French are presented as alien monsters in terrifying
tanks, whereas Paul and his buddies are underdogs who battle on against the
odds, and even manage some tank-busting heroics straight out of Saving Private
Ryan and The Empire Strikes Back. One of Paul’s friends surrenders and begs the
French for mercy, only to be incinerated alive by a flamethrower. Another of
his friends is killed in cold blood by the dead-eyed, crewcut, shotgun-wielding
son of a French farmer. Far from being one of the “good guys”, the boy is a
figure straight out of a backwoods horror movie.
These
scenes seem especially ill-judged when you remember how many critics have drawn
comparisons between All Quiet on the Western Front and the invasion of Ukraine.
The message the film sends is that if you invade another country, your brave
lads will be brutally mistreated by that country’s soldiers and citizens. Is
that really what a war movie should be saying at the moment?
The most
questionable of Berger’s inventions is to have Paul himself dying after being
stabbed in the back by a French soldier. The director ought to be aware of the
“stab-in-the-back myth”, which claimed that the German army was not defeated in
the first world war, but was betrayed by Jews, socialists and the cowardly
politicians who signed the armistice for their own selfish reasons. This
conspiracy theory was popular in the 1920s, and was much favoured by Adolf
Hitler. For a German film about the war’s last days to risk any evocation of
that antisemitic myth with a literal backstabbing is irresponsible, to say the
least. Being less generous, you could call it an unforgivable distortion of
Remarque’s novel.
I doubt
that Berger sees it quite like that. He may well have been too focused on what
one German critic called Oscar-Geilheit, or “lust for an Oscar”, to notice the
jingoistic interpretations his work could invite. But even if he didn’t set out
to make a film that would appeal to nationalists, Nazis and Putin apologists,
that, unfortunately, is how the film may be seen.
Nicholas
Barber is a freelance writer on film and pop culture
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