The Brownshirts, the Nazi Party\u2019s paramilitary wing of thugs who had already gained notoriety for intimidation and street violence, were tasked with sabotaging the film\u2019s screening on 5 December at Berlin\u2019s ornate Mozartsaal (Mozart Hall), the day after its nationwide premiere. They destroyed ticket counters, attacked \u2018Jewish\u2019 attendees, released scores of white mice, and lobbed stink bombs and sneezing powder into the throngs of patrons.<\/p>\n
Above them from his balcony seat, Joseph Goebbels, who would go on to become the Nazis\u2019 supreme propagandist, screamed anti-Semitic invective at the movie\u2019s Hollywood producers and director \u2013 yelling \u201cOut Jews!\u201d and \u201cA Jewish film\u201d \u2013 while surveying the mayhem unfolding below with deep satisfaction.<\/p>\n All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em> 2022 is streaming now on Netflix. Looking for something else to watch? Explore our full round-up of the best historical TV and film<\/a> available to stream right now, or the new history TV and radio<\/a> airing in the UK this month.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> Over the course of the following week, the Brownshirts maintained an ominous torchlit vigil outside the Mozartsaal, threatening to burn the theatre to the ground were the movie to be shown again. The bullying tactics worked. Many theatres subsequently refused to screen All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em>, and those who did could only do so under heavy police protection. Soon, the liberal Weimar Republic, painfully aware of the growing Nazi menace and its own precarious grip on power, caved into pressure.<\/p>\n Barely seven days after its Berlin premiere, the movie was banned under the pretence of restoring public order. The episode only served to embolden the Nazis\u2019 attitude towards censorship and suppression. \u201cWithin ten minutes, the cinema resembles a madhouse. The police are powerless. \u2018Jews out!\u2019 \u2018Hitler is standing at the gates!\u2019 The police sympathise with us,\u201d gushed Goebbels in his diary. \u201cThe box office outside is under siege. The screening is abandoned, as is the next one. We have won. The newspapers are full of our protest. The nation is on our side. In short, victory!\u201d<\/p>\n A heavily cut version of the movie would be briefly authorised in 1931, before being banned outright following the Nazi party\u2019s rise to power two years later. It would not be shown again in public until 1952. The novel on which it was based, Erich Remarque\u2019s bestselling Im Westen nichts Neues<\/em> (1929), similarly provoked the ire of Adolf Hitler<\/a> and his supporters, and was one of the first works to be publicly burnt on the Nazis\u2019 pyres of \u201cdegenerate\u201d books. Remarque himself had escaped to Switzerland by that point, but the Nazis mollified their wrath by arresting and beheading his younger sister in his stead. In a further tragic footnote, Hanns Brodnitz, the Jewish manager of the Mozartsaal, whose \u2018crime\u2019 of screening the movie was never forgotten, would be murdered in a gas chamber in Auschwitz<\/a> in 1944.<\/p>\n The Nazis\u2019 seething overreaction to All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em> seems inevitable in hindsight. Outside of Germany, however, the movie was a resounding critical and commercial success, being showered with numerous accolades including the Academy Award<\/a> for Best Picture (then known as Outstanding Production) and Best Director, and quickly achieved iconic status. It was a brilliant technical achievement, arriving at a critical juncture in cinematic history that allowed it to capitalise on the advent of new technologies.<\/p>\n The new soundscapes reproduced with frightening authenticity, the terrible cacophony of the battlefield \u2013 from the deafening roar of artillery bombardments to the rapid staccato of machine gun fire \u2013 both shocked and thrilled moviegoers transitioning between the silent and talkie eras. To demonstrate just how deftly All Quiet on the Western<\/em> Front straddled this liminal period, Charlie Chaplin\u2019s classic silent movie City Lights<\/em> was released the following year, in 1931.<\/p>\n Sophisticated new cameras and complex wheeled cranes allowed dynamic and innovative filming techniques, which drew the viewer directly into the action. One particularly memorable, minute-long tracking shot running parallel to the trenches captures French infantry being viciously decimated across No Man\u2019s Land by scythe-like machine gun fire. A hefty $1.2 million budget; the employment of German veterans from the war as advisors and extras; and the use of genuine war relics and memorabilia repurposed as movie props, all helped in creating the film\u2019s remarkable sense of verisimilitude.<\/p>\n However, the movie\u2019s iconic status, and the reason it rankled the Nazis, was down to more than its pioneering audio-visual accomplishments. Rather, it left a tremendous legacy in shaping popular attitudes towards not just the First World War, but war and pacifism more generally. One solemn contemporary review in Variety<\/em> declared: \u201cThe League of Nations could make no better investment than to buy the master print, reproduce it in every language for every nation to be shown every year until the word War shall have been taken out of the dictionaries.\u201d<\/p>\n All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em> presented a realistic and harrowing account of a meaningless war that had led to disillusionment, suffering, death, and ultimately ignominious defeat. The war was presented as an incomprehensible tragedy in which a generation of naive young men, swept up in romanticised appeals to valour and blind patriotic fervour, had been churned out callously by the terrible machine of war.<\/p>\n The enemy were not the opponents on the battlefield. Enemy soldiers were in fact comrades, equal in suffering and death: a generation of peers caught up in an interminable war of attrition and senselessly squandered in brutal mechanised slaughter. The true enemy were the old men revelling in tales of glory, who had betrayed their nation\u2019s youth by selling them a lie; or it was the society at home that had happily packed them off to be dutifully sacrificed at the nation\u2019s altar and remained detached from the unpalatable reality of the frontline. Perhaps most profoundly, both novel and film concluded that the true enemy was war itself.<\/p>\n In short, this was a damning indictment of the war, lamenting \u201ca generation of men, who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war\u201d.<\/p>\n Almost every anti-war movie made afterwards relied on many of the tropes invented by the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front:<\/em> the lost innocence of youth; the bonding between brothers in arms; the boredom and banality in the lulls between fighting; the incompetent generals yearning for glory; the soldiers as expendable fodder; and war as an affront against both humanity and nature.<\/p>\n Today, historical films (and other forms of popular culture) are the most important mediums through which publics engage with the past. Consequently, they often tell us as much about the societies that create them, as they do about the past being portrayed on screen. The 2022 German production of Im Westen nichts Neues, which launched on Netflix recently, illustrates this point well.<\/p>\n The timing is striking as it immediately begs the question of why it has taken Germany close to a century to make an adaptation of their own native son\u2019s internationally renowned literary classic. One of the reasons that Remarque\u2019s 1929 novel was met with such widespread acclaim on its release, both within and outside of Germany, was that it managed to relate an everyman soldier\u2019s story. Its German protagonist could easily have been substituted for a French poilu or British infantryman, whilst preserving the universal themes and lessons of the novel.<\/p>\n Indeed, more remarkable was the fact that just a year later, one of the largest American film studios of its day could produce a sympathetic account of the same enemy German soldiers who, barely a decade earlier, had been reviled as bloodthirsty \u2018barbaric Huns\u2019 in US war bond propaganda posters. \u201cIt showed the Germans as having the same values that you and I have\u2026 just people caught in this thing that\u2019s bigger than all of us,\u201d stated Lew Ayres, the lead in the 1930 movie, in an interview. \u201cAll Quiet on the Western Front<\/em> became one of the first voices for universality\u2026 that unity was possible within the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Carl Laemmle, a German-Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9 to the US at the age of 17 who co-founded Universal Pictures, regarded his studio\u2019s movie as having \u201cdone more to establish good will toward the German people than any factor since the Armistice\u201d.<\/p>\n Why then has it taken so long to translate this powerful story that encourages empathy with the German perspective and experience, into the German cinematic vernacular? Much of the reason lies with the fact that Germany\u2019s popular memory of the First World War has largely been supplanted by the traumatic damage done to the national psyche by the conflict that came afterwards, the Second World War.<\/p>\n Feelings of pain, shame and guilt over the belligerence and atrocities committed by the Third Reich have overshadowed, and to some extent tainted, the cultural memory of the First World War. \u201cEverything we now know about German history is imbued with the Nazis that came after,\u201d says the director of the new version of All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em>, Edward Berger.<\/p>\n![\""A\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/11\/AllQuietOnTheWesternFrontReinerBajo01-24d9560.png?quality=45&resize=556,556"\" "\\"\"A\\"\/")
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>The original anti-war masterpiece<\/h3>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>The need for the new German adaptation<\/h3>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Feelings of pain, shame and guilt over the belligerence and atrocities committed by the Third Reich have overshadowed, and to some extent tainted, the cultural memory of the First World War <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
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