How honest is All Quiet on the Western Front?
Despite the complaints of some critics, pretty damn honest.
During World War I, literally millions of men were forced out of their trenches toward enemy lines, great waves of flesh pressing forward only to be shredded by bullets and artillery. The meat grinder comparison has become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget why it’s so apt. Edward Berger’s recent film adaptation of the enduring anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front is determined to remind you.
As someone who’s invested a lot of time into both German movies and the historical trauma of the First World War, I’m a bit late to this one—embarrassingly late, in fact. The film’s been streamable on Netflix since October, but in my defense, it’s definitely one that you need to be in the right headspace for. Though the characters do get occasional moments to breathe, to shoot the shit and reminisce about the times before they were shipped into an Otto Dix painting come to life, we do spend a lot of time in Dix’s nightmare. There are multiple sequences that compete with the famous savagery of Saving Private Ryan's Omaha Beach opening.
Few historical questions have been as thoroughly explored as the consequences of World War I, and those consequences were immense. Empires died. The Soviet Union was born. The United States emerged as a global power. Germany entered a fragile moment of democracy, its fatal cracks already visible. But All Quiet mostly zooms in from that macro view to show us the price that the war exacted on the bodies and minds of the people who fought it. Our protagonist Paul Bäumer, played with paradoxically dead-eyed expressiveness by Felix Kammerer, takes the archetypal journey from teenage patriotism to bloody disillusionment with a group of school friends, and we’re invited to consider both the scale of industrialized death and the scars that this hellscape would leave on those “lucky” enough to survive.
The reception of All Quiet has been largely ecstatic. It earned nine Oscar nominations and won the BAFTA trophies for Best Film and Best Director. I have, though, run across a few reviews in major outlets that insist the movie errs by, as one mercifully paywalled article at The Wall Street Journal insists, putting a “Teutonic tweak on history,” or, as this braindead take at The Guardian describes it, “depict[ing] the Germans as the good guys.” These assessments engage in the same disingenuous sides-taking that they accuse All Quiet of.
[SPOILERS START HERE!]
The latter critic, Nicholas Barber, harrumphs that a moment in the novel where a German soldier has his watch stolen by a comrade didn’t make the movie because, he infers, it shows “German troops in a less than glowing light.” Then, when expressing consternation at what he sees as the Francophobic implications of a scene where one of Bäumer’s friends is “killed in cold blood by the dead-eyed, crewcut, shotgun-wielding son of a French farmer,” he fails to mention the fact that this killing was in retribution for the German soldier stealing food from the kid’s family.
Most preposterously, Barber tries to frame Paul’s ultimate bayonetting in the last minutes before the armistice as an evocation of the Dolchstoßlegende, or “stab-in-the-back myth.” I get into this on episode two of the podcast, but, with uncharacteristic accuracy, Barber describes it as a post-war narrative 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.
Paul was indeed literally impaled by someone standing behind him, but it wasn’t an act of betrayal by a Jew, socialist, or cowardly politician. It was a bog-standard act of combat by a French soldier protecting one of his own, just moments after Paul himself bashed an adversary’s face in with a helmet and shot another in the head from close range. The sequence doesn’t show Paul as some noble, double-crossed Siegfried. He’s literally growling like a beast, overcome with nihilistic despair after being forced into a pointless suicide mission fifteen minutes before the ceasefire goes into effect. To imply that Paul’s manner of death was some crypto-fascist symbolism is a stretch.
But still, isn’t it fair to argue, as Barber does, the “director ought to be aware of the ‘stab-in-the-back myth’”? Of course. And Berger is more than just aware of it. He explicitly puts it in the mouth of the film’s most villainous character. The mustachioed and diabolically Prussian General Friedrichs sends Paul and his comrades to die with a speech that explicitly blames “German social democrats” for rendering “our beloved people defenceless by accepting a perfidious armistice.” The movie doesn’t endorse the Dolchstoßlegende. It is, in fact, quite fucking obvious in its rejection of it.
I could continue rebutting these arguments point-by-point, but that’d be boring for the both of us. All Quiet doesn’t need me to defend it. But it’s irritating to see an outlet as credible and widely read as The Guardian publish a review that is so intent to see a thoroughly anti-nationalist film through a nationalist lens. World War I was unabashed clusterfuck that broke bodies and destroyed lives in every nation it touched, and it’s beyond me how you can spend two-and-a-half hours watching the historically honest suffering of everyday German teenagers and emerge pissed off that said teenagers were portrayed too humanely. Neither the film nor the novel was interested in tallying up the morality score of this country or that, like some geopolitical version of The Good Place. All Quiet understands the toxicity inherent in this rush to give people a moral thumbs-up or thumbs-down based on which side of an imaginary line they happened to be born on. The horror on Paul’s face as he begs for the forgiveness of a French soldier he stabbed to death in a foxhole makes that pretty clear.
This isn’t to say there aren’t valid critiques of Berger’s adaptation. As Jamelle Bouie points out at The New York Times, the B-plot about high-level armistice negotiations comes at the expense of Paul’s injury leave in the novel, and we lose the opportunity to see the distance he now feels with everyone back home. Psychological depth is sacrificed for political context. To some degree, I understand Berger’s choice. A 21st-century viewer is less likely to arrive with a grasp of the war’s broader trajectory than contemporary audiences of Remarque’s 1929 novel or the 1930 American film to which Bouie unfavorably compares the Netflix version. As grateful as I am for the chance to see Daniel Brühl transition into the role of literal elder statesman, though, it might not have been a trade worth making.
If you’re looking for a movie to help fill out your understanding of the human toll of the First World War, then you could do worse than watching the original adaptation. But my personal recommendation is a German one: G.W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918, which was also released in 1930, just over a decade after the fighting ended. (Criterion Channel subscribers can find it here.) I give the film a deep dive on the podcast’s Pabst episode, but like All Quiet, it centers on a group of German soldiers struggling to survive until Armistice Day. Where Berger’s film gives screentime to the generals and politicians who called the shots, Westfront offers glimpses of the homefront, providing insight into how a whole society can end up as collateral damage.
For those who are feeling especially ambitious—and especially internationalist—make it a double feature with Kameradschaft, Pabst’s other challenge to the cancerous nationalism that infected both his era and ours. This one centers on a team of German miners who set aside historic hostilities to help rescue their French counterparts after a mine collapse. It’s my favorite of Pabst’s films—his most profound articulation of common humanity and global solidarity. It’s great film, if not a subtle one, but I suspect The Guardian could still find someone to completely miss the point.