This article contains spoilers.
All Quiet on the Western Front may be the best war novel ever written, a work told entirely in first person and present tense that evokes the myriad aspects of combat—its gruesome horrors, routine banalities, feverish otherworldliness, and fervent camaraderie—with engrossing vividity, in language at once sparse and explicit, though never gratuitously graphic or sentimental.
These qualities make it a tough nut for would-be adapters to crack, though three directors have tried: Lewis Milestone in 1930, Delbert Mann in a CBS TV movie in 1979, and now Edward Berger for Netflix. Milestone’s film closely followed the novel, which had been published just two years earlier, and his battle scenes were remarkable for the era (it won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director), but the melodramatic acting makes it unwatchable today. The version by Mann, a veteran of Playhouse 90 productions, won a Golden Globe for best made-for-TV movie, but his directing was too stagey and his battlefields too clean.
Berger, besides enjoying the benefits of modern technology (the ultra-high-definition images look spectacular on a well-calibrated 4K television), is the first German filmmaker to approach All Quiet—remarkable, given that the novel tells a German foot soldier’s story of the First World War, and its author, Erich Maria Remarque, was a German foot soldier wounded in that war. Berger’s background lends the tale an innate authenticity (it’s more convincing to hear German actors complaining in German about French or British soldiers than to hear unaccented American actors doing the same) and a more unnerving perspective.
As Berger (best known for his TV spy series, Deutschland 83) said in an AV Club interview, he grew up watching American and British war movies, which were about heroic journeys because America and Britain had liberated Europe from fascism. But there is no heroic pride in Germany’s story of 20th-century wars. “There’s a sense of shame, guilt, horror, terror, responsibility towards history,” he noted. “It’s in my DNA […] I wanted to get that out of my system and share it with other countries and tell that story. And to make a specifically German film.”
The opening sequence of his All Quiet is breathtaking: a misty forest, a tree-skimmed sky, a fox and its cub; then the rumble of cannons (war as an intrusion on nature) over an aerial view of a hill littered with dead bodies and suddenly pierced by gunfire; then soldiers ordered to climb out of their trench and charge into the maelstrom of smoke and dust and grime and noise, some of them felled at first exposure to the air, others dashing madly, desperately, to shoot or slice open the unnamed enemy before facing the same fate.
Nothing in the previous films of All Quiet—very little in any war film—remotely captures what Remarque’s narrator calls “the animal instinct” awakened by “the first droning of the shells […] We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill.”
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Throughout, Berger’s new film summons up the shifting tones, moods, and colors of Remarque’s novel so brilliantly, he can almost be forgiven for departing from it in other ways—some minor, others puzzling and significant.
The novel follows Paul Bäumer, a bright, 17-year-old literary idealist just out of high school, who, along with a handful of classmates, is inspired by an ultra-nationalist teacher to join the German army in its glorious crusade to conquer France. The new recruits march and sing their way to the front lines, then descend into a disillusioned misery as they discover the nightmare of trench warfare. Those that survive do so by gradually relinquishing their education, culture, ambitions, attachments to family—everything they once thought made life worth living—to a soldier’s straitened goal of survival and the survival of his comrades in arms.
The theme’s sorrow and tragedy come off in the movie—a remarkable achievement—but there are truncations and compromises.
In the book, there’s a long chapter following Bäumer on an eight-day home leave, taking the train to his village, trudging to his house, greeting his family, settling into his old bedroom with its familiar objects, but realizing that he is utterly estranged from his old life. What was once important to him is now useless; his neighbors and relatives have no comprehension of what he’s been through. It’s as harrowing, yet understated, a portrait of the war years’ “lost generation” as anything in Hemingway.
This whole chapter is missing from Berger’s film, though one of the characters does recite a key line of dialogue from the book: “The war has ruined us for everything.” The chapter’s omission is understandable; to include it would have added another 20 minutes or so to an already 2-1/2-hour-long film. But maybe it should be that long. Maybe it should have been a multipart series like Tom Stoppard and Susanna White’s adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s WWI epic, Parade’s End. Certainly, it deserves to be.
One of the book’s most gripping scenes has Paul stabbing a French soldier, then apologizing to him, riffling through his papers, glimpsing a photo of his wife and daughter, promising the dying man that he’ll contact them—then walking away and shifting back into soldier’s mode, almost instantly, realizing he won’t keep his promise and thinking nothing of it. There’s a similar, and equally gripping, scene in the film, but Paul doesn’t return to coldness. Instead, he hangs on to the papers and the emotion they unleash. It strikes one of the film’s few false notes.
Throughout the film, Berger cuts to the true-life story of Matthias Erzberger, the German politician who pressed for and negotiated a cease-fire—which turned into an unbridled surrender—with French officials. I see what Berger is doing. He’s drawing contrasts between the grunts in the filthy trenches and their leaders feasting on fine wine in the spotless boardrooms. I suspect he also means to create suspense between the soldiers’ fates and the countdown to peace. Nonetheless, the cutaways distract more than dramatize.
There are other annoying lapses. Paul’s comrades are never fully traced as characters, except for Kat, the illiterate cobbler who emerges, in the novel and film, as the most moral and humanistic of the bunch. Berger omits another of the novel’s themes, the harsh cruelty imposed by “small men” who are elevated by war to junior officers. And it’s especially puzzling that a caption at the start of the film, when Paul and his chums join the army, reads “Spring 1917.” In the book, they join up two years earlier, closer to the start of the war.
That discrepancy isn’t trivial: By 1917, the Battle of the Somme had been fought; millions of men had died; soldiers had returned to all the combatant countries crippled or in body bags. It is extremely unlikely that, this far into the war, a hawkish schoolteacher could still lure naïve students into merrily joining the fight. Yes, it would have been a stretch—and a huge expense—for Berger, to say nothing of his producers, to expand the story from one year to three. Maybe the next generation can get an All Quiet miniseries.
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The film’s biggest change comes at the end. In the novel, Paul suddenly dies in October 1918, the month before the armistice, of a cause unspecified, “on a day,” Remarque writes, shifting to third-person, “that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western front.”
By contrast, in Berger’s film, a half-hour before the armistice goes into effect (at 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month), Paul’s commanding general orders his men to raid and conquer one bit of French land, so they can go home as heroes rather than cowards. In the course of this final insanity, Paul dies of a bayonet wound inflicted less than a minute before the ceasefire takes hold.
There was no such crazed order or final raid either in the novel or in the real First World War. Again, I understand what Berger is doing: He’s alerting or reminding the viewers that this war didn’t end in 1918, that the German surrender embittered many generals—and their political leaders’ successor, Adolf Hitler—into propagating the “stab-in-the-back myth,” the notion that Germany would have won the war but for the perfidy of Social Democrats and Jews. This is something Remarque could not have foreseen, having written his novel in 1928, five years before Hitler came to power, 11 years before World War II began. Still, Berger could have found some way of foretelling the next war—and, looking a century ahead, wars to come—without contorting Paul’s death into something other than routine.
For all its shortcomings, this Netflix version is more than good enough, a deep immersion into the soul-sucking realities of war—and a powerful supplement to what’s going on around us. Berger started making the film well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but a tide of nationalism had begun to overtake Britain, Hungary, Poland, the United States, and elsewhere; the European Union, which has helped prevent war from engulfing the continent, was under political attack. “We felt like, this is the time to make this movie in German,” Berger told AV Club. “It felt very resonant of how it was 100 years ago. It felt like, ‘Listen guys, this is what led us 100 years ago. Let’s just be careful.’ This was already two and a half years ago, and now see what happens in Ukraine. It wasn’t really and isn’t really farfetched.”
