‘All Quiet’ Shows the Tragedy of War on the Western Front

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The 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front remains a milestone in cinema and a moving testimonial on the tragedy of war. The new All Quiet on the Western Front is less a remake than a return to the source, Erich Maria Remarque’s bestselling 1928 novel about the experience of Germany’s frontline soldiers during World War I. The novel, the 1930 and the 2022 films powerfully dramatize combat in a war that made no sense while making millions of casualties.

German director Edward Berger catches the repetition as well as the horror, the boredom as well as the anxiety, of trench warfare. “Faster! Faster! To the ladders!” the officers shout as their men scramble over the top and surge across the muddy no man’s land and into the French barrage of machinegun and shellfire. Bodies drop, mud splatters, shrapnel scatters and pings. And in the aftermath, the dead are recovered from the battlefield, shipped home in plain coffins while their uniforms are bundled up, boiled in cauldrons and sent to garment factories where rows of women at sewing machines recycle them for the next wave of troops.

Many went to the front voluntarily with dreams of glory. Paul (Felix Kammerer) is a high school student who enlists, roused by the jingoist oratory of the headmaster. “In a few short weeks you will finally march on Paris!” the uninformed educator tells the assembly. Most of the boys will march instead to their death in a war where gains of a few hundred yards on the battlefield could cost a few hundred thousand lives.

Berger accurately depicts conditions in the trenches, turned muddy alleys in the rain and offering little shelter. The troops run for the bunker under French bombardment but the wooden, earth-covered roof buckles under direct hits. Battlefield hospitals are bloody places with many saws and little chloroform. The soldiers are reduced to eating turnip bread three times a day.

Cut to headquarters where a belligerent general, well fed and comfortable, orders his men to their death with no more regard than a chess player sacrificing a few pawns. The centrist politician Matthias Ernstberger (Daniel Bruhl) is shown trying to convince Germany’s military-led regime to seek an end to the war. Ernstberger meets with French leaders and is handed an ultimatum: peace terms won’t be favorable for Germany. All Quiet shows that the lies of Germany robbed of victory by traitors began before the fighting ceased, spread by military leaders who refuse to acknowledge defeat.

However, the politics of the war is secondary in All Quiet to how the war is experienced by Paul and his friends, called upon again and again to achieve impossible objectives. There is hard-won camaraderie, panic, stoicism. The music of All Quiet isn’t deployed to instruct the audience on how to feel about scenes and characters but is heard sparingly as counterpoint to the action. When Paul discovers the body of one of his friends, the expression on his mud-caked face tells the story without the aid of treacly piano or saccharine strings. He looks on at the horror in silence.

All Quiet on the Western Front is streaming on Netflix.