‘All Quiet on the Front’: a formidable version of Remarque’s anti-war novel about the First World War

“What will our parents do if one day we get up and ask them to account? What do they expect us to do when a time comes when there is no war? For whole years our task has been to kill; This has been the first job of our lives. Our knowledge of life is reduced to death. What else can happen after this? And what will become of us? Erich Maria Remarque in the final part of No news at the front, classic of antimilitarist literature, portrait of the daily life of the First World War, of the absurdity of the war, which he experienced first-hand as a combatant on the side of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The validity of this passage, and many others with powerful language, overwhelming sincerity and poetics of disaster, admits no doubt. At a time when relatively close to where the novelist lived on the edge, people continue to fight town by town, for barely an inch of land, Remarque’s reflections still stand, big words. Perhaps that is why anti-war cinema makes more sense than ever, or perhaps the same sense as always. No news at the front, formidable third adaptation of the novel, and the first produced in Germany, arrives on Netflix after one of those technical premieres in theaters, in a handful of theaters and for a limited time.

Published in the year 1929, No news at the front It didn’t take long for it to be made into a movie. In 1930, from Hollywood, Lewis Milestone composed a powerful work of art, winner of the Oscar for best film in the third edition of the awards. Together with a spectacular editing work in the lash and shrapnel sequences, with the camera crossing trenches and flying over the heads of soldiers, the American director crudely showed the vileness of certain patriotic speeches, the questioning of the military institution, the incapacitating post-war pain and the motivations and hidden ambitions in the high command and in governments.

The second adaptation of the book was made for television by Delbert Mann, one of the members of the so-called, precisely, generation of television (that of Lumet, Pakula, Pollack and Frankenheimer, among others), although not during the incipient years fifties, before they began to make the leap to the cinema, but already at the end of the seventies, in 1979. With less means, but with his innate sense of narration, Mann won the Golden Globe for best telefilm and seven nominations to the Emmys (the film can be seen on Amazon and on Filmin; the Milestone version is not on platforms).

free adaptation

A sense of the story that is also recovered by the unknown to almost everyone Edward Berger, seasoned in German television and directing episodes of American series, which with just three feature films prior to the present (only one, Jack, premiered in Spain, and notable), with a more intimate cut, surprises with a film with an admirable sense of ethics and aesthetics. A very free adaptation, and not only because it changes not a few things in Remarque’s story, maintaining its anti-war sense, but above all because from its central core it adds relevant political nuances with a subplot around the peace talks, surrender and armistice between Germany and France. Some sequences commanded, after the fall of the kaiser, by Mathias Erzberger (played by Daniel Bruhl), anti-militarist politician and economist, nicknamed The Opposite during the war, who unfortunately consistent with his ideas and his work, ended up being assassinated by two nationalist soldiers a few years later.

Berger opens his work, selected by his country to aspire to the Oscar for best international film, with an impressive sequence that sums it all up: the absurdity of war, physical pain, mental fear, paralysis and fury; all merged, spectacular in the forms and without music, only with the silence and noise of death. From then on, punctuated by an exquisite soundtrack in which its effective main theme stands out, barely three notes sustained and repeated until impact, with winds and a certain electronic nuance, the film does not stop showing the physical helplessness and decline staff. The futility of trench warfare, fighting for a few meters of land, dying for nothing, so characteristic of the first world war, and expressed in other portentous titles, such as Paths of Glory Y Gallipoli, is shown here with a savage crudeness. Soldiers, if not killed by war, are also killed by hunger. The desolation, the bleeding of the bodies and the incomprehension of the soldiers, many of them nothing more than defenseless children.

Elegant, expressive, and never gratuitous in the violent beauty of its shots, not exempt from an atrocious realism of mud and ax blows, No news at the front, in German version, it is a surprising triumph. “Only a hospital shows what war really is,” Remarque wrote. Breakthrough director Berger doesn’t even have to dwell on clinical calamities. The harshness of the last look is enough for him, an instant before death. The enemy’s or your own. Check that the opponent is nothing more than another man like you. Terror, bewilderment. The office of killing, and the search for mercy.