After a year in the trenches, Paul Baumer is lost. He has witnessed childhood friends killed, maimed and driven mad by shellfire. He has felt debilitating hunger, fought grotesque rats that feast on corpses, and sheltered in the barren mud from incessant artillery. He has grown from an innocent schoolboy into a battle-hardened soldier with the sole aim of survival. It is no surprise that when he returns to Germany on leave, Paul feels utterly detached from civilian life.
“I imagined leave would be different from this… I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world.”
At this point in Erich Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front and its 1930 film adaptation, we get the sense that even if the war were to end, Baumer and millions of soldiers like him could never truly return home.
The 2022 adaptation of Remarque’s novel doesn’t quite strike the same chord. It feels like there is something missing. That’s not to say that the film does a poor job at criticising war. In fact, in many ways, the film often goes beyond Remarque’s book in showing the terrifying scale of industrialised warfare. Nowhere is this more clear than the opening sequence, where bloody uniforms are harvested from dead soldiers, before being washed, mended and handed to fresh recruits. Once those new recruits suffer the same fate as the uniforms’ previous owners, their dog tags are collected in bulk, recorded and processed into grim statistics. This tragic conveyor belt of young men being sent to their deaths is something that is not fully grasped by Remarque, since everything in the book is from Paul’s point of view.
But the 2022 film’s zoomed out perspective has its downsides too. Since we spend more time with characters like General Friedrichs and Matthias Erzburger, we lose sight of the dissociation suffered by Paul and his comrades as they are transformed from patriotic civilians into traumatised veterans who are disillusioned with the idea of dying for their country. This is no minor plot point to miss out. It is a theme at the heart of Remarque’s story and one that is echoed by many other renowned war writers from all sides of the conflict. There is no escaping that, for many soldiers, it was simply impossible to reconcile the desolate, blood-strewn trenches with the peaceful civilian world that sent them there.
Hints of this disconnect are somewhat visible in the 2022 film. Scraps of conversation between Paul and Kat reveal that the two will struggle to leave the war behind them when they eventually return home.
PAUL
“In two weeks, we’ll be in Paris.” Two years of hand grenades, you can’t just discard all that like a pair of socks. The stench will always be with us. Ludwig is dead. Franz is dead. Albert–
KAT
What do we care? We’re alive. There’s nothing we can do for them now. Who knows what’s in store for us.
But these fragments don’t really paint a full picture of the isolating power of war and the true scale of the alienation that soldiers like Paul felt. The book, as well as its 1930 film adaptation, go much deeper into this theme. Just when it feels like Paul has seen every possible brutality of war, he is granted three weeks of leave, where he is allowed to return to his peaceful home town and visit his family. This provides a stark and immediate contrast between the desolate western front and the civilian heart of Germany.
When Paul arrives home, it becomes clear that things are tough here too, with food rations and supplies being especially scarce. The people understand that their soldiers must come first and seem willing to make a patriotic sacrifice. What they don’t understand is the trauma that the front-line troops have gone through, and the horrific human cost of the war. They all seem to want to put words in Paul’s mouth, as if expecting gripping stories about the bravery and patriotism of their beloved soldiers. But when he wants to deviate from this script, and express the true nature of war, he realises that no one will believe him. Paul’s experience is so far removed from their idealised vision of a glorious conflict that it is rejected and silenced.
The civilians dictate to Paul what his experience should be and how he and his fellow soldiers simply need to push harder to make a breakthrough on the Western Front. They tell him that this is his duty to his country. Indeed, from the safety and comforts of civilization, it becomes easy for people to parrot the old lie.
I believe it will be a quick war, that there will be few losses. But if losses there must be, then let us remember the Latin phrase which must have come to the lips of many a Roman when he stood embattled in a foreign land, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” “Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.”
When Paul’s schoolmaster, Kantorek, delivers this rousing speech in the 1930 film, it seems like a direct reference to Wilfred Owen’s Dolce et Decorum Est, a 1918 poem that ends with the lines:
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
This stanza is preceded by a harrowing description of a chlorine gas attack on a column of British Soldiers. One soldier is too slow to fit his gas mask and is consumed by a poisonous “green sea” that causes him to collapse “guttering, choking, drowning”. The speaker talks directly to war-mongers like Kantorek, asking “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs…” would you still repeat the old lie? In other words, Owen argues that the reality of war is so far removed from civilian society that patriotic platitudes like “dulce et decorum est” become absurd.
When Paul returns to his old classroom in the 1930 film, he sees Kantorek speaking the very same platitudes to a younger cohort of students. Just like Owen, he corrects his old-schoolmaster and explains that such words are meaningless in the face of the real thing. “It’s easier to say it than to watch it happen”
In the 2022 film, the only glimpses into the civilian world are offered by the parallel storyline of Matthias Erzburger, a German official who lobbies the government to agree to an armistice. Aside from being an invention that has no basis in Remarque’s book, the subplot fails to show the complete disconnect between civilian and military society. Instead, it is clear that Erzburger is highly sympathetic to the struggles of front-line soldiers and is doing everything he can to prevent more of them dying.
This means that viewers never get a sense of the hatred and distrust that many soldiers felt towards uncomprehending civilians during the war. This is problematic, because this contrast is important for understanding the true mentality of a World War One Soldier. As Herwig Holger writes in The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918.
The front-line soldiers (Frontschweine) developed their own vocabulary, code of ethics and norms of behaviour. Few of these had anything in common with pre-war upbringing and education. Indeed, many of the front-line combatants developed a vitriolic dislike of the home front in general and of civilian profiteers. This ‘we-versus-them’ dichotomy would plague the Weimar Republic to its very end.
We see this civilian distrust play-out in Remarque’s book. As soon as Paul gets off the train after returning from the front, we are faced by this passage:
On the platform I look round; I know no one among all the people hurrying to and fro. A redcross sister offers me something to drink. I turn away, she smiles at me too foolishly, so obsessed with her own importance: “Just look, I am giving a soldier coffee!”–She calls me “Comrade,” but I will have none of it.
It was not just in Germany where feelings like this were common among soldiers. The same sense of segregation was seen within all sides of the conflict, especially Britain. In “The Great War and modern memory”, historian Paul Fussell writes that:
It was not just from their staffs that the troops felt estranged: it was from everyone back in England. That division was as severe and uncompromising as the others generating the adversary atmosphere. The visiting of violent and if possible painful death upon the complacent, patriotic, uncomprehending, fatuous civilians at home was a favourite fantasy indulged by the troops…
Philip Gibbs recalls the deep hatred of civilian England experienced by soldiers returning from leave: “They hated the smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old men. . . . They desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed to God to get the Germans to send Zeppelins to England—to make the people know what war meant.
This social context means that fatuously patriotic figures like Kantorek become important antagonists in the story of Paul Baumer. In the 2022 adaptation, however, this key antagonist is replaced by the bloodthirsty General Friedrichs who seems to have no preconceptions about the glory of war.
Men are born alone. We live alone and die alone.
Friedrichs, with his prominent position in the military, does understand war’s bleak reality, but that doesn’t stop him from recklessly ordering more men to their deaths. His fault seems to be an uncaring and callous attitude towards human life, that war should be fought so soldiers have something to do. Kantorek’s evil is much more subtle; he cares for all of his students and doesn’t want them to die, but genuinely believes that the war is for a noble cause. In fact, his platitudes lead directly to the death of Joseph Behm, as Paul explains to him when they are reunited in the book:
Territorial Kantorek, two years ago you preached us into enlisting; and among us there was one, Joseph Behm, who didn’t want to enlist. He was killed three months before he would have been called up in the ordinary way. If it had not been for you he would have lived just that much longer.
Therefore, By omitting key figures like Kantorek and replacing them with the likes of Friedcichs, the 2022 adaptation gives a somewhat false impression of the challenges that soldiers faced behind their own lines. Challenges that are eloquently explored by Remarque.
Of course no adaptation needs to stay entirely faithful to the original material. The 1930 film deviates in a number of ways. In the book, Paul doesn’t reunite with Kantorek in his old classroom and the two never have an argument about whether it’s sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. However, since this exchange remains true to the spirit of Remarque’s novel, the scene is one of the most authentic in the film.
The same can’t be said for the 2022 adaption’s equivalent scenes with Friedrichs and Erzburger which seem to tell an entirely different story. They transform All Quiet on the Western Front from a young man’s psychological descent into a lost soldier to an exploration of the political forces driving the war. Sure, we see just how horrific the Western Front can be, but we don’t see how soldiers like Paul eventually find more in common with their enemy than the civilians back home. We don’t see the vast gulf between fatuous patriotism and the bleak reality of war. To truly see that, I would suggest reading the novel and watching its 1930 adaptation.
Oh, God, why did they do this to us? We only wanted to live, you and I. Why should they send us out to fight each other? If we threw away these rifles and these uniforms you could be my brother, just like Kat and Albert.
Sources
Englander, D. (1994). Soldiering and Identity: Reflections on the Great War. War in History, 1(3), 300-318.
Herwig, H.H. (2014). The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Fussell, P. (1975). The Great War and modern memory. New York, Oxford University Press.
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