In an exhausted age of cinema characterized by sequels, reboots, and remakes, it is rare to find any improvements in updated versions of older fare. But the new German-language Netflix production of All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Edward Berger, exceeds expectations, delivering a compelling adaptation of Eric Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel. In addition to being visually riveting and brilliantly acted, the film prompts timely contemplation about the future of Western civilization. Despite over a hundred years of innovations in communication and consumer goods that give the illusion of progress, life in Europe and the United States today is anemic. In fact, modern Western culture may be summed up well by the literal German title of Remarque’s novel: Im Westen nichts Neues (In the West, nothing new). We have not reached a triumphant end of history, but rather we endure the half-hearted repetition of its most nihilistic aspects. All Quiet on the Western Front may provide the opportunity to mourn, and inch forward.
Berger’s film modifies Remarque’s timeline slightly, depicting the protagonist Paul Bäumer, played with great sensitivity by the Viennese newcomer Felix Kammerer, entering the fray in 1917, when the allure of glorifying the Fatherland had not quite faded. Three years into the bloody conflict, schoolmasters in pristine German villages hundreds of miles from the front lines still had a willing audience in boys who could finally carry rifles and endure long marches, just in time to relieve the classes that would never return for a reunion. Maybe this time, they thought, the lads really would storm Paris in a month. The reality, however, was that the Army hoped it could get six weeks of service out of them before they died. In a particularly ominous scene early in the film, an eager Paul receives his uniform, which still has the name tag in the collar from the dead man who had owned it before. Paul wore it until the bitter end of the war, but his boyhood friends would not spend much time in theirs, including Ludwig Behm, who died on his first night at the Front.
The film also improvises on Remarque’s novel by cutting away from Paul’s story, focusing on the experience of two other characters, the first of whom is a vain, bloodthirsty character named General Friedrichs, who sends Paul’s unit into a final senseless battle on the morning of November 11, 1918, just before the ceasefire. The son of a prestigious Prussian military family, Friedrichs leads out of spite, blaming the ascendent Social Democrat party in Germany for infecting the bureaucracy and the high command with a loss of nerve. One may see in Friedrichs a resemblance to General Erich Ludendorff, whose command in World War I ended in disgrace, and who was later allied with the Nazis and championed the theory that the Left had betrayed the Reich and ensured its defeat to the Allies. In this way, Berger’s film improves on the novel in foreshadowing the diabolical sequel to the Great War, foisted on the world by another monomaniacal veteran, Adolf Hitler.
But far more interesting both to the plot of the film and to longer-term historical ramifications of the disaster of World War I is Berger’s depiction of the real-life figure Matthias Erzberger, played by Daniel Brühl. Erzberger was a hawkish German bureaucrat and propagandist who had a change of heart before he was deputized to surrender Germany to Marshall Foch on the railway car in the Forest of Compiègne. Brühl’s performance highlights the impossible task Erzberger faced, as the Allies refused to negotiate a peace that would stave off political and economic turmoil in Germany, and the German people did not understand an unconditional surrender when their own lands remained uninvaded and unmolested. Erzberger was assassinated in 1921 and later vilified by the Nazis as one of the treacherous Novemberverbrecher; but Erzberger’s inclusion in the film suggests a more complicated tragedy that still plays out in Europe today, long after the Nazi era.
Erzberger was not a member of the Social Democrats, but rather a centrist Catholic whose political legacy would lead in part to the creation of the Christian Democratic Union, the ruling party which oversaw Germany’s post-World War II “economic miracle” and took the first steps towards the creation of the European Union. In his book A Turning Point for Europe, Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, describes this period as “the great hour of Christian politicians,” whose “new construction was based very consciously on the ethical principles of Christianity.”
One political lesson from Remarque’s novel that seemed obvious after World War I and again after World War II was that in place of old Christendom, a new coalition of Christian nations committed to peace with one another might absorb politics into faith.
But despite the leadership of great Catholic men like Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle, the idea of a new Christian Europe proved naïve, and an unaccountable international technocracy grew up where an arrangement of humane national coexistence was intended to emerge. The metaphysical foundation of Europe was simply too weak to support the human institutions placed upon it. In ways that neither Remarque’s novel nor the original film could foresee, the new film may allude to this spiritual loss in its depiction of a church building that is repurposed as a bloody field hospital and then abandoned, representing a once dominant Christianity that took its last stand along with the Christian men who died of their wounds within it. As one character in the film sums up Europe’s God-forsakenness, “God watches on while we slaughter each other.”
The film does a manful job depicting conditions from which few people escape alive, and no soul remains unscarred. Its depiction of Paul’s first experience of hand-to-hand combat perfectly captures Remarque’s insight that for many soldiers, the reality of battle is nothing like the idea of war in the abstract. The horror on Paul’s face when he first sees a tank is palpable, and Volker Bertelmann’s jarring electronic score heightens the sense of dread already captured by the machine guns and flamethrowers firing into dreary fog. The film also takes the viewer down into the freezing, filthy trenches, driving home not only the fear of death in combat, but the hunger and illness of battlefield conditions. In one scene during the middle of a battle, Paul and other German soldiers stumble into a trove of provisions, and they take the opportunity to tuck into the food intended for the dead Frenchmen at their feet.
Despite plenty of gruesome violence, All Quiet on the Western Front includes tender moments. The film captures the beauty of friendship across class divides, particularly in the relationship between Paul and Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky, played superbly by Albrecht Schuch. Their adventures seeking food in the French countryside are reminiscent of the end of Jean Renoir’s World War I masterpiece from 1937, The Grand Illusion, and for a moment they, and the audience, can almost imagine a good life beyond the chaos. There are also strong reminders throughout the film to maintain gratitude for life however long or short it may be, as a tribute to those who have sacrificed for others’ survival.
At one point in the film, Paul admits, “I’m afraid of what’s to come,” and reasonable people today may wonder what Paul and his generation would make of Germany and the rest of the modern world. Likewise, Europeans may share his sentiment as they look out on an uncertain future of wars, energy crises, and mass migration. But as good as both the original novel and the new film version of All Quiet on the Western Front are, today’s viewer—and especially today’s conservative—may need to balance Remarque’s pessimism with a dash of hope from another voice from the same era. Once wildly popular throughout Europe, Ernst Jünger’s World War I memoir Storm of Steel may offer an alternative treatment to simply popping the black pill of despair. Hitler liked Jünger, who wore a German uniform again in World War II, but the Marxist playwright Bertholt Brecht and the pacifist Catholic novelist Heinrich Böll admired him too. Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand both honored him, and by the time of his death at age 102 in 1998, he was an undisputed giant of European letters.
In Jünger’s riveting account of his war experiences, he emphasizes his own desire to succeed in the task he has been set, neither brainwashed by war propaganda nor disenchanted by battlefield gore. Jünger doubles down on valor, and despite grave danger, he is eager to join the fray without overly psychologizing his situation. One of his favorite words is ‘sangfroid,’ and there is none of Remarque’s “fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.” Wounded many times, he takes pride in having made it out alive, saying, “I felt every justification in donning the gold wound-stripes.” Considering Jünger’s testimony, perhaps World War I was not the unmitigated disaster whose long-term effects tempt some traditionalists to accept a future that will always get worse. At any rate, different soldiers tell different stories, and while it is easy to mistake what is worth fighting for, fighting per se is not evil. In fact, it can be noble, win or lose.
Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front finally does not imply a state of melancholy anguish, offering encouragement in ways that would never have entered Remarque’s mind. Like other excellent recent war films including Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Sam Mendes’ 1917, there are no woke or politically correct agendas shoehorned into this tale from another time. These days, such an omission is brave. Moreover, in a way that Englishmen like Nolan and Mendes perhaps cannot manage, Berger’s film is able to imply the depth of cultural loss that only a post-Nazi-era German can. At one point in the film Kat says, “Soon Germany will be empty,” and from a cultural perspective, he was mostly right. Can a respectable German today praise the likes Goethe and Beethoven, let alone Nietzsche and Wagner? Berger’s film, however, gives tacit permission to lament the death of what was—the first step in the near-suicide mission of rediscovery and renewal that some of us find irresistible.
Indeed, finishing All Quiet on the Western Front and considering the scale of the tragedy not only of the Great War but of its long legacy turned my mind to another man of Remarque’s era, T.S. Eliot, who explained, “We fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.” The fictional Paul Bäumer represents millions of dead Europeans, but not necessarily the death of the long-standing idea of European civilization. Savor this new All Quiet on the Western Front, a harrowing tale out of the past, as a strange affirmation that something worth fighting for remains alive today.
Perhaps something new is possible in the West after all.
