Not Very Quiet on the Western Front

This article by Francis Babeuf was originally published in Cosmonaut at https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/02/not-very-quiet-on-the-western-front/

Netflix’s recent adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) ends with Paul Baumer–a stand-in for the German soldier–being stabbed in the back at the minute of the armistice, which is the most generous thing it is possible to say about the film’s political aspirations. The film is a failure on both an aesthetic and political level, more dedicated to a blood-soaked sentimentality than an honest engagement with the First World War, or its source novel.

There’s not much in this film that wasn’t done earlier and better by Stalingrad, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, or Platoon. There is the squad of brotherly soldiers, the maudlin pining for absent wives, the ‘what will we do after the war,’ the lust after local women, the ultimate death of protagonist and squad in a sacrifice that, while devoid of literal meaning, is drenched in enough symbolic bathos to fill a thousand high school essays. Stalingrad has the courage of its nihilism, Saving Private Ryan has the benefit of Spielberg’s commitment to craft and practical effects, and Band of Brothers has moments of genuine historical and moral interest. All Quiet, or in its original German Im Westen Nichts Neues, has echoes of better movies.

Still, the costumes, the makeup, some of the practical effects, a good deal of the cinematography, are all fine. There are shots that are well-composed, like Paul’s Christlike emergence from the bunker, or Katcynzki’s fated wander in the woods, and the hospital in the chapel of a captured church. But these moments do not redeem a 150-minute runtime.

The movie begins with a brief sequence contrasting the natural beauty of a particular winter landscape with the ugliness and violence of the fortifications on the Western Front. The sequence follows Heinrich Gerber, a German infantryman, until he is killed. His jacket is taken from his corpse, washed, repaired, and given to Paul Baumer at his induction to the armed services.

Paul enlists in Spring 1917, which is a major departure from the novel and the 1930 adaptation, both of which place Baumer’s enlistment near the start of the war, certainly before 1916 given the helmets which Baumer’s company are issued. This chronological shift is the primary decision undermining the film’s narrative. It shortens the time Baumer and his friends spend in school and in basic training to less than five minutes of screentime. The speeches by his teachers already feel hollow, are delivered with more bathos than feeling, and the cheers of the students feel choreographed. 

This is also the first moment where the film clashes with history in an aesthetically significant way. By 1917 the ‘Burgfrieden’ (labor and social peace) underpinning the German war economy had collapsed. In late 1916, thousands of metal workers in major industrial centers conducted the first major political strike against the war. That winter, as German war dead reached into the millions, the ratio of potato flour in ration bread was decreased and replaced with turnips. Thousands starved, and millions of civilians endured a winter with little fuel and less food. The Social Democratic party split. The Russian monarchy fell. Parliamentary opposition to further war spending increased. The United States entered the war.

None of these titanic social forces are present in the movie. The young men are motivated by ignorance and nationalism out of all proportion with the endurance of the German homefront.

In the novel, Paul and his classmates are genuinely stirred by Kantorek’s patriotism. That level of earnest emotional investment (as opposed to the fascist nihilism that drives Baumer in the last minutes of the film) was not sustained on the homefront by any major power through the duration of war.

This may seem like nitpicking. But the decision to shift Baumer’s enlistment to the final 18 months of the conflict, combined with the decision to set the bulk of the action in the last week of the war and to contrast it with Matthias Erzberger (played competently by Daniel Bruehl) breaks the narrative structure of the original work irreparably. It means the western front is no longer quiet; Paul’s experience is no longer that of an average soldier or recruit, but of a man pressed into a political gambit by his superior officers to cripple the republican revolution in Germany or sabotage the peace process. His death is not a stand-in for the deaths of millions of soldiers, but a specific death at a specific moment for a specific purpose. His death is a symbolic representation of the Dolchstosslegende that was so vital to the Freikorps and then to German militarists and fascists.

Remarque’s novel traces Paul’s gradual evolution from a nationalist, naive youth, to a competent soldier, to a wounded, broken man and finally to a walking corpse. Remarque’s Baumer experiences the hardships of the front and of civilian life–when granted leave, Paul finds his mother is dying of an incurable illness and his family do not have enough to eat. Baumer’s family in the Netflix adaptation are an impediment to his enlistment. They bear no meaningful relation to him. They are never present on screen. The film robs Baumer of his familial relationships, depriving him of an existence as a concrete individual, a human, but it grants his life and death a specific political role. Baumer is dead, in Netflix’s telling, before he ever pulls a trigger. He is, instead, a stand-in for the man in Feldgrau. But even his existence as a representative of the German army is undermined by poor characterization, a bad script, and a failure on Netflix’s part to invest the lives of the soldiers with any meaning. 

All socializing institutions are stripped away in Netflix’s version. Even the strength of Paul’s platoon, which in the novel is enough to motivate the men to mutiny for better rations, to keep Kropp from killing himself, to sustain Paul through four years of war, is reduced to the generic dynamics of the squad war movie: grizzled veteran Kat, grizzled veteran with less leadership ability Tjaden, middle-class intellectual audience stand-in Paul, naive painfully-horny Kropp, and the Franz Mueller, the guy who fucks. (Both are eventually punished for their sexual desires by gruesome death, Kropp is burned to death).

The relationships between these men are not compelling. Though the individual actors give good performances, there is something missing here, something in the pacing. This movie is how a neoliberal subjectivity conceives of war: an aesthetic experience by a mass of disaggregated individuals pursuing their own subjective goals.

The directors in charge of Netflix’s adaptation have succeeded in making a remarkably unfaithful adaptation, down even to the tactics and methods of killing employed in WW1. Hand-to-hand combat among unarmored opponents is a genuine rarity and one of the main assumptions of gunpowder war is that one side will break before knives are necessary. But fighting with the bayonet did happen in WW1 and was part of the tactical toolkit available to soldiers on either side.

In the industrial age, smokeless powder, long-range artillery, machine guns, bolt-action rifles, hand grenades all became key weapons of war. But these weapons, which produce the terror and alienation and boredom present in Remarque’s novel, are not visually exciting. A multi-day bombardment is dull. Rifle combat at a range of several hundred meters is not spectacular. And the slow death of exposure suffered by wounded men snared in barbed wire does not lend itself to overwrought performances. These aspects of war, monotonous, anonymous, extended, slow, loud, maddening and industrial, produced the psychological stress of the Western Front. Netflix replaces them with constant trench battles, save an early scene featuring a sentry’s shot, and a brief bombardment. Paul kills at close range with his rifle, shooting at men he can clearly see, men who can see him. He kills with a bayonet, a shovel, a knife, close personal death with blood spatter. His comrades lose limbs to field artillery (a direct strike by a howitzer shell would leave no visual evidence), are lit like match heads by flamethrowers, blown to pieces by tanks or drive sharpened spoons into their own necks. But, for the most part, they fight. They do not spend days clinging to the earth or working to repair their trenches. They charge, they shoot, they stab, they kill.

They are all supersoldiers, until they are squibs. This is a Marvel-ization or Super Hero version of World War 1, where individual grit and capability in combat matter, but the cohesion or doctrine of the military do not. Already these men are not soldiers, but caricatures of individual warriors, Ubermensch fighting other, highly skilled Ubermensch. This tacitly accepts part of the ideological framework of military fascism (what we could, in the unipolar present term JSOC-ism), that an inferior force may triumph through superior individual skill, technical competence, and bravery. This choice undermines the few sections that deal with military logistics–the film features the obligatory scene of German soldiers finding and enjoying allied rations, a staple of literature of both World Wars–by not connecting the German inferiority in supply and industrial capacity to the wearing down of the German military.

I focus so much on this because the reduction of war to an equation of production and the ways soldiers adapted to it are central to Remarque’s critique of war. Netflix does gesture at these, in the opening sequence and in the aforementioned bombardment, but it has translated the anti-war novel into the visual language of action cinema, Marvel-ized the Western Front. In so doing, it has erased a critique of war and replaced it with a spectacle of violence where caked on make-up, syrupy squibs and CGI fire fill in for narrative structure, thematic cohesion and emotional tension.

While the reactionary films of the 1970s and 80s about Vietnam were not anti-war, they were, at least, in dialogue with the anti-war movement that had shaken American imperialism, they felt the necessity of defending war as a political project. Outliers to this trend, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket sought to alienate viewers from war as an aesthetic experience, in the former case by rendering it absurd and cartoonish, and in the latter by transforming it into a sort of formalistic stage play. They largely failed.

That Netflix can make a movie that closes World War One with a German soldier getting stabbed in the back, which argues–textually–that war is given meaning by the political content militaries seek to invest it with, is a result of the collapse of the anti-war movement in the imperial core. Peace movements are no longer large, culturally generative forces to which reaction must respond.

War is a political tool. Class war, civil war, the final confrontation between the workers and the men defending the bourgeois state is the aim of Marxism. Perpetual war for resources, social control and extension of political hegemony is the end state of liberal imperialism. While the opposition to war on a universal ground is an honorable stance, it is also at odds with human liberation, it is a gesture of political defeat, a contentless opposition to an extant status quo that does not seek the transformation of class relations, but the moral amelioration of aggression. The idea that national wars are invested with inherent meaning by the officers in charge of war is central. 

Which brings me to the critical reception.

There are a number of brainless Youtube essays about this being a ‘true anti-war’ film. This argument rests on two pillars: the realism of the combat, which I have already addressed, and the meaninglessness of war. If death is meaningless, then war serves no purpose. The trouble with this interpretation of Netflix’s All Quiet lies in the succeeding decades of German history.

The anti-war interpretation of this film is haunted by the reality of the Freikorps and the five years of political terror and civil war that broke the back of Germany’s revolutionary left, haunted too by the victory of the clique of militarists and fascists in 1933 and the subsequent years of dictatorship. The absurd position of the general, that the German army must preserve its honor, motivated the German right to contest state power, vested intense symbolic meaning in their struggle, and led to their eventual triumph. Even after the German military carried out the slaughter of countless millions in the Second World War, men of the Prussian officer class made themselves politically indispensable to NATO and the United States and rewrote the history of their conduct from 1914 to 1945.

The antagonist’s position is the victorious position: war is given meaning by its aims and its outcome. Paul’s death at the minute of the armistice and the success of the attack in which he is participating are a literal representation and repetition of the Dolchstosslegende. This is, despite Erzberger’s qualms about wasted lives, a structurally pro-war film. It is dishonest to pretend otherwise.

It’s worth asking what makes a film anti-war. I would argue it is narrative structure, rather than frenetic (and always illusory) realism. The best examples of anti-war films that I have seen all come from the Soviet Union: Ivan’s Childhood, the Cranes are Flying, and Come and See. These films address war not as something freighted with political and social meaning, but as something that is wholly, relentlessly negative. There is no redemptive violence, only survival or death. Even though two end in ultimate victory, those films leave their characters worse off and give a convincing portrayal of emotional damage. The characters, especially in the Cranes are Flying, are left without meaning. This is generally accomplished by focusing on character choice, rather than any attempt to depict combat as it was experienced by soldiers.

Anti-war movies are characterized, generally, by a broader social framework, an emphasis on the disruption caused by war, feelings of loss and the burden of survival. War movies that focus on the aesthetics of combat and the experiences only of men in uniform almost never succeed in a structural critique of war: they draw their narrative meaning from death in combat, or victory in combat.

There are fascinating, even heroic stories about the end of World War One waiting to be told. But its protagonists are not individual soldiers skilled at combat. The war did not end with bayonet charges, it ended when the Kiel sailors mutinied and turned their guns on their officers. It ended with civil war in Germany, Austria, Russia, Turkey, ongoing revolutions in Mexico, Iran and China, white terror in the United States, fascism in Italy and the colonial partition of the Middle East. 

This movie engages with none of that. Instead, it reiterates the worst reactionary lies of the German military class, but disguises it in cloying sentimentality. Its western front is anything but quiet.