Teenage boys quickly find themselves caught up in the ordeal of trench warfare in this German-language adaptation of the first world war novel
Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war classic gets its first German-language adaptation for the screen, after the Hollywood versions of 1930 and 1979; it’s a powerful, eloquent, conscientiously impassioned film from director and co-writer Edward Berger. Newcomer Felix Kammerer plays Paul, the German teenage boy who joins up with his schoolfriends in a naive patriotic fervour towards the end of the first world war, excitedly looking forward to an easy, swaggering march into Paris. Instead, he finds himself in a nightmare of bloodshed and chaos.
For generations of British readers, the story provided the symmetrical complement to similar agony behind the Allied lines, a book read in tandem with, say, Wilfred Owen’s poetry. It was that intertextual, mirror-image combination which in some ways established the dimension of absurdist insanity that later anti-war works such as Catch-22 would build on. The original German title, Im Westen Nichts Neues (“In the West Nothing New”), brilliantly rendered as “all quiet on the western front” in 1929 by Australian translator Arthur Wheen, is a phrase from a factual military report endowed with an awful irony. The western front is only quiet for the dead.
