This story is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.
Erich Maria Remarque
[Dieses Buch soll weder eine Anklage noch ein Bekenntnis sein. Es soll nur den Versuch machen, über eine Generation zu berichten, die vom Kriege zerstört wurde, — auch wenn sie seinen Granaten entkam.]
On the 11th hour of this day, the 11th day of the 11th month, a minute's silence is observed and dedicated to those soldiers who died fighting to protect their nation. The Armistice, an agreement to end the fighting of the First World War as a prelude to peace negotiations, began at 11am on 11 November 1918. (Armistice is Latin for to stand (still) arms.)
Published as a novel in 1929, "All Quiet on the Western Front" (German: "Im Westen nichts Neues"), is the greatest anti-war novel ever written. It is set in 1917 at the height of World War I and revolves around an enlisted Imperial German Army soldier, Paul Bäumer, and his hometown best friends as they come to terms with the harsh realities of war and loss.
Under the Nazis it was a crime for anyone to own a copy of the book. Once they assumed complete power over Germany in 1933, they confiscated copies from homes and libraries, burned them, and banned its publication. When they accused the author of being “unpatriotic,” he escaped to Switzerland, then to the U.S., where he lived the rest of his life. Undeterred, the regime arrested his sister. At her trial, the judge declared, “We have sentenced you to death because we cannot apprehend your brother.” Hours later, they beheaded her.
Unlike most war stories, "All Quiet on the Western Front" makes no effort to justify or sentimentalise either side of the conflict. When Erich Maria Remarque started writing the novel in 1927, he aimed to capture his experience of the war with journalistic clarity. Paul and his comrades hold no animus towards the French. They fight because they are told to fight and do not want to die. In one of the most famous scenes from the book, Paul falls into a shell-hole and buries his knife into the chest of a French solider. For hours he lay next to the slowly dying Frenchman and finally, wracked with guilt, confesses, "If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother."
Read the original German edition online here
There are three film adaptation of this German epic anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque: the original 1930 version in black-and-white, the above 1979 version starring Ernest Borgnine, and the latest released in 2022.
The book and three film adaptations all end with the same final scene:
"He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."
[Er fiel im Oktober 1918, an einem Tage, der so ruhig und still war an der ganzen Front, daß der Heeresbericht sich nur auf den Satz beschränkte, im Westen sei nichts Neues zu melden.]
Er war vornübergesunken und lag wie schlafend an der Erde. Als man ihn umdrehte, sah man, daß er sich nicht lange gequält haben konnte; – sein Gesicht hatte einen so gefaßten Ausdruck, als wäre er beinahe zufrieden damit, daß es so gekommen war.]
The trenches. The lies. The subversion. The abandonment of democracy. It would be easy to view these events as calamities of a bygone era, the material of any war movie. The world has progressed, we tell ourselves.
And yet, nationalist movements are once again on the rise. Italy has elected a neofascist prime minister who flies the flag of Mussolini. Hungary silences its press and calls for "ethnic homogeneity." From France to Poland, far-right politicians undermine the European Union. Brazil teeters on the brink. Russia has invaded Ukraine. And in the U.S., the oldest democracy in the world, armed "patriots" violently attacked the U.S. Capitol to overturn the 2020 election at the behest of the president. A new fascism cloaked in stars and stripes.
"All Quiet on the Western Front" and the history that surrounds it, reminds us of what we risk if we allow democracy to weaken under the pressure of fanatical nationalism. Lest we forget!
