Review Tuesday: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

 

 

All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque 

1928

Young Germans graduate school and head off to the horrors of the front lines of WW1.

After having watched all three versions of the movie I felt compelled to re-read the book to refresh my memory. The last time I touched this bust have been in middle school as an English class assignment. 

 

The first thing we need to confront regarding this book is the author, Erich Maria Remarque. He wrote the book based on his own experiences being in the Imperial German Army during World War I. Also, the very first lines in the book are a warning that this is NOT an adventure novel. 

 

It most certainly is not a flight of fancy. After having viewed all three versions of this movie, this original telling of the story was, by far, the best yet most horrific telling of this tale. I don't even know where to begin with a review of this amazing and chilling account of life in the trenches of the front line of the Great War. My habit is to read just before going to sleep, since I am usually pretty tired I don't get through too many pages. With this book, I frequently sat up trying to fully grasp the lessons in this book. 

 

But I digress... Told from the perspective of Paul Baumer, this is a story of a class of young German men who joined the military because their teacher romanticized the notion of of fighting for the glory of the Fatherland. Young and idealistic they had no idea what they were in for. Basic training taught them discipline, but didn't prepare them for war. The book is Paul's internal dialog while they try to survive the war. Through his eyes you see the rare highs points, but you also see the blood and gore of battle and see all his friends fall, one by one as the days, weeks, months, YEARS pass.

 

Maybe the most important lesson to learn from this story is how the demoralized soldier lives each day, with barely any hope to survive or even the future. Paul has a bleak outlook for his future because he went from being a boy, and became a man in war and is lost to this world. If the war needed, and he survived, what can possibly be out there for him? All those things they learned in school seemed trivial and stupid in comparison to SURVIVAL. Nowadays, we would call is post-traumatic stress disorder, but he was still in the thick of it. I think the modern term is that he "broke" but continued to trudge along out of duty. 

 

If you pay attention to the timeline, Paul says that in October 1918 he had been fighting got three years. So, he joined up in 1915, maybe a year after the start of the war. By the end of the book, he's around 21. Paul had been the last one of his group of friends left in the fighting. All the others either went home, already, in pieces or whole but in a box. The title of the book comes from the Paul's demise. In October, 1918, on a relatively uneventful day in the trenches, Paul stopped his bullet, mere WEEKS before the armistice. The official report on activity that day? ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.         

 

Having originally read this book at a young age, a child without any understanding of mortality or war, this book didn't resound like it did this time around. This book illustrated, in gory detail, what really happens in war. It's sad and bleak. It also put humanity into the "villains" of the Great War.  

This is definitely worth reading. 

AMAZON

 

Now that I have re-read the book, how do the movies size up?  All three movies that share this title run two and a half hours each. Many people consider the original movie from 1930 as the perfect picture. I agree that it was good and covered many of the themes from the book. My biggest problem with that film was the actors didn't act very German at all. Plus the ending, Paul got shot trying to catch a butterfly?! Wat?!?! 

 

The 1979 version felt, to me, like a remake of the original film with some added details from the book. There were many close similarities, but they were based on the same book, so it should! To me, this was an improvement on the first. The actors seemed more German. Even though it was inaccurate, the way the director tied the beginning and the end with Paul drawing a sparrow, was a nice touch.  

 

The recent 2022 Netflix adaptation was the least accurate to the source material of the three. It focused on the gore and the politics of the war. The armistice negotiations weren't even a thing in the book, as well as so many other scenes. Okay. World War One was horrific. It changed the face of modern warfare. This adaptation wanted to take that angle.  The deaths, dismemberments, blood, and guts would rival Saving Private Ryan. One point it did make was how the lines hardly shifted. The soldiers would take turns charging each other, but they never gained any ground. It DID paint the bleak picture that was in the book. What I disliked most, however, was the spoilsport maneuver that the Germans pulled at the end. In the final hours of the war, knowing full well that the armistice kicked in at 11AM, the German forces made a final attack on the French. During this final battle Paul met his end. He lived to see the end of the war, then died from a bayonet wound through the heart. 

Of the three movies, which did I like best? 1979. Which one came closest to the source material? 1979. Which one gave me nightmares? 2022...