Germany’s Oscar Nominee Isn’t Nearly German Enough

“Was it not noticeable at the end of the war,” German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin famously asked after the end of World War I, “that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?” The scope of technological change had so outstripped the capacities of the human mind that storytelling had grown impossible. There was, for Benjamin, “nothing remarkable” about the incommunicability of modern warfare. “For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”

Netflix’s much lauded adaptation of author Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front operates on the assumption that what the soldiers needed were better special effects. It is, for a movie with “quiet” in the title, very loud—2 hours and 23 minutes of artillery fire and machine guns, with scarcely a nod at the reflective interiority that rendered the book a German classic.

Remarque’s book is an indictment of a society willing to sacrifice its sons on the altar of national honor. Director Edward Berger’s film replaces that pensive condemnation of a culture with a single bellicose general, played so cartoonishly by actor Devid Striesow that one occasionally expected Roger Rabbit to emerge into frame. There are, in Remarque’s book, no noble sacrifices and no heroes in war—just meaningless violence. That’s very different in Berger’s film.

“Was it not noticeable at the end of the war,” German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin famously asked after the end of World War I, “that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?” The scope of technological change had so outstripped the capacities of the human mind that storytelling had grown impossible. There was, for Benjamin, “nothing remarkable” about the incommunicability of modern warfare. “For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”

Netflix’s much lauded adaptation of author Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front operates on the assumption that what the soldiers needed were better special effects. It is, for a movie with “quiet” in the title, very loud—2 hours and 23 minutes of artillery fire and machine guns, with scarcely a nod at the reflective interiority that rendered the book a German classic.

Remarque’s book is an indictment of a society willing to sacrifice its sons on the altar of national honor. Director Edward Berger’s film replaces that pensive condemnation of a culture with a single bellicose general, played so cartoonishly by actor Devid Striesow that one occasionally expected Roger Rabbit to emerge into frame. There are, in Remarque’s book, no noble sacrifices and no heroes in war—just meaningless violence. That’s very different in Berger’s film.

In Remarque’s book, the protagonist dies on a quiet day. Thus the title. But in Berger’s film, protagonist Paul Bäumer falls in an epic last battle. Remarque’s book insists that war is always brutal and pointless; in Berger’s film, Bäumer is literally stabbed in the back by a Frenchman, an unavoidable reference to the so-called backstab legend, which holds that Germany could have won the war had it not been betrayed by Jews and Communists. The ending, as writer Nicholas Barber noted in the Guardian, is likely to make the film popular among “nationalists, Nazis and Putin apologists.”

Beyond its apologetics for an invading army, however, the film says little about the experience of warfare that we see reported from Ukraine, Yemen, or Ethiopia, so focused is it on the static brutality of early 20th-century trench warfare. The film is so eager to depict the horrors of the trenches that it rushes to turn even its few domestic scenes into harrowing, closely shot ordeals. The school recruiting scene and the town’s preparation for war are filmed with the same hectic intensity that marks the later battle scenes. The world of bucolic farm life and bourgeoise boys playing the piano, which always lurks in the background in Remarque’s novel, is nowhere present here. The subtle, varied forms of horror and loss, solidarity and joy experienced by the soldiers in Remarque’s book are rendered unimaginable. When even school is war, you might as well go to the trenches.

That the film so thoroughly departs from the book has, as has been widely reported, caused much consternation among its German critics. “Germans are always skeptical of ambition,” a defensive Berger told the Independent, “Whenever you try something a little bit different than the norm, they get worried.” The claim is doubly absurd. First of all, German film is rich with ambitious, inventive productions, from filmmaker Edgar Reitz’s Heimat to director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland. More recently, filmmakers like Angela Schanelec, Christian Petzold, and Maren Ade have each made ambitious films that did much to reestablish German film on the international festival scene. But beyond that, there’s very little new or (aside from the special effects) particularly ambitious in Berger’s film. It relies, like Saving Private Ryan, 1917, or Dunkirk on cinematic sensory overload to try to replicate the sensory overload of war.

Germans don’t like the movie for the same reason they feel embarrassed for a countryman who goes on a business trip to Houston and returns to his Bavarian village in snakeskin boots and a 10-gallon hat. What might be meaningful cultural artifacts in one context quickly becomes kitsch in another. The kind of film that Berger made would long have been impossible in Germany—indeed, it would likely still be impossible to make a film like Berger’s without relying on American funding.

German film production, as director Julia Hertäg recently detailed in the New Left Review, has long been shaped by the exigencies of its powerful state-sponsored funding system, which is directly involved in the production of nearly every German film. The system began in the wake of World War II, when the occupying Allied powers were deeply and understandably anxious about German propaganda. Both laws and conventions governed the kind of films that could be made in Germany. While films that dealt with the aftermath of war or the cultural conditions that led to armed conflict were common, films that depicted war directly were not. The few exceptions—director Joseph Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad or director Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot, for example—tend to make much harder watching than Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Berger’s film, for all of its brutality, finally grants its protagonist a heroic death. In most German war films, there’s only meaningless loss.

In interviews, Berger has made much of the film’s Germanness. “Germany, unfortunately, does have a background of starting two world wars,” he told the Independent. “That’s something inherited. We can put this DNA into the movie.” It’s a stupid and dangerous claim. To imply that Germans have a genetic predisposition to war is exactly the kind of racial essentialism that motivated the rise of Nazism. It was not German genes that led to war; it was German culture. In the same way, German movies aren’t German simply because of the language. They’re German because they exist in a cultural context—one that couples an economic framework for film production with a set of cultural conventions about the ways in which war and violence should be depicted.

Berger’s film was produced almost entirely outside of that cultural context and adheres to none of its conventions. As Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming platforms focus increasingly on international productions, they will almost invariably homogenize any number of national cultural norms in the production of film and television. French, Italian, Korean, or Indian films produced with American money by American producers will almost invariably feel different than films produced locally. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. But it’s also not at all hard to understand why German critics have been skeptical about the film: Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front is a German film in the same way that Taco Bell is Mexican food.

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