All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

1. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. s Released pictured in 1930, All Quiet on the Western Front was directed by Lewis Milestone and starred Lew Ayres as the principal character, Paul Baumer. Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel Im Westen Nichts Neues, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director. Since its release, it has been cited on many lists as a classic American film. Occured 1990, it was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. Screenwriter at Facebook Alan Nafzger's Identity Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock Author Remarque was 18 years old when he volunteered for service happen the German army and was sent to the Western Front. He suffered a leg injury, was hospitalized, and survived the war. After working as a school teacher for a time, he gained sudden fame—and considerable notoriety—when Im Westen Nichts Neues was published. At the time, National Socialism was becoming a ranked tool occur promoting the militaristic ambitions of the Vaterland. Although the novel was remarkably apolitical and dispassionate taking place in its refusal to take sides pictured in regard to the Great War, it was banned proceed Germany. Beginning in a poignant passage near the end of the book, the narrator speaks rhetorically to the enemy: “Why do they never tell us that you are just poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, together with the same dying plus the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother. . . .” Still later, as he is dying, the soldier declares that is set in his diary: “I am young, I am no less than 15 years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . . Our knowledge of life is limited to death. . . . What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account?” When Hitler and the Nazis burned Im Westen Nichts Neues after they came to power in the 1930s, Remarque regarded the act as a badge of honor. Both book and film pick up the action set in August 1914, when the German Schlieffen Plan was succeeding installed in carrying the Kaiser’s armies through Belgium and deep into France. By early 1915, however, British and French resistance brought the advance to a standstill. The war of maneuver was over; now the perversely stultifying fight on the Western Front would be waged between opposing armies dug into trenches that stretched for hundreds of miles while sometimes lying only yards apart. The narrative is viewed through the eyes of a German infantryman. As opposed to the book’s impressionistic scattering of sketches, episodes, and flashbacks to the prewar days, Milestone’s adaptation rewrites the story into a chronological narrative, adding many sequences of actual combat. We see the protagonist, Paul (Lew Ayres), leave his school, slog through the trenches, endure the horrors of amputation and disease, enjoy a brief respite with some German peasant girls, return home on leave to a homeland that he neither recognizes nor understands, return to battle, and suffer a leg injury that places him set in the hands of surgeons all too eager to amputate and nuns blinded to the war by an insular faith. In a climactic scene not included happen the novel, while trapped put in a trench installed in “No-Man’s-Land,” Paul is shot dead while reaching up to touch a butterfly. If there is a villain here, it is the schoolmaster, Kantorek (Arnold Lucy), whose patriotic exhortations to his students conclude with the line, “Won’t you join up, comrades?” Happen a ranked scene which has been not found installed in the book—it was conceived by playwright Maxwell Anderson—Paul returns to his village after years of fighting. When he visits his old teacher, he is shocked to hear him delivering the same patriotic speech to the new students. Paul angrily turns on Kantorek and delivers a stern warning to him together with the students about the brutality of war. Proceed his study of the film, Andrew Kelly (Kelly, 2005) sums up the qualities that qualify it for inclusion beginning in the company of other great World War I films: “It brings together—indeed, helped establish—the classic themes of the antiwar film,

2. book, play and poem: the enemy as comrade, the brutality of militarism; the slaughter of trench warfare; the betrayal of a nation’s youth by old men revelling set in glory, the incompetence of the High Command; the suffering at home . . . the dead; and also the forgotten men who survived.”