In the midst of the conflict in Ukraine and while Germany sends Leopard tanks to the war, expanding and consolidating European involvement, the Hollywood Academy ranks ‘All Quiet Front’, a new adaptation of the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, among the great Oscar candidates – served by Netflix and this time billed for the first time in Germany-, of which It was perhaps the most influential novel, due to its popularity, of the period after the First World War. A book that then stood up against the prevailing warmongering, converted from its appearance in 1928 into an instant and unprecedented international success. Now ‘No news…’, the novel, which continues to hold its own in bookstores almost 100 years later, once again launches its pacifist message at a time when Europe seems to need to reflect on it.
If the Great War had not broken out, Erich Maria Remark, German of Franco-Catholic descent, he might have ended up as an obscure schoolteacher. But he was called up in 1916. Legend has it that he participated in the first line of fire and that he even received an iron cross, a somewhat exaggerated version that the author never took it upon himself to deny. The truth is that he was wounded in the rear by an artillery shell and barely saw direct action. He was not cannon fodder but he was an exceptional witness. His long stay in the infirmary allowed her to see first-hand the experiences of his fellow soldiers, victims of that lethal technology that sank chemical weapons and the use of artillery and modern machine guns in the muddy trenches. That world war, which years later would be numbered as the first, deeply penetrated the public imagination. War ceased to be, perhaps for the first time, a game between gentlemen.
After graduating, Remarque spent a decade working for sports newspapers and selling tombstones, something that after the war massacre was quite a lucrative business. And meanwhile he was writing a novel about the experiences of recruit Paul Bäumer, an innocent boy, just out of adolescence, who after dreaming of participating in a heroic deed gradually realizes the horror and meaninglessness of combat. The reader accompanies him with a heavy heart.
too much staff
“One day I started writing. I had the material and I just wanted to order. But for a long time I left what I had written lying in a drawer. The book seemed too personal to me, ”he wrote stunned, as if apologizing, before the amazing reception of the book. It was an instant publishing success, although Billy Wilder, then living in Berlin, was not on much notice when he said: “This is 1928. Who wants to read a novel about the Great War?
Only the first three months sold half a million copies in Germany, the first of the 20 million that came to be billed worldwide. It was quickly translated into 30 languages. Hollywood launched itself to acquire the rights and in 1930 Lewis Milestone made a poignant and poetic version that swept the Oscars. The image of the hands cut off and trapped in a wire fence is still hard to forget today. In Spain the first translation is instantaneous, from 1929, and today it can be found on the Edhasa and Navona stamps.
hated by the nazis
That work acted as a catalyst for German society. A kind of password to define ideologies, although Remarque, careful, used to insist on defining himself as apolitical. For the ascending nationalism, that revulsion against the war that made battles miserable and did not portray the French as anonymous enemies – today we would say that zombifying them -, that novel was anathema. Nazism placed the author on the blacklist.
During the premiere of the American film in Berlin, in 1930 Goebbels sent his stormtroopers to throw stink bombs and mice into the audience, in addition to choreographing various demonstrations against the “unpatriotism” of the author. They also succeeded in having the novel removed from all school libraries in Prussia. Today it is required reading in German schools. It is not surprising that, when they came to power, ‘All Quiet on the Front’ was one of the books that fueled the bonfires in 1933.
A few months earlier, Remarque had decided to flee to Switzerland and later to the United States, where he was welcomed with open arms. The film industry was ready to adapt a good part of the novels that he continued to publish, among them ‘Three Comrades,’ on whose script Scott Fitzgerald worked in the darkest and most painful years of his time in Hollywood-Babylon.
‘playboy’ depressing
Introverted and prone to depression, the German, who became a millionaire overnight and was in demand at all the saraos of the moment, was then reincarnated as a kind of ‘playboy’ to the delight of the film industry gossip that recounted , with the attention that today is given to Shakira and Piqué, their love adventures with divas like Hedy Lamarr, Dolores del Río and, above all, with Marlene Dietrichwith whom he had a complicated relationship between 1937 and 1940 that gave rise to a correspondence, revealed and published in 2003. In them, the fiery prose of Remarque –a very passionate guy- with which he tried to break the ice of the actress.
The author wrote other novels such as ‘Time to love, time to die’, which gave rise to the fiery melodrama of Douglas Sirk. And he ended up hiding his aloofness in Switzerland, in the company of his second wife, actress Paulette Goddard. Upon his death in 1970, some critics denied his literary value, what Stefan Zweig left written on the ‘All Quiet Front’ band as a claim: “A perfect work of art and an indisputable truth at the same time”. Perhaps this incombustible novel can today be considered “gimmicky”, “outdated” and a point of kitsch to be claimed as “perfect”, but it cannot be denied that it has managed to reflect the most humane and painful face of a war. Of any war.