The movie "No War on the Western Front", adapted from the German novel of the same name, was launched on the Netflix streaming media platform on October 28. From the official publication of the novel by German writer Erich Maria Remarque in 1929, it took the Germans nearly a century to bring the German version of the film to the screen.
The year after the novel's publication, Hollywood adapted it into a film of the same name and won the third Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director, calling it "one of the best anti-war films of all time." Despite the film's enthusiastic reception in the industry, with the rise to power of Hitler's Nazi Party, anti-Semitism rhetoric became rampant in Germany, and critical narratives against World War I were not welcome at all. The literary work, as well as the film adaptation, fell victim to Nazi censorship, the novelist Remarque was forced into exile in Switzerland, and the film was banned in Germany for 20 years.
In 1979, Hollywood director Delbert Mann adapted the novel into a TV movie of the same name, which received multiple nominations at the Emmy Awards.
2022 edition of "No War on the Western Front" poster.
Until a few years ago, German filmmakers set up a team, determined to look at the war from the perspective of the Germans, capture the horrors of war, do not create heroes, do not excuse war crimes, and present the first German version of "No War on the Western Front" to the audience. After the film was released, it gained a good reputation, and some foreign media said: "The best war film after "1917". The current Douban score is 8.7 points, only 0.2 points lower than the classic version of 1930. The film has been confirmed to represent Germany in the 95th Academy Award for Best International Film in 2023.
【Original】
Universal turned the bestseller into a movie for $1.2 million that year
In 1928, Erich Maria Remarque began serializing the novel "No War on the Western Front" set on the Western Front of World War I in the German newspaper Fox Zeitung. When the novel was serialized in newspapers, newspaper sales tripled. The author, Remarque, was born into a poor German family, he experienced World War I, and was conscripted into the army at the age of 18 when he was studying at the elementary normal school, and was wounded many times, and he personally felt the cruelty and inhumanity of war. After the war, he worked a lot as a primary school teacher, stonemason, organist, sports journalist, etc., and spent his spare time writing. From the second half of 1927, he began to conceive the novel "No War on the Western Front", which was brewing after World War I, which is set on the Western Front in World War I, and tells the story of the protagonist Paul Boymer and his classmates who are incited by the principal and his chauvinism and plunge into the war with fanatical "patriotic fervor". During the four years of war, he witnessed the terrible casualties and the devastation of the human body and soul of the war, and witnessed the inhumanity of war. The initial "patriotic fervor" was gone, leaving only physical pain and doubts about German militarism and the purpose of entering the war.
Writer Erich Maria Remarque.
In 1929, the novel "No War on the Western Front" was officially published in Germany and quickly sold more than 1.2 million copies in Germany, which was quickly translated into English and caused a sensation in other countries, with a total circulation of about 5 million copies. At this time, there was still a year before the novel was brought to the screen, and the process was indispensable for a key figure - Carl Lemler.
Born in Raunheim, Germany, Lemmler immigrated to the United States at the age of 17 and quickly established his kingdom in the burgeoning film industry – establishing Universal Pictures in 1912, and three years later defeating rival Edison to open the world's first Universal Studios outside Los Angeles.
He lived the American dream while still maintaining strong ties to his "homeland," Germany. After World War I, he delivered tons of food and supplies to war-torn Germany. In the 2020s, he also established a series of production companies in Germany and hired many of his relatives as operational staff.
In 1929, when Lemmler saw the international sales of the novel "No War on the Western Front", he saw not only a film project with the opportunity to make money, but also wanted to send a message of peace to the world through film. To this end, he went to Karlsbad, a spa resort in Czechoslovakia, to visit the original author Remarque to discuss the film adaptation rights of the novel, and promised that Universal Pictures would definitely be loyal to the anti-war sentiment in the novel, and there would be no exciting battlefield glory, let alone join a sad love story.
In the end, Universal Pictures obtained the rights to the film adaptation, investing $1.2 million, a figure that belonged to first-line productions at the time. 10 years later, the luxury masterpiece "Gone with the Wind" invested less than $4 million. Producer Lemmler handed over the production rights to the project to his 21-year-old son, Carl Lemmler Jr. America's competitors are doubting that the fledgling young man is up to the task, while waiting to see how the "good show", a big-budget war film that does not set American soldiers, will end.
Stills from the 1930 version of "No War on the Western Front". Brutal trench scene.
Russian-American director Lewis Myersstone directed the project. As a veteran of the U.S. Army's signals corps, he prioritized war authenticity during the preparation of the film, importing $27,000 worth of authentic German field equipment — uniforms, gas masks, trenching tools. The war scenes were filmed on a farm in Irvine, California, USA, where the camp covers about 20 square kilometers and 1,000 extras and crews sleep out in tents like soldiers. The crew also dug a 1.6-kilometer-long trench and built a 0.3-kilometer-long concrete pavement for tracking filming.
In order to allow the audience to feel like they are in a terrifying no-man's land, the director carefully arranged the relatively fresh elements of the film grammar at that time - sound (when the film was filmed, the sound film was just over two years old). Spectators were bombarded with deafening explosions, escalating shell whistles and machine-gun strafing. In particular, influenced by the montage of Soviet cinema of the time, the war shots in the film are mobile and more expressive.
Stills from the 1930 version of "No War on the Western Front". The end of the classic.
"No War on the Western Front" has a classic ending: the male protagonist Paul reaches out from the trench to touch a butterfly, a gun in the opposite trench is quietly raised, and after a gunshot, only a close-up of one hand is left in the camera. The inspiration for this famous ending was thought of by director and cinematographer Carl Freud while driving in a heavy rain. Freud watched the wiper mechanically swing back and forth and kept muttering: "Butterfly, butterfly."
【Situation】
The Nazis wanted to erase "No War on the Western Front" from German memory
On April 21, 1930, "No War on the Western Front" premiered at the 1,500-seat Cassie Theater in Los Angeles, followed by a week in New York, followed by a full release. At the end of the show, the audience did not applaud, they just sat in a daze for a while, and then silently walked out of the theater.
Unlike the calmness of the audience, the media's praise for the film was a little more direct, "the best war movie ever", "no one should miss it", "war epic movie", "this is the most convincing argument against the war of terror so far". Even Louis B. Meyer, founder of rival MGM, sent a telegram to Carl Lemler congratulating the film for "continuing the essence of the original, depicting the hopelessness of war and the eternal brotherhood of mankind."
At the 1931 Oscars, "No War on the Western Front" convincingly won two awards: Best Picture and Best Director. Outside of Hollywood, there is serious discussion of awarding Carl Lemmler the Nobel Peace Prize.
"No War on the Western Front" has some gory and vulgar passages, but it hardly encounters censorship in the United States. The Hays Code, enacted in 1930, had little effect at the beginning, and its real power over film censorship began in 1934. "No War on the Western Front" can be regarded as escaping.
However, the film's release in Germany was not so smooth. In order to prevent trouble, Lemmler invited the German prosecutor general in San Francisco at the time to take a plane to Universal Studios to watch the film, and the other party did not like it too much after watching it. Universal Pictures brought in a German journalist from New York, combined the opinions of the two, and cut some clips specifically for the German special version, but still did not pass the review of the German Supreme Film Censorship Board, and Universal Pictures appealed to officially approve the release of the film in Germany on November 24, 1930.
On December 4, 1930, "No War on the Western Front" premiered at the Mozart Theater in Berlin, Germany, and the German audience was emotional after watching it, but everything went well.
Stills from the 1930 version of "No War on the Western Front". The film is full of strong anti-war ideas.
However, when it came to screening on the second day, the situation changed. Joseph Goebbels, the mouthpiece of the Nazis at the time (later appointed Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany and Chancellor of Nazi Germany), received news of an agent attending the premiere and dispatched a large number of German Nazis into the Mozart Theater. When the film showed the German army panicking during the artillery attack, the Nazis in the theater began to prevent the film from being shown as if they had received a code, and Joseph Goebbels, a Nazi propagandist, stood in the front row of the Mozart Theater and began to shout at the screen: "Jews get out", "Jewish film", "an obscene film made in the United States".
Behind Goebbels, dozens of thugs in brown shirts also began to carry out ugly acts - they released guinea pigs and set off stench bombs. The women screamed and stood in their seats, spectators rushed to the exit, and several sponsors who were considered Jewish were beaten. The lights in the theater came on, the people in the theater left, and the screening was forced to stop.
Hans Brodnitz, the Jewish manager of the Mozart Theater, vividly recounted this past in his posthumous memoir, Intimate Cinema: Forgotten Biography (2005). He was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.
Over the next six days, Goebbels continued to occupy the Mozart Theater, with hundreds of brownshirts marching in front of the theater, demanding a ban on the screening of No War on the Western Front and threatening to burn copies of the film.
Shocked, Lemmler sent a 1,000-word German telegram from Hollywood and published it in the German media. He considers the film the culmination of his 25 years in the film industry, "I am surprised that No War on the Western Front is threatened by so much hostility and misunderstanding, and that the film is based on goodwill towards the German people, believing that the conscience of the German people will not allow this film to be treated unfairly."
However, the trembling officials of the Weimar Republic capitulated, banning the film on the grounds of "damaging Germany's reputation."
For his part, Lemmler realized that the Germany he was born was no longer his homeland, and that he had become Hollywood's most ardent anti-Nazis. For nearly 10 years, until his death in 1939, he worked tirelessly to get Jews and others threatened out of Germany — signing affidavits, raising money, arranging jobs for refugees.
In 1933, Hitler was promoted to head of Germany, and Goebbels was appointed Minister of Propaganda for Nazi Germany. Their totalitarian control of the media began, determined to erase traces of No War on the Western Front from German memory. On May 10, 1933, there was the infamous book burning incident, including "No War on the Western Front". Later, the movie "No War on the Western Front" was also officially banned, and the Nazis considered the novel and film "No War on the Western Front" to be "a betrayal of German soldiers in the world war". It was not until March 1952 that the film was released again in Germany.
【New work】
Shoot from a German perspective and give a new perspective on the war
The new version of the film "No War on the Western Front" has been prepared for several years, and there have been several changes of directors in between. A few years ago, when producer Mart Grunat approached director Edward Berg and told him that he wanted to adapt Remarque's classic novel into a movie, Berg felt that the opportunity must not be missed.
No War on the Western Front, Ballantine Books, 1987.
"It's such an important book, with such a unique perspective on the First World War," says Berg, "and it's one of the best-selling German-language novels of all time for a reason." Berg knows what it means to do it, and it will be the first time No War on the Western Front has been adapted into a German film.
Of course, the fact that the novel will be made into a German-language film for the first time is not the most important reason why director Berg did it.
Berg has seen many British and American war films before, and the soldiers in these war films, traumatized on the battlefield, return home to be regarded as heroes, and the whole society will be proud of them. They inevitably bring a sense of victor and heroism. But in Germany, on the contrary, in the German national spirit, war brings only guilt, shame, fear, destruction.
A war film set in World War I, Hollywood just made a "1917" two years ago, directed by Sam Mendes from the United Kingdom, the film unfolds from the perspective of two British soldiers, using a "one-shot to the end" approach to follow them, cross the front line, and save 1600 British soldiers.
Berg said "1917" was shot a bit like an adventure movie, and British directors could do that. But as a German director, Berg wanted to make a war film from a German perspective, and as depicted in the original, there was no heroism or grand adventure in the war. Both the Germans and the French died in the trenches in the same terrible way. Capturing the horrors of war and giving it a non-heroic perspective is one of the main goals of director Berg's adaptation of No War on the Western Front.
"I don't want people to think: Oh, look at those poor soldiers. In Germany, perhaps unlike other countries, we are more critical of our history. We rightly view our history with a critical eye. I would be very sad if any audience in any country thinks that this film is justifying the actions of German soldiers during the war." Berg said.
The narrative perspective of the new version of "No War on the Western Front" is placed on the character of German recruit Paul, allowing the audience to truly feel what this young man experienced on the battlefield.
The above picture below is a still from the 1930 version and the new version of "No War on the Western Front". Paul stabbed French soldiers in the trenches.
Before Paul's appearance, the director set up several scenes. On the battlefield, a young soldier named Heinrich summoned up his courage, threw his used rifle aside, and heroically charged at the enemy with a shovel. After this scene, the soldiers began to clean up the corpses on the battlefield, and the uniforms on their bodies were stripped off, packed and shipped, washed, and repaired.
Immediately after, Paul appeared, eagerly hoping to go to the front with several classmates, and even forged his parents' handwriting to sign a letter of intent to join the army. Soon they were assigned uniforms, and Paul's uniform still had a label with Heinrich's name on it.
Stills from the new version of "No War on the Western Front". Tags bearing the names of dead warriors such as Heinrich were thrown on the icy ground.
Director Berg said that the film visually establishes the theme of war as machines at the beginning, and the uniforms of soldiers piled on trucks full of blood and dirt are washed on the assembly line, and the machines are constantly running, transporting groups of young people to the battlefield non-stop.
【Production】
From photography to composition, they create an atmosphere of suppressed fear
Since Universal Pictures first put "No War on the Western Front" on the screen in 1930, more than 90 years ago, movies have made a qualitative leap in photography, special effects and other technologies. In addition to relying on scripts and performances, the technical aspect also realizes the director's creative intention to a large extent.
Berg shot the film in the Czech Republic, where set designers built German and French trenches, no man's land in the middle, and battlefields covered with barbed wire, craters, carcasses, and animal carcasses.
The location of the new version of "No War on the Western Front".
Working with cinematographer James Fred and composer Volker Batelman, Berg sought to create an atmosphere that reflected the fear and disorientation of the young protagonist. "Everything in this film is about expressing Paul's feelings, expressing his heart. The music, the set design, and especially the camera position always try to give the viewer an immersive feeling." Berg said.
In particular, the electronic synthesizer music created by composer Batellman in the film pops out of the picture from time to time, with a sense of dissonance and abruptness, but it creates a very depressing and thrilling atmosphere for the audience.
The original novel "No War on the Western Front" is widely known in Germany, and for the actor of the role of the actor Paul, director Berg initially hoped to find a new person who has not yet been discovered, and will not let the audience have preconceived notions about this character. The actor who plays Paul in the film, Felix Camiller, is an Austrian who works as an ensemble actor at the Berg Theater in Austria.
Stills from the new version of "No War on the Western Front". Paul went from the excitement and fervor of his first enlistment to the numb despair of the latter part of the war.
Coincidentally, the wife of the filmmaker, who also worked there, sent the director a photo of Felix Camiller. In the director's opinion, the young actor has an old-school but pure face, as well as the acting skills necessary for this demanding role. At that time, the crew found more than 500 young actors, interviewed for several months, and invited Felix Camiller back again and again. Felix Camiller impressed the director with his excellent performance at the first audition and constantly surpassed himself and became more and more adapted to the role of Paul.
After experiencing such a tragic theme as "No War on the Western Front", director Berg and producer Mart Grunat are preparing a remake of a relatively light-hearted work - "The Adventurer" starring Alain Delon in 1967. "I needed to get No War on the Western Front out of my mind and create something new and interesting." Director Berg said.
Beijing News reporter Teng Chao
Editor Huang Jialing
Proofreader Wu Xingfa