Germans are right to be incensed by All Quiet on the Western Front: it paints them as the good guys
The Guardian
(...) Along with his co-writers, Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, Berger removes everything subtle in the book and replaces it with something absurdly bombastic, as befits a Prestigious, Important War Movie. He also omits an astonishing number of the book’s key episodes, and shoves in just as many new ones of his own. (...)
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Felix Kammerer, right, as Paul Bäumer in All Quiet on the Western Front. Photograph: Netflix/Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock.
[A]ll too often his All Quiet on the Western Front depicts the Germans as the good guys, while the French are cruel and spiteful villains. Remarque – who was denounced as “unpatriotic” by the Nazis – would have been appalled. (...)
In place of these sequences are countless new scenes featuring politicians and officers negotiating the armistice. (...) But the intransigent Foch won’t budge until Germany agrees to every one of France’s demands. (...) [B]y painting such a simplistic, one-sided picture of the meeting, Berger seems to be laying the blame for the rise of the Nazis squarely at Foch’s feet.
Meanwhile, on the frontline, the French are presented as alien monsters in terrifying tanks, whereas Paul and his buddies are underdogs who battle on against the odds. (...)
The most questionable of Berger’s inventions is to have Paul himself dying after being stabbed in the back by a French soldier. The director ought to be aware of the “stab-in-the-back myth”, which claimed that the German army was not defeated in the first world war, but was betrayed by Jews, socialists and the cowardly politicians who signed the armistice for their own selfish reasons. This conspiracy theory was popular in the 1920s, and was much favoured by Adolf Hitler. For a German film about the war’s last days to risk any evocation of that antisemitic myth with a literal backstabbing is irresponsible, to say the least. Being less generous, you could call it an unforgivable distortion of Remarque’s novel.
I doubt that Berger sees it quite like that. He may well have been too focused on what one German critic called Oscar-Geilheit, or “lust for an Oscar”, to notice the jingoistic interpretations his work could invite. (...)
Tags: #english #movie #books #remarque #erich_maria_remarque #baftas #oscars #war #war_movie #All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front #Oscar-Geilheit #stab-in-the-back_myth