
Only the dead have seen the end of war - Jennifer Coolidge
(Im Westen nichts Neues)
dir: Edward Berger
2022
It’s not hard to make movies about World War I. It’s hard to make heroic, triumphant movies about World War I. At least, I feel like creative people with brains and working hearts, with any grasp of history or decency shy away from it, based entirely on the films that I’ve seen based on that terrible, stupid war (all wars are terrible, obviously).
The book was written by someone who fought on the German side during the war, survived, and then wrote a book about how terrible fighting in the war was, how senseless, how easily and cheaply lives could end for no benefit or purpose, how much it was the opposite of the patriotic adventure the boys that went off to war thought it would be.
Maybe we can say with some assurance that the writer Erich Maria Remarque hoped his message of the pointlessness of war would prevent further wars in or by Germany. Of course it was one of the first books banned by the Nazis when they came to power.
And then World War II said to World War I: Hold my Oktoberfest stein of beer…
It’s not an uncommon kind of story, being that it doesn’t take much to convince us that War is Hell. But decades of American movies, from a nation that has a very different relationship to the outcomes of global conflicts, have been trying to convince us that War is Hell, But the US of A Still Kicks ASS!!! That kind of mentality, maybe mitigated a bit by war films that came out of the Viet Nam and Iraq Wars which at least have some ambiguity, still predominates and still works with audiences (as Exhibit A, I present to you the staggering success of Top Gun: Maverick).
But this is a German film. Germany still wrestles with its past, with what it did in the last century, as it should and always must in order to prevent what happened happening again. So if this film has a point, it’s that war has no point, and should be avoided at almost all costs.
Tell that to the Russian scum brutalising Ukraine, but I digress.
As the film opens, we see a den of foxes, forest trees frozen in winter, a natural world represented that doesn’t care about our human intentions or rationales.
And then the carnage starts. Ill-prepared boys are yelled at to clamber out of the trenches and to run towards the bullets being fired at them.
And they all die – but the story doesn’t end there. We see their bodies collected and disrobed. We see the clothes bundled, transported, washed, and repaired by legions of sewers at sewing machines. The uniforms are made ready again, without the tags of the last owners being removed yet, for their next wearers, for the next men who will die in them.
Did I say men? A group of boys, still in school, talk about enlisting, of forging parental permission slips, and going off to fight for the Kaiser and the Fatherland! The principal of their own school urges them to take part, with a tone and cadence in speech that sounds disturbingly familiar, and like from twenty years in the future.
And it works, because Paul (Felix Kammerer) and his friends go from school to the front lines in short order, wearing the clothes of dead men, with many of them dying almost immediately, in what we assume is a cycle that will keep spinning, ever downwards, into the machinery of war, for years to come.
The system works! The speed with which the boys go from wide-eyed innocents to “oh god, what have we done?’, even if they survive, is breathtaking. Most of this is conveyed by two things: the camera tightly focusing on Paul’s wide, guileless blue eyes, and the state of his face, which is often covered in mud, blood, ashes, and many combinations thereof.
Those eyes…that drawn face…the poor kid.
At least Paul gets to meet Kat (Albrecht Schuch), an older soldier who gives him and some of the other green recruits enough skills to keep them alive a little longer before some stupid action or oversight gets them killed. It’s handy, because when most of the people around Paul are dead, at least he has Kat to hang out with, and steal geese with.
The visuals of this life in the trenches is rendered in all its awful detail, or at least to a level of detail we have long come to expect. Lots of mud? Check. A sickening amount of rats? Check. Rotting bits of people everywhere? Check. Death potentially coming from anywhere at any time, and deaths not mattering whether someone is lucky, unlucky, brave or cowardly? Check.
This is what we have come to expect, but it is no less bracing, or horrifying to watch in all its (absence) of glory.
After this first chapter, the film jumps to the closing stages of the war. That’s a bit jarring. I mean, I didn’t want the characters or the actors to endure years of this misery, but jumping to the end seems…churlish.
It’s literally the last days of the war. What a relief; we should feel relief, the soldiers should feel relief, everyone should be glad that this insanity that was killing, at some stages, 40,000 German soldiers a week, would soon end.
Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), along with some other diplomats, is dispatched by the Imperial German side to sue for peace with the French. He doesn’t seem happy about it, but he doesn’t want the war to continue for a second longer that it “has” to. The French basically don’t give a fuck about whatever Germany’s requests or requirements might be to get them to surrender, because they’ve lost already. But the pig in charge of the German forces, in this particular bit of France relevant to us, being General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow) doesn’t agree.
He doesn’t care how many people have died, are dying, will die. Why would he care? These soldiers aren’t real to him, only Germany, or Prussia, or whatever the fuck this part of the ailing empire was called when Gavrilo Princip managed to shoot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the neck and his poor wife, matters. On an otherwise pleasant day, back in 1914.
The General wants to go out on a high. Even when you’re shamefully wallowing in ignominy and defeat, and it’s your own fault, you’ve got to get what you can.
Which is why this fuckhead orders an attack, an advance, just minutes before the armistice is meant to kick in.
It’s enough to make you shake your head in disgust, and think “this war stuff, it’s less than goodl!”
It is not unusual for war films to be utterly devastating, for most of their running time, but because they’re conscious of the fact (the filmmakers) that even a film about something unrelentingly bleak needs to have moments of levity to let the audience breath, to give the characters something to do other than fight or die, or be tormented by their poor life choices, this film has them too.
And, yes, Paul has wonderful friends in the trenches and on the battlefield, and they look after each other, they do stuff to make each other laugh, they look out for each other as best they can, they even literally feed each other (through risking the wrath of farmers by stealing their produce), and they try to protect each other as best they can.
And none of it matters.
This flick isn’t about the bonds of brotherhood or how sweet it is to die for your country. It’s about war. It kills millions. The survivors envy the dead. Soldiers die inside well before the final blow. And in the end they welcome death, because there is no way for them to live.
This might sound beyond nihilistic, but I would argue that the film, like the book, argues the opposite: that nothing justifies war; that the loss of life means all of humanity loses.
It’s predicated on the hope that you can only convince people of how awful wars are when you depict them accurately, without patriotic adornment, without syrupy narratives that justify themselves (like the mawkish Saving Private Matt Damon, where it’s okay if stacks of nameless jerks die so that 1 Matt Damon may live).
I see daily footage from Ukraine, and the awful, awful stuff happening there, I look at all these atrocities committed since the Great War, and I wonder why anyone can ever think wars are a good idea, even slightly better than average, and I just don’t get why it keeps happening. It’s almost like hoping books and movies can change people’s minds is a foolish endeavour, but what else can we do?
It’s a beautifully shot film, with solid performances, with a discordant, abrasive soundtrack that works well to remind us of the grinding gears of the machinery of war. And it doesn’t fail in its mission of begging for peace by having it both ways, by taking the machismo and heroism of war out entirely.
It’s still a cry in vain, over a century later, to find a better way to live together on this planet.
Hopefully someone might hear it, one day?
8 times all deaths are in vain out of 10
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“You have to be brave now. For those who didn’t make it. For us all” – yeah, nah - All Quiet on the Western Front
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