All Quiet on the Western Front

All sorts of unsettling days and dates are coming up as November begins: a mid-term election on which the President says that democracy itself will be on the ballot, the 84^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 104^th anniversary of the ceasefire that ended the First World War, and the 59^th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. I was having trouble organizing my feelings about all those dates at once, but then I saw a movie the other night that actually helped me do just that.

The made-for-Netflix movie, All Quiet on the Western Front,  is a German-language film made by Edward Berger based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque. I remember reading the book when I was still in college and the nation was in the throes of unrest relating to the Vietnam War—and finding the book both terrifying and satisfying at the same time. Remarque was a, well, remarkable author whose anti-war message comes through as loud and clear as it does precisely because he doesn’t preach his sermon at all and merely allows you to see the picture of war he draws with devastating clarity and precision. The anti-war message, in fact, was so profound that the Nazis damned him as a pacifist when they came to power and banished him from Germany, labelling him as a Jewish author despite the fact that he wasn’t Jewish at all—and then sensationally “discovering” that the German spelling of his last name, Remark, was merely the backwards spelling of his secret Jewish last name, Kramer. All that was fully bogus, yet the Nazis had good reason to fear him and his book: they, the Nazis, stood for a kind of bellicose barbarism that the world hadn’t ever seen before and Remarque’s book was an unflinching indictment of warfare as the most horrific of all man-made evils. Not at all a good fit!

The movie focuses on the experiences of a single German soldier, a young man named Paul Bäumer, and several of his school-friends as they enlist to fight in the First World War and are then sent to the trenches in France. I won’t give the plot away other than to say that the main action is set in the few weeks before the final armistice on November 11, 1918, and that the senseless brutality of a war fought over nothing at all—and that ended with neither side really accomplishing anything or gaining anything—comes through as loudly and clearly as I have ever experienced it. There are scenes in the movie that depict military camaraderie in a positive light too. But, for the large most part, the movie is about the struggle within the soul of this specific soldier, Paul, between the bestial and the human, between the savage and the civilized. It’s more than awful—and riveting—enough to see this play out in the soul of one specific soldier. But there were millions of soldiers in those trenches, each his own version of Paul. I can’t say I enjoyed the movie. (That would really be too much.) But I was very moved by it and I recommend it to you all very highly as a real pinnacle of movie making. I once thought no wartime movie scene could equal the opening of Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s depiction of the storming of Omaha Beach on D-Day, and I’m still not sure any movie ever will. But All Quiet on the Western Front comes as close as any movie I’ve seen since Saving Private Ryan came out almost twenty-five years ago in terms of suggesting just what it means to volunteer to fight for all the right, patriotic reasons…and then to end up descending to a level of barbarism you would never have considered yourself capable even of imagining, let alone actually attaining. The movie does not have a happy ending.

The thing about the First World War was that everybody acted correctly. Nations supported their allies. Commitments were honored. Promises were kept. There were no rogue states promoting military adventurism or crazy-pants dictators bent on world domination. It was far more subtle than any of that. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Within a few days, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia then declared war on the Austro-Hungarians. One by one the nations of Europe chose to honor their alliances and commitments, and so within just a few months Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Austria-Hungary were at war with France, Great Britain, Russia, and Serbia. The next spring, Italy joined the allies. Eventually, the United States was drawn into the war, which brought about its end in 1918. By the end of the fighting, almost ten million soldiers were dead as were also almost eight million civilians. Nothing at all was accomplished, other than by the final Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany—which treaty paved the way for the rise of Nazism a decade later. It would be challenging to answer the question of what all those young people died for other than with shrugged shoulders and a quietly mouthed “nothing.”

To prevent World War One, someone—someone of stature who was  respected by all—someone needed to stand up and, looking at the larger picture, say out loud that this was madness, that this descent into violence may have felt  reasonable and rational at first but was actually a ramped-up flight into true lunacy, a paroxysm of barbarism that led to thirty-one million individuals either being killed, wounded, or missing in action. There were voices for peace. But, in the end, the fear of being thought an unreliable ally—and the fear of dishonor such an accusation would inevitably bring in its wake—brought nation after nation into the war until the situation was so fraught with un-unravelable political entanglement and mutual military obligation that there simply was no way to avoid the conflict that then ensued for four long years and which cost the world tens of millions of lives.

I fear our nation is a few feet back from a similar crossroads now. If Moscow chooses to deploy tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and if NATO responds by declaring war on Russia, we will inevitably be part of that conflict. It will feel right to stand by our allies and it is right to remain loyal to commitments freely undertaken. But watching that one movie reminded me that it was precisely that same sense of allegiance to commitment that led to carnage on a level that the world at that point hadn’t ever seen. Will we—we the American people, we citizens of the world, we human beings—will we be able to produce leaders who can actually lead the world away from the brink of true disaster? Or will we sink into a pit of quasi-patriotic rhetoric that ends up making it impossible for anyone to see the horizon at all, let alone what lies just beyond it?

The First World War was unbelievable until it actually happened. So was Kristallnacht—even after all that anti-Semitic legislation the thought that a nation-wide pogrom could be launched against German Jewry without the world lifting a finger to respond other than with toothless condemnatory press statements would have been unimaginable until it actually happened. Lots of history consists of things no one saw coming, of events no one imagined even could occur, let alone would occur. That Camelot could close down in a hail of bullets on a beautiful fall day was also unthinkable up until the minute it actually happened. Is Vladimir Putin capable of plunging the world into nuclear war? I’d certainly like to think not. But many of the people in the corridors of power in such an eventuality are going to be the individuals elected to office next week. All citizens’ choices at the ballot box should be framed by that thought. More than ever, we need to be led by statesmen and women possessed of vision and courage, not by political hacks whose only true allegiance is to their own careers. Do I sound uncharacteristically shrill? Watch that movie, then let’s talk.