what is happening and acknowledging that the two of them could have
been brothers. The moment is emblematic of the whole movie.
All Quiet on the Western Front was closely based on a bestselling
novel published in 1929 by the German novelist Erich Maria
Remarque. It quickly sold over a million copies, including 600,000 in
Great Britain and 200,000 in the United States. One might have sup-
posed that it would have been as well-received in Germany, the home-
land of its author, but this was scarcely the case. While its message of
war’s futility resonated among the victorious powers, it enraged
the rising Nazi Party, which polled 6.4 million votes—18 percent of the
total—in parliamentary elections held a few weeks before the film’s
premiere in December 1930. The victory made the Nazis the second-
largest political party in Germany. Both novel and film f lew in the face
of Nazi ideology, which insisted upon a heroic German army stabbed in
the back by Jews and Communists and that celebrated violent struggle
as a core value.
It wouldn’t be long before the Nazis threw 25,000 copies of the novel
into bonfires and raided movie houses that showed the film, led in one
case by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Shouting “Judenfilm!,”
Brownshirts threw sneezing powder into the air, hurled stink bombs
from balconies, and released mice into theaters. They even attacked
filmgoers who, in the Nazis’ frenzied appraisal, appeared to look
Jewish. In 1933, shortly after Hitler took power, Remarque left his
homeland in fear for his life, eventually becoming a naturalized U.S.
citizen. Ten years later his younger sister Elfriede was seized by the
Gestapo for allegedly making antiwar statements, tried in a People’s
Bäumer spends a sleepless
night hearing a dying
soldier gasp for breath.
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5Court, and harangued by the judge: “Your
brother is unfortunately beyond our reach—
you, however, will not escape us.” She was
beheaded in December 1943.
The contrast between the reaction to the
film by the victors and vanquished could not
have been more stark—and might have served
as a warning that the Nazis had very different
ideas about its meaning. +