All Quiet On The Western Front Essay

3487 Words14 Pages
The classic anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), directed by Lewis Milestone, has been restored by the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Centre. Based on the best-selling novel by Erich Maria Remarque, the book and film tell the story of a group of German students who volunteer to fight in the 1914-18 War. It is not a story of heroes, but of ordinary young men trapped in a terrestrial hell; a bitter critique of war that resonates as powerfully today as it did before the next ‘war to end all wars’. All Quiet on the Western Front was not the only film inspired by the First World War. One of the most famous, Abel Gance’s J’accuse (whose title echoes the notorious Dreyfus affair of 1894) appeared in 1919. It was made near the end of the war with the assistance of the French army. Gance was influenced by his own front-line experiences as an official cinematographer and the deaths of his many friends in combat. The film includes a…show more content…
C. Sherriff (1928), Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington (1929), All Quiet on the Western Front by E. M. Remarque (1929), Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1930), and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon (1930). Critical views about war held during the 1920s by a minority were becoming the accepted orthodox opinion of the new decade – at least for a while. In Germany, before publication, Remarque’s book was serialised in the newspaper Vossiche Zeitung (every issue was sold out) and after publication sold 999,000 copies. It was the subject of more than 200 articles and essays and a pamphlet examining arguments for and against the book. But times were changing. The Nazi Party saw the book as an affront to the German people. In 1930 the Minister for Education (a Nazi) banned the book from schools and on 10 May 1933 it went on the book-burning bonfire in Berlin. Remarque’s objective was made clear in a letter of
Open Document