![]() ![]() Hitler refused to believe Teutonic soldiers could be anything but a magnificent fighting force, a nationalistic historical rewrite that took hold amongst the battered German citizenry. As Hitler’s power grew, Remarque’s critically acclaimed novel (which would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931) became a proxy for Nazi rage over its portrayal of German infantrymen as dispirited and disillusioned. This “ stabbed in the back” theory was historical nonsense, but allowed workaday Germans to place blame elsewhere for the conflict that took an estimated 3 million lives, military and civilian, an easy sell that undermined the Weimar Republic.Īll Quiet on the Western Front may have been the first runaway international bestseller, but its utter lack of pro-German propaganda and honest, downbeat look at war made the book a Nazi target. Hitler, believing that treasonous Jewish-Marxist revolutionaries at home were to blame for Germany’s defeat in the Great War, proposed tearing up the Treaty of Versailles and ending war reparations to the Allies. His leading campaign message, to unite Germany and make it strong again, resonated with voters in the midst of the Great Depression. It was a stunning victory for Adolf Hitler that gave his party 107 seats in the Reichstag and made the Nazis the second-largest political party in Germany. A few weeks prior to the December screening, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party surprised the nation on election day, garnering 6.4 million votes, 18 percent of the total. Ironically it was this very humanity, and relentless political agnosticism, that made Goebbels see the All Quiet on the Western Front film as a threat to the Nazi ideology. Joseph Goebbels was the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. ![]() The humanity of All Quiet on the Western Front was captured in The New York Times review as, “a document of men who-however else there lives were disrupted-could endure war simply as war.” Apolitical in terms of policy and strategy, Remarque’s anti-war masterpiece tapped into the global sorrow following a conflict that led to more than 37 million casualties between 1914-18. Limbs are lost, horses are destroyed, starving soldiers root through garbage for food, the troops are ravaged by poison gas and artillery bombs, and few make it out alive. Baumer himself dies on a tranquil day shortly before the Armistice is signed. It’s a gritty pull-no-punches look at the horrors of war. Based on Remarque’s time as an infantryman, it’s the first-person account of Paul Baumer, who joins the cause with a group of his classmates. The film rights were snatched up by Universal Pictures for a record $40,000 and the motion picture went into production immediately.Īll Quiet on the Western Front is, as most American high school students know, the story of a company of volunteer German soldiers stationed behind the front lines in the last weeks of World War I. Abroad, All Quiet on the Western Front was a big hit as well, selling 600,000 copies in both Britain and France, and 200,000 in America. In Germany, the initial print run sold out on release day, and some 20,000 copies moved off the shelves in the first few weeks on its way to more than a million books sold by year’s end. A somewhat shocking turn of events, considering the movie was the highly anticipated adaptation of countryman Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the blockbuster novel that had transfixed the nation months earlier.įirst serialized in 1928 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung he, the book was published on January 31, 1929, and instantly became a literary juggernaut. Spewing anti-Semitic invective at the screen, they repeatedly shouted “Judenfilm!” as they tossed stink bombs from the balcony, threw sneezing powder in the air, and released white mice into the theater. But during the movie, a cadre of 150 Nazi Brownshirts, nearly all too young to have fought in World War I, were led into the theater by propagandist Joseph Goebbels. On December 5, 1930, just over 12 years after the end of World War I, German moviegoers flocked to Berlin’s Mozart Hall to see one of Hollywood’s latest films.
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