In December 1930, Berlin’s elegant Mozart Hall was packed for the second screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, the film of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel of life and death in the trenches of the First World War.
The book, published the previous year, was already a sensation, the first genuine international bestseller, with more than 1.5 million copies sold in Germany and another 600,000 in Britain and France. The Hollywood adaptation by Universal Pictures was the talk of Berlin.
The lights dimmed, the curtain rose, then Joseph Goebbels led a gang of Nazi Brownshirts into the auditorium, hurling stink bombs, throwing sneezing powder and, in an oddly whimsical act of hostility, releasing white mice. “Judenfilm!” they yelled, as the mob attacked the projectionists and began savagely beating audience members they perceived to be Jewish.
Goebbels was ecstatic, writing in his diary: “Within ten minutes, the cinema resembles a madhouse. The police are powerless. The embittered crowd takes out its anger on the Jews. The box office outside is under siege. Window panes are broken. Thousands of people enjoy the spectacle. The screening is abandoned, as is the next one. We have won.”
He was right, in the short term. The Supreme Board of Censors in Germany caved in to Nazi intimidation and, under the pretense of restoring public order, All Quiet on the Western Front was banned.
Joseph Goebbels led a gang of Nazi Brownshirts into the auditorium, hurling stink bombs, throwing sneezing powder and, in an oddly whimsical act of hostility, releasing white mice.
Remarque’s slim 200-page book is the greatest anti-war novel of all time. Apolitical, harrowing and deeply humane, it permanently changed the way war was perceived by portraying the reality of conflict as never before: the mental and physical trauma, the pointless butchery, the utter disconnection from civilian life experienced by soldiers returning from the front.
Remarque became the voice of a generation that had been, in his words, “destroyed by war, even though it might have escaped its shells”. The latest film version, directed by Edward Berger, leads the field in this year’s Bafta film awards, with 14 nominations. The 1930 movie won Oscars for best director (Lewis Milestone) and best production. Some 40 million copies have been sold since the novel was first published. The phrase itself has entered popular parlance.
But perhaps the greatest and least celebrated achievement of All Quiet on the Western Front is to have been the book most violently hated by the Nazis. The human vulnerability depicted by Remarque was diametrically opposed to the heroic militarism Hitler espoused. He wanted to see glorious modern Teutonic knights, not men shivering with fear, half-starved in freezing, muddy ditches. Hitler had survived the trenches but he would not tolerate seeing that reality depicted in fiction or on screen.
From a Nazi standpoint the book was defeatist and unpatriotic, part of a Jewish-led campaign to make Germany appear weak. The book’s absence of nationalist propaganda was itself a threat to Nazi ideology, another “stab in the back”: the author was accused of exaggerating the horrors of war to further his pacifist agenda.
Remarque was not Jewish but Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, was a German Jewish émigré. Just before the premiere, Remarque was approached by one of Goebbels’s thugs and instructed to claim that the film rights had been sold without his consent to a Jewish producer: an obvious hint that he would be protected in exchange for allowing the Nazis to spread the lie that he had been swindled by Jews. Remarque declined.
Perhaps the greatest and least celebrated achievement of All Quiet on the Western Front is to have been the book most violently hated by the Nazis.
In May 1933, four months after the Nazis came to power, the book burning began. On Berlin’s Bebelplatz, some 25,000 works of 150 “degenerate” authors were hurled onto flaming pyres to “cleanse the German spirit”, as Goebbels, now propaganda minister, put it. All Quiet was among the first to be burned, condemned as “a literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War”. The book was purged from libraries; it became illegal to sell or own a copy.
A marked man, Remarque had already headed into exile, first to Switzerland then the US. The Nazis condemned him as a cowardly traitor and revoked his German citizenship. They insisted a man who had changed his name from Remark to the Frenchified Remarque could not be truly German (he was partly French by heritage). It was falsely claimed he had never seen active service, despite the shrapnel wounds in his leg, arm and neck.
Denied the opportunity to persecute the writer in person, the Nazis nonetheless extracted their revenge. In 1943, the Gestapo arrested Remarque’s younger sister, Elfriede Scholz, a dressmaker who had remained in Dresden with her husband and children. She had remarked to a customer that Germany was losing the war. Branded a “subversive propagandist for our enemies”, Elfriede was tried by the Nazi People’s Court and charged with “undermining morale”.
Roland Freisler, the court president, made no attempt to disguise that the trial was a sham and Elfriede a scapegoat. “Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach,” he declared. “You, however, will not escape us.” She was guillotined at Plötzensee prison on December 16, 1943.
Remarque did not discover what had happened to his sister until a year after the war was over. Distraught, he wondered if he had been sufficiently outspoken in his opposition to the Nazis. In truth, his book had played a vital part in the resistance to Hitler, defying the Nazi glorification of war — an enduring testament to humanity’s endurance amid the carnage. Goebbels did not win the battle over this book. Standing up to Nazi cultural philistinism demanded quite as much courage as battlefield bravery.
Elfriede was one martyr to that cause, as was the exiled Remarque. And there were others. Hanns Brodnitz was the Jewish manager of the Mozart Hall who dared to screen All Quiet on the Western Front. In 1944, he was murdered in Auschwitz.
All Quiet on the Western Front is in theaters now
Ben Macintyre is a writer at large for The Times of London and the best-selling author of The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work