Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet On the Western Front).

 

He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

The last two paragraphs of All Quiet On The Western Front. 

I've never reviewed All Quiet on the Western Front, even though I'd long ago seen the prior two versions.  I just saw the newest, German made, production of the book, which in Germany was released under the novel's German title, Im Westen nichts Neues, which literally translates as "in the West nothing new".*

All Quiet On The Western Front has a reputation as being the greatest anti-war novel ever written.  I'm sorry to say that I haven't actually read it, which I'll have to do.  Indeed, the recent German made version of the novel sort of compels me to do so.

The novel was first adapted to film in 1930 in an American version, which is a great film in its own right.

It was later adopted to a television in 1979, in another version that is very well regarded.  In 2022 this German version was released and shown on Netflix.  My original intent was to review just that version, but you really can't.  You have to review all three.

The best of the three is frankly the first one, although it does suffer from being a film that, due to cinematography, and due to pacing, hasn't aged as well as it should have.  It's hard not to watch the 1930 version and not, at least at first, appreciate that you are watching an old film.  

Still, this version sets the story at well, and perhaps with more than a degree of unintended irony in that the film came before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1932, and therefore the early scene of enthusiastic school boys being eager for the war were ominous, retrospectively.  It's a gritty, good protrayal.

The 1979 television version is good as well, but frankly I just couldn't quite get around Richard Thomas in the role of the main protagonist, Paul Bäumer.  Lew Ayres was better in that role.  For that matter, Ernest Borgnine, who almost always turned in a good performance, did in the 1979 version as well, but he's just way too old for the German NCO Stanislaus Katczinsky he portrays.  For that matter, Louis Robert Wolheim really was as well, at age 50, but he carries the role off better, even though he was within a year of his own death at the time.

Anyhow, Thomas was so whiny, in a way, in The Waltons that I just can't get around that in this film, which really isn't his fault.  I just can't see him going from a green, naive recruit to a hardened combat veteran.

Which takes us to the new production.

This is the first German production of the film, and it shows it.  The production values in the film are absolutely excellent.  the material details are superb and. . . . the plot massively departs from the novel.

And for that reason, frankly, it suffers.  

This film really carries the post World War Two German guilt/excuse into a World War One work that was a novel.  It doesn't, therefore, really get Remarque's warning about militarism across, so much as it portrays average Germans as victims of the Great War and future victims of the Second World War.  The death of Katczinsky, which is a completely pointless combat death in the novel and first two films, is a weird murder by a French child in this version.  

And the ending of this movie departs massively from the novel and looses the point of it.  The protagonist dies on a quiet day, like thousands of soldiers did.  In the new German version he died in a  massive late war German assault at the end of the war.  That's completely different.  

For that matter, that's a major departure from actual history and it ties in, just a tad, to the Stabbed In the Back myth. The Germans had an ongoing revolution at home and the Frontsoldaten were collapsing. You couldn't have ordered them into an attack in late 1918 no matter how hard you tried.

So, the first version is the best.  I don't think I could get through the second again, and the third version is worth watching, once.

*This review was started in October, 2022.

Wednesday, November 14, 1923. In from the cold.

German Gen. Hans von Seeckt ordered that Berlin cafés, halls and cabarets must admit the city's poor and cold in order to warm themselves, least the Government seize them to be used for that purpose.

Von Seeckt's tomb.

Von Seeckt had been an important figure in the Imperial German Army before going on to be a major figure in the Reichswehr.  He was in the German parliament from 1930 to 32 as a member of a center right party, but turned towards the hard right thereafter.  He was assigned to the German military mission in China in 1933, where he restored the failing relationship with the Nationalist Chinese.  His advice lead to the 1934 Nationalist campaign that resulted in the Communist Long March.

Germany suspended payments on its reparations.

New Zealand's laws were extended to Antarctica as Governor General John Jellicoe applied its jurisdiction to the Ross Dependency.

Thursday, September 13, 1923. Spanish democracy collapses.

The Spanish government was deposed in a coup led by Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja, 2nd Marquis of Estella, a military officer.  The coup came about as it's leaders were upset with the Spanish government's inability to deal with the economic conditions which were a precursor to the Great Depression.

Coming during the last days of Spain's Bourbon Restoration, Primo de Rivera secured the support of the King and a significant percentage of the Spanish population and ruled until 1930, when an economic boom brought about during his dictatorship foundered and Spain began a return to democracy.  He died later that year, at age 60.  The Bourbon Restoration itself would end the following year with the establishment of the short-lived Second Spanish Republic.

Perhaps instructive for us today, the period overall saw increasing tension between Spanish leftists and Spanish conservatives, with the middle ground increasingly evaporating.  The government was seized first by the monarchical right, and then restored to democracy which lurched increasingly leftward, resulting finally in a collapse of democracy entirely and a right wing coup which brought Francisco Franco to power.  

Interestingly, we just dealt with something similar happening in Chile in 1973 the other day.  In both instances, the society in question was unable to deal with increasingly radical opposing forces and the middle more or less evaporating.

In common accounts of the period, little attention tends to be given to the fact that the revolution that brought Franco to power was, in some ways, a continuation of one that began on this day in 1923.

A revolution was also occurring in Bulgaria but was put down by the put down by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization

Some experimentation was engaged in on this day with tanks converted into tractors.

Wednesday June 15, 1930. Bessie Coleman receives a pilots license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.

The Aerodrome: June 15, 1930. Bessie Coleman receives a pilots l...:   

June 15, 1930. Bessie Coleman receives a pilots license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale

 

On this day in 1921, Bessie Coleman received a pilots license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, making her the first black person to be a "licensed" pilot.  As her grandparents were Cherokee, she was also the first licensed Native American pilot.

The event is a real milestone, but it's somewhat deceiving.  The US didn't require pilots licenses at the time and the global requirement was far from universal.  Pilots licenses would be introduced in the US in 1927.  This is significant here as Coleman's international pilots license was a real license, but one that was not recognized everywhere and, moreover, she was not the first black or female black pilots as is sometimes suggested.

She was a pioneering aviator however and earned her living as a barnstormer after taking up flying.  In that career she was also an advocate for African Americans.  She tragically died in 1930 at an airshow when her aircraft had catastrophic failure.

March 28, 1921. Empires coming and going.

Street in Seattle on March 28, 1921.

Things went from bad to worse for Charles I, the last Austro Hungarian Emperor, when newly created Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia warned Hungary that if the regained the Hungarian throne, they'd declare war on Hungary.

All of those countries, combined with Austria, had been part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and they feared that Charles I's restoration as King of Hungary would be followed by a claim to restore the Austro Hungarian Empire.

Winston and Clementine Churchill were the subjects of a reception at the Government House in Jerusalem.

Also present was Abdullah I and his entourage.  Abdullah's army had occupied Jordan without opposition.  He was a British client, but the situation was tense as his actions were not yet recognized as legitimate.

The U.S. launched the USS Corry, a Clemson class destroyer that would serve only nine years.  The ship had been ordered in World War One, like all of the ships then being commissioned, but finished to late to serve in the war.

The Corry was one of 60 ships decommissioned as too expensive to maintain at the beginning of the Great Depression.

The Australian Department of Civil Aviation was formed as the Civil Aviation Branch of the Australian Defense Department.

An Easter Egg roll was held on the White House grounds.  Easter was the day prior in 1921.

Time is a lot shorter than we imagine.

In looking at the old newspapers I sometimes put up here, I saw in a local paper that the building that I work in was sold this past week. . . 100 years ago.  It made the front page as it was one of the few "skyscraper" buildings in town at the time.  Maybe the only one.

That is, news of that sale hit the front page on December 31, 1920.   The building was 103 years old at the time. The new owner soon changed the name of the building to what it is today.

Yesterday I had a man in the office who was 93 years old. He asked about some details of the building and lawyers who had practiced in it in the past.  We spoke about the sidewalk out front and that some odds and ends.  He noted that out in front, on the street, "there were probably horses back then".  

No doubt there were some.

He was ten years old when this building was 13 years old. That struck me at the time.

The building was built in 1917 and first occupied in 1918.  I don't know when he first saw it, but it would have been in its early history.  That's stuck with me.  I can recall things easily back when I was ten.  He may have recalled this building when it was only a little over 20 years old, maybe even earlier than that.

For that matter, I recall this building being here, and my father having business in it, over 40 years ago, maybe 50 years ago, when the building was less than 50 years of age itself.

I've worked in the building for 30 years.  It was 73 years old when I started working here.  The man I was talking to was 63 then.  My father would have been 59, two years older than I am now.  He died at age 62.

Time just gets away from us.

The last dialogue from True Grit.