For hours he lay next to the slowly dying Frenchman and finally, wracked with guilt, confesses, “If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother.” In one of the most famous scenes from the book, Paul falls into a shell-hole and buries his knife into the chest of a French solider. They fight because they are told to fight and do not want to die. Paul and his comrades hold no animus towards the French. When Erich Maria Remarque started writing the novel in 1927, he aimed to capture his experience of the war with journalistic clarity. Unlike most war stories, All Quiet on the Western Front makes no effort to justify or sentimentalize either side of the conflict. This story feels more relevant than ever. Only a nation so deluded with its own sense of exceptionalism that it has paved the way for its own demise. First adapted into an iconic film by Universal Pictures in 1930, Berger has reclaimed this story with a distinctly German understanding of war and power. Man is a beast.”ĭirector Edward Berger’s new adaptation for Netflix of the 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front offers a grim, yet stunning portrayal of trench warfare in WWI. “Give a dog a bone and he will always snap it up,” he mutters. A sergeant, convinced Paul will be dead by dawn, pulls the mask from his face and orders him to bail the rainwater from the trench. Like a creature from a distant planet, he takes in his first glimpse of the western front. Peering through the yellow lens of his gas mask, seventeen-year-old Paul Bäumer struggles to breath.
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