All Quiet on the Western Front - Once Not so Quiet

 Victor Grossman, Berlin Bulletin No. 15,

 On December 5th one or two hundred people left a movie
 theater in Berlin, mostly silent and deeply moved
 though the film they had seen was first released in
 1930. This American-made epic had lost none of its
 extremely emotional appeal . It was "All Quiet on the
 Western Front" and the date of its showing here was no
 coincidence. Exactly eighty years earlier, to the day,
 Joseph  Goebbels, later to become Hitlers notorious
 propaganda minister, had led 200 Nazis in violently
 preventing the showing of this same film.  At the
 shout of Goebbels, who was in the balcony, the Nazis,
 storm troopers without their brown uniforms and some
 of the many newly-elected deputies to the Reichstag,
 blew whistles, attacked the rest of the audience and
 then let hundreds of white mice out of cardboard boxes
 to scurry through the rows. The police tried to
 restore order, at least some of them did, but this
 proved impossible and the showing was stopped. Then
 five or ten thousand Nazis waiting outside joined
 Goebbels in a march and rally in the downtown area. 
 The tumults continued for a whole week, after which
 the Censorship Office, made up of Nazi sympathizers or
 men fearing the growing Nazi pressure, bowed to the
 demands of several pro-Nazi states to have the film
 banned altogether in Germany. This was a first major
 success of the Nazis and was accompanied by an obscene
 barrage of propaganda against this "defamation of our
 boys in uniform" by the "Jews in Hollywood" and in
 Berlin's "elite" West Side.

 A half-year later, after protests by prominent
 writers, artists and anti-Nazi political figures,
 permission was reluctantly granted to show the film to
 small private audiences, but only in such a  radically
 cut version that much of the political punch was gone.
 This strange law, a compromise applying to a single
 film, was soon canceled, yet the attempted
 conciliation of the important German market for
 American films resulted in only cut film versions
 being distributed to all other countries as well. The
 film was totally forbidden in many countries,
 including France, Austria and Australia, and was
 eviscerated even in the USA, despite its two Oscars as
 best film and, for Lewis Milestone, best director. A
 final wish of Milestone was to have the film restored
 to its original length and principles. It took two
 decades after his death in 1980 before this was
 finally achieved.

 The film shown last Friday was the original, uncut
 version with German sub-titles. Before it began, two
 historians described what had happened in 1930, which
 had made this a major step in the Nazi take-over  of
 German culture and, two years later, of the whole
 country, resulting in the destruction of both. One
 historian told the tragic story of Hanns Brodnitz, the
 manager of the Mozart-Saal, which he had turned into a
 leading art film center, highlighting such film greats
 as the young Rene Clair ("Under the Roofs of Paris")
 and Charlie Chaplin's masterpieces. But after the Nazi
 attacks on his theater and the exploding level of
 anti-Semitism in Germany he lost his job and, before
 long, all jobs. His attempts to escape to the USA were
 in vain and in 1938 he went into hiding. Only after
 five years, when he dared to leave his last
 hiding-place, was he caught and sent to Auschwitz,
 where he was murdered in a gas chamber a few days
 later. His autobiographical book on film culture
 during Germany's Weimar Period (after 1919) was not
 released in 1933 because of the Nazi takeover and was
 soon destroyed, but a surprising find of the galley
 proofs a few years ago made a new edition possible.

 Two major thoughts certainly went through the minds of
 many in the audience last Friday. One was a swift
 understanding of why not only Nazis and not only
 German super-patriots hated the film and its
 terrifying portrayal of the horrors of war, with
 occasional questioning by the soldiers as to why and
 to whose benefit they are suffering, shooting and
 dying. One scene, where the hero, played by Lew Ayres,
 bitterly regrets killing a French soldier lying next
 to him, is unforgettable. The glories of "fighting and
 dying for one's country," so mercilessly  satirized
 and exposed by the film, went against all the efforts
 by nearly every government in those  years to honor
 the dead in such a way that the next generation would
 dutifully follow in their fatal footsteps.

 The other thought surely going through the heads of so
 many in the audience was not unrelated: They are at it
 again! Not only the heavy-booted pro-Nazi groups
 marching through one city after another in Germany,
 for they are still a small minority and face
 unrelenting resistance by anti-fascists. But even more
 menacingly, troops are again being sent to fight in
 Afghanistan and elsewhere, and when the metal coffins
 are flown home they are met with rites and speeches
 hardly differing from those in the years before and
 between the two world wars and attacked in the film.
 This month Germany's Minister of Defense, while ending
 the draft, is creating a tough professional army with
 the latest murderous equipment, ready to defend
 "Germany's trade routes and access to needed raw
 materials" anywhere in the world. His semi-prediction 
 of future conflicts was accompanied by his usual
 slight and for some so frightening smile. Words like
 Iran, Palestine, Yemen and Korea inevitably crossed
 people's minds. Eighty years had passed, and what
 terrible years some of them were, yet so many have
 learned, or altered, so little. Aside from the
 greatness of the film, it was thoughts like these
 which this event so meaningful  and so disturbing.

 December 6 2010

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