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All Quiet on the Western Front - Once Not so Quiet
Victor Grossman, Berlin Bulletin No. 15,
from portside -
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
Germanyhe 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, Yemenand
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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