Not So Quiet on the Western Front: German Reactions to Netflix's 2022 Remake

Abstract

In October 2022, Netflix's remake of All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) opened to great acclaim in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries, receiving rave reviews from critics and movie-goers alike, eventually winning seven BAFTAs and four Oscars, the most awards ever for a German-language production. In Germany, however, reactions could not have been more different. The film was roundly panned by historians as “flawed, cliché-laden, and unauthentic [all translations from German by Michael Geheran],” and derided by critics as Oscar bait, an anti-American trope often used to disparage a cultural production. In what has now become something of a punchline, the Süddeutsche Zeitung quipped that “No book is so good you can't make a bad film out of it,” while the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung charged that the producers were “horny for an Oscar,” having removed “the inner plot, the brains of the story” and “replaced them with a Hollywood program.” How to make sense of such dramatically different reactions to the same film? Germans’ responses cannot simply be explained by the historical liberties taken by the director, Edward Berger, or disappointment with the plot differences between the movie and Erich Maria Remarque's novel, but arguably reveal deeper anxieties as the long shadow of Germany's past continues to weigh heavily on German minds. Does the film pander to popular images about war in a way that has different meaning in Germany than, say, in the US or the UK, with their different memory cultures? How much is German dislike of the film shaped by the legacy of the Second World War and not just the First? With these questions in mind, this essay will consider German reactions to the 2022 film and what they say about Germany's memory culture, paying close attention to the film's language, connotations, and imagery that may be particularly meaningful to German audiences. To be sure, film reviews are not the most reliable source for getting at popular attitudes and mentalities, but the stark divergence of opinion about Netflix's All Quiet say something important about how and whether memories of militarism and the Holocaust continue to shape how Germans think about war.