The novel on which ‘All Quiet on the Front’ is based: burned by the Nazis and sung by Elton John

‘All quiet on the front’ was done with seven 2023 BAFTA Awards including Best Film, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film directed by Edward Berger, one of the 70 best movies on Netflix in 2022 and nominated for nine Oscars in 2023, brings to the screen a novel written in 1929 by the German Erich Maria Remarque, in which he talks about his experience as a soldier in the First World War.

“I am young, I am twenty years old, but I know nothing of life other than despair, fear, death and the transition from an existence full of the most absurd superficiality to an abyss of pain. I see the peoples throwing themselves against each other and kill themselves without question, ignorant, crazy, docile, innocent”, he begins by saying in his first lines. His disenchantment continues with a phrase that has been applied to so many other wars that have come after: “I see the most illustrious brains in the world invent weapons and phrases to make all this possible for longer and with greater performance.”

Thus begins this novel published ten years after the end of the Great War, and which narrates in the first person the experiences of a young German soldier who enlists to fight on the western front. The novel, published in Spain by the editorial Edhasa, became from the first moment an anti-war anthem about the horrors of war, and achieved great success among the public and critics of the time. In the same year of its publication, it was translated into 26 languages ​​and today there are more than 50.

The name Erich Maria Remarque is actually a pseudonym for the writer Erich Paul Remark. Although the plot is based on his experience, the protagonist, Paul Bäumer (played by Felix Kammerer in the Netflix film) cannot be considered to be exactly an alter ego. To begin with, the protagonist of the novel enlisted as a volunteer moved by great ideals, which he did not do.

A book persecuted by the Nazis

‘All Quiet at the Front’ was considered an unpatriotic book by the Nazi party, and in 1933 he burned at the stake where works contrary to his propaganda were burned. Its author left Germany and ended up living and becoming a national in the United States. It is known that throughout his life he had romances with various actresses, including Hedy Lamarr, Dolores del Río and Merlene Dietrich, whom he met at the Venice Festival. And it is that his novel was adapted to the cinema in 1930 (that version directed by Lewis Milestone got the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director). In 1979 a successful remake for television was shot.

Elton John’s pacifism

The novel deeply marked the musician Elton John, who in 1983 composed a song about it. ‘All quiet on the western front’ (same title as the book, in English) talks about those wet trenches and the bewilderment of a soldier faced with barbarism during a sleepless night. The song was six minutes long, and a shorter version had to be recorded to be released as a single.

Gabriel García Márquez also refers to ‘All Quiet on the Front’ in his novel ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’, when he mentions that its protagonist “had read it with a heart devastated by the barbarism of war”.