Last month’s Berlin premiere of the restored version of All Quiet on the Western Front was a quiet affair compared to the premiere of the original US film version by Lewis Milestone in 1930.
Youthful Nazi protesters heckled premiere guests then rushed into the auditorium, throwing stink bombs and white mice. The guests fled, the screening was abandoned and the film was subsequently banned in Germany for “dishonouring” the memory of German war veterans.
Masterminding the protest was Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi agitator-in-chief who, three years later, would become the dictatorship’s culture and propaganda minister.
All Quiet on the Western Front was an ideal agitation platform given Germany’s love-hate around its source material - the 1928 novel Im Westen Nichts Neues by journalist Erich Remarque.
Born in 1898 in Osnabrück in Westphalia and drafted aged 18, he was wounded five times over a month on the western front. His later novel, written in five weeks, merged his own experiences with tales he heard in the field hospital.
When his publisher marketed his novel as a first-person account of the horrors of war, that discrepancy allowed German conservatives and nationalists to attack the young pacifist author as a traitor-fantasist. Anything was preferable to admitting they had sent an entire generation of young men to their deaths, for a lost cause.
The controversy boosted sales and the novel has, nearly a century on, been translated into 90 languages.
“We’re completely delighted because the film will give a considerable boost to Remarque’s popularity around the world,” said Thomas Schneider, head of the Erich Maria Remarque Centre for Peace in his home town of Osnabrück.
“The film is taken as a commentary on the current situation, even though that wasn’t intended.”
For Remarque, a struggling advertising copywriter, All Quiet on the Western Front launched him into a new orbit as a Hollywood celebrity lover of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Hedy Lamarr. Despite his success and celebrity, he never fully escaped Germany or the trenches warfare around his first success.
In a 1957 essay, Remarque explained how the rising Nazi party first denounced the 1928 book in its newspapers, insinuating that its author was Jewish and that his birth name - Remark - was actually Kramer spelled backwards.
Weeks before the premiere of the film in 1930, all apparently forgiven and forgotten, Goebbels inquired if Remarque would be prepared to lie in public and say his publisher had sold the film rights to Universal without his permission.
“He wanted to use this point as anti-Semitic propaganda - that I, a non-Jewish author, had been exploited by two Jewish companies for their ‘cosmopolitan pacifist’ goals,” he recalled.
Remarque declined the offer and became a public enemy of the Nazis. In May 1933, Nazi-supporting students tossed his book, alongside the works of the Mann brothers and Erich Kästner into a fire in central Berlin.
Remarque wasn’t there to see the blaze. Sensing danger, he had left Germany a day after Hitler’s ascent to power in January 1933. But even in absentia the cat-and-mouse game continued.
In advance of the Nazi march into Austria in 1938, an Austrian author copied out a chapter of Remarque’s novel and sent it to the Nazi party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, claiming it was an excerpt from his new novel.
The newspaper, Remarque’s most vicious critic, published the text in full, calling it an impressive text that “tells the truth in full unlike distortion novels like All Quiet on the Western Front”.
Furious when the joke was revealed, the Nazis pushed their campaign against Remarque to a low point in December 1943. They arrested his anti-Nazi sister Elfriede Scholz for “undermining the war effort”, had her beheaded and sent her surviving sister Erna the bill: 495.8 reichsmarks.
Remarque visited Germany after the war and even helped adapt another war novel, A Time to Live and a Time to Die, for a 1958 film directed by fellow emigré Douglas Sirk.
Early one morning, heading to the studio near Berlin with fellow actors, he remembers pulling into a petrol station to fill up the tank. The woman on the pump saw them in full Nazi regalia, then shouted towards a nearby house: “Run, Otto, they’re back!”
On a break from shooting one day, Remarque returned to Nollendorfplatz, scene of the abandoned 1930 movie premiere. Like much of the city it was still a ruin, the cinema no longer standing.
Surrounded by ruins and memories, Remarque recalled the 1930 premiere, abandoned thanks to the chaos of Joseph Goebbels and his youthful rent-a-mob.
“None of them were older than 20, none of them could have been in the 1914-1918 war,” he wrote in 1957. “None of them knew that, 10 years later, they would be in a war and most of them would be dead before they would reach 30.”
All Quiet on the Western Front is showing at the IFI and streaming on Netflix from October 28
