Ann P. Linder
It is a truism of twentieth-century European history that the First World War formed or, from certain points of view, deformed all aspects of European life. Certainly, the commemoration of that war occupied a central position in European thought in the two decades following its conclusion. Individual and collective experiences of combat, transmuted through artistic media, emerged as myths of the war, encompassing both the experience of the war and an interpretation of that experience.[1] These myths, especially the ones that developed into institutionalized national myths, are central to interwar debates on the life and direction of the individual and of the nation. Many critics have assumed that the experience of the First World War was universal - an absolute paradigm, undifferentiated by historical and cultural diversity. It was not. At the triumphal culmination of the "principle of nationality," the experience was supremely national, shaped by national history, culture, and tradition. [2]
The divergent national myths of the war are mirrored most significantly in the combat narratives, and then with increasing impact in the popular form of the cinema, particularly with the arrival of sound films in 1929.[3] The public reception of the war novels and the films based on them can serve as a barometer of national attitudes concerning war, national identity, and national culture.
This essay will examine two important combat novels usually regarded as pacifist or antiwar novels, and the films based on them: first, Roland Dorgelès's testimonial Les Croix de bois (1919) and Raymond Bernard's 1932 film of it; and second, Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (1929) and Lewis Milestone's 1930 American film version of it, All Quiet on the Western Front. The transformation of novelistic fictions into film fictions and the popular, critical, and even official reception of these works reveal patterns of national thought between the wars - patterns which have left their legacy in our use of political terminology to describe cultural artifacts and movements.
The myth of the First World War that emerges in France between the wars has two stages, only the first of which concerns us here. That stage concentrates on realistic témoinage - direct testimony of the experience of combat that, overtly or covertly, subsumes within it a valuation of the experience. Before examining Dorgelès's novel, it is worth taking a moment to recall the condition of France at the end of 1918. Out of a total population of a little over 40 million, metropolitan France had lost almost two million men dead, and more than a million permanently disabled. To put those figures in a human context, Jean Giono averred that of the original 1914 complement of his company, there were only two survivors, himself and his captain.[4] In addition, a wide swath of northeastern France had been laid waste, with some areas, particularly around Verdun, rendered permanently uninhabitable. Despite such losses, France and her allies had won the war, to the point of being able to impose a peace settlement on Germany. Thus in France, the problem inherent in commemorating the war, that is, in bestowing meaning on it, is one of weighing victory and loss, and concerns the answer to Henri de Montherlant's question: "was the good of the war worth its evil?"[5]
The French had already begun to answer that question in their public commemoration of the war. From the beginning, commemoration of the war was indissolubly linked with the memory of the dead. Significantly, the only national monument to the dead of the First World War is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, beneath the Arc de Triomphe, a choice of site that conflates national victory and national loss. Local ceremonies usually took place at the village monument to the dead of the war - there is scarcely a village in France that does not have such a monument - at 11:00 a.m. on Armistice Day. The participants included the local authorities, former combatants, schoolchildren, and the populace. The military was conspicuously absent, for several reasons. First, as Antoine Prost maintains, "the monument to the dead is a symbolic sepulcher, and the ceremony of the eleventh of November is a funeral service." [6] Its purpose was to recall the sacrifice and to pass that knowledge to the next generation. Secondly, the emphasis on death and on the moral debt of the living to the dead encouraged the development of these ceremonies into exercises for initiates, and very quickly into glorifications of peace.[7] In short, they were most emphatically not victory celebrations, but rather reminders of the price that had been paid for peace.
The literature of témoinage has the same roots. The purpose of combat literature is to show the reader what the war was like, and to convince him, openly or otherwise, what lessons should be drawn from it. And in France that lesson focuses on the inescapable presence of death, and on the overriding conviction that such a war must never be allowed to happen again. Les Croix de bois (Wooden Crosses) is the most famous and probably the most characteristic novel of the period of témoinage. Dorgelès eschews both the didactic pacifism of Barbusse and the somewhat sentimental pity of Duhamel's Vie des martyrs in favor of a multifaceted account of the experience of an infantry platoon. The novel adheres to the narrative pattern characteristic of Great War narratives (in Germany and Britain, as well as in France): a chronological narrative composed of non-contiguous episodes presenting the "highlights" of the platoon's experience of the war. The episodes characteristically alternate between periods at the front with patrols and attacks, and periods in reserve and on leave, reflecting the rhythm of trench warfare. Within the platoon, the story focuses on a smaller group of men: Gilbert Demachy, a law student; Corporal Bréval; and Sulphart, the incarnation of French méfiance and débrouillage. Unlike Barbusse's Le Feu, where there is little relief from the horrors of war or the author's diatribes, Dorgelés includes amusing scenes behind the lines and a conventionally heroic episode that has troubled many critics, in which the regiment, relieved after ten days of assault, overcomes its exhaustion to parade proudly before the commanding general.
Nevertheless, in spite of what Dorgelès actually calls "the good times,"[8] death and loss are omnipresent. In the penultimate chapter, Sulphart, who has been wounded and sent home just before the end of the war, visits the parents of Demachy, who has been killed, and then, in despair, finds his way to a bar. The bar is full of civilians arguing about the war. One drunkard proclaims that the peace has come too late and the war was a defeat. Sulphart, suddenly aroused, asserts that, on the contrary, it was a victory. When asked why, he simply says, "I believe itís a victory because I got out of it alive..."[9]
The tentativeness of that victory is reinforced by the image that controls the novel and gives it its symbolic resonance: the wooden crosses of the title. As the wooden crosses recur throughout the novel, they form a leitmotif of death, echoed in the slang of trench soldiers, who referred to dying as "earning the crois de bois," a cynical rendering of "earning the croix de guerre."
The making of the film of Les Croix de bois appears, in and of itself, to have been an act of témoinage. Bernard filmed in the Champagne, near La Neuvillette, where chalky soil and lack of inhabitants ensured that remaining trenches were little altered.[10] Bernard also insisted on using veterans for all of the roles, including the leads. The stars, Charles Vanel, Gabriel Gabrio, and Pierre Blanchar, were all veterans. Vanel maintained that "we didn't act, we remembered!"[11] In playing Demachy, Blanchar felt that he was serving his country a second time.[12] The seriousness with which the enterprise was regarded is suggested by the lengthy review in Pour Vous (the leading French film magazine of the time), written by Henri Malherbe, honorary president of the Association des Écrivains combattants. The film was premiered in Geneva before the League of Nations, and then in Paris before the president of the Republic. Both of those events imply that the film was regarded as an important national and even international statement on war.[13] But Malherbe touched on the essential when he stated that most of the previous war films constituted "acts of impiety and almost of calumny toward our dead."[14] His use of religious diction and the plural possessive define the ethical and patriotic position of the veterans, as evident here as in the ceremonies surrounding Armistice Day. The high seriousness with which war films were viewed can be seen as early as January 1928, when Paul Ginisty, director of the cinematographic section of the Ministry of Public Instruction, threatened filmmakers that no films would be approved by the censors that "mix together scenes of war with a dramatic or comic fiction. He [the minister] believes that the tragic events of the war which recall so much mourning and so much suffering should not be travestied for a commercial purpose."[15]
The emphasis on "our dead" is even more evident in Bernard's rearrangement of material from Dorgelès's novel. As noted above, Dorgelès's narrative concludes with Sulphart's statement on victory and survival. But in the film, this statement has been displaced to a scene in the middle of the story, between the attack and the triumphant parade, leaving the focus at the end of the film on the death of Gilbert Demachy. His agonizing death alone on the battlefield is raised to an emblematic level by superimpositions of funeral wreaths (in an earlier scene the men are entrenched in a graveyard where crosses and wreaths are much in evidence) and finally of French and German soldiers carrying crosses. The crosses echo the opening of the film, in which rows of soldiers are transformed into rows of crosses, infinitely multiplied to the horizon. The film's tone of nostalgic seriousness, and even piety, despite comic scenes, accords with the eternal flame on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which appears under the titles and credits.
Dorgelès's novel is widely regarded as a denunciation of war, but the film does not stop with mere condemnation. The film begins with the horror of war, with what Michéle Lagny (speaking of this film) calls "an absurd cataclysm, inexplicable, uncontrollable,"[16] but the final message is that a permanent peace alone can justify the death of so many men. That message, implicit in the film's structure, becomes explicit in the press coverage, where paeans to peace are virtually a required element in any interview, review, or report. Bernard's film is an unmistakable glorification of peace, although the price of that peace is never far from the viewer's mind.
In January of 1929, Erich Maria Remarque's war novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) exploded into the deeply polarized and politicized German cultural scene. Commemorating the war presented different problems for German writers. After all, a victorious war defines itself; a lost war demands explanation and justification. In Germany, the problem was not that of weighing the good against the evil of war, but of rescuing something meaningful from the material, personal, and spiritual ruins of Imperial Germany. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the reception of German war narratives was largely a question of the reader's politics.[17] Conservatives adhered to the predominant German myth of the war, one glorifying comradeship, idealism, and a belief in the rebirth of the nation - convictions usually expressed in Fraktur. Liberals tended to express a humanist and even pacifist interpretation of the war experience and in Roman type. Socialists tended to agree with the liberals, but communists, although basically antiwar, often rejected antiwar novels as self-indulgent and "bourgeois."
Although Remarque's novel enjoyed an enormous popular success, both in Germany and abroad, and became the first modern bestseller, its critical reception in Germany followed political lines. The liberal press reviewed the book early and very favorably.[18] Many veterans identified with Remarque's narrative, and saw it as a "true" depiction of their own war experience.[19] The early reviews in the official organ of the pacifist movement were likewise favorable,[20] one critic proclaiming that the book "ripped the romantic mask of heroism from the face of war."[21] Later reviews centered on whether All Quiet was indeed pacifistic in its effect, and whether it should be regarded as a genuinely pacifist novel.[22] The book itself and the label of pacifism enraged the nationalist right, whose critics venomously castigated the novel as inauthentic and as a betrayal of the German soldier, and its author as a "degenerate" interested only in a "latrine war."[23] In short, the reeption of Remarque's novel reflects a paradigm of the cultural politics of Weimar Germany.
Having witnessed the novel's enormous international success, Carl Laemmle, the German-American head of Universal Studios, quickly purchased the film rights to the book. As director, he hired Lewis Milestone (for whom the picture would be his first sound film), with instructions that "the picture was to present the human narrative of the soldiers in trenches."[24] Filming was completed at the end of March 1930. American reviews were favorable, emphasizing strong performances, technical skill, and effective direction. Most also noted that the film surpassed previous war films in its depiction of the horror of war, to become, as Alexander Bakshy states in his review for The Nation, "a terrifying document that reveals the carnage of war with staggering force."[25] But other than a few conventional mentions of the "horrors of war," politically oriented criticism of the film, particularly any recognition that the film depicts German soldiers, that is, former enemies, is notably absent. This internationalist point of view may be the result of America's limited involvement in the First World War and limited losses from it. European audiences, although recognizing the film's basic message of pacifism and universal suffering, could not divest themselves of their national feeling. French audiences, for example, applauded the French counter-attack in All Quiet.[26] American critics also singled out what Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times called the film's "fidelity to the spirit of the printed volume" - a fidelity that he attributed to screenwriters George Abbott and Maxwell Anderson.[27]
But is the film a faithful transcription of the novel? The reviewer of the London Times complained that the film's great length and repetitiousness were due to "a conscientious effort not to omit anything essential," an opinion echoed by other reviewers.[28] We know that Remarque, disillusioned by what he considered the political co-optation of his novel, obtained an unprecedented contract with Carl Laemmle, stipulating that the film "should interpret the story as he had written it, without change or additions, and without unduly stressing any incident."[29] But was the contract fulfilled? The film is certainly faithful to the spirit of the novel, even exaggerating its message, as was the case with Les Croix de bois. The sequence of film scenes largely follows the chronology of the novel, inserting in chronological order those that are told as flashbacks in the text, most importantly the patriotic ranting of schoolmaster Kantorek, the enlistment of the entire class of boys, and the persecutions of Corporal Himmelstoss in the training camp.
But there are two important scenes in the film that do not exist in the book, and serve, as do the changes in Les Croix de bois, to emphasize the suffering and, above all, the meaninglessness of the war. The first is Paul Bäumer's disillusioned speech to Kantorek's new class of students, delivered while he is home on leave. Kantorek is still (four years into the war) glorifying courage and heroic deeds. When Paul suddenly appears at the classroom door, Kantorek presents him to the class as the embodiment of heroism and urges Paul to tell the class about the front. Paul demurs at first, but finally speaks: "We live in the trenches out there, we fight, we try not to be killed. Sometimes we are. That's all."[30]
When Kantorek urges him again to recount some heroic episode, Paul, goaded to anger, bursts out against his old schoolmaster: "You still think its beautiful and sweet to die for your country. Well, we used to think you knew, but the first bombardment taught us better. It's dirty and painful to die for your country. When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all. There are millions out there dying for their country now, and what good is it?" Despite their accusations of cowardice, Paul, exhausted and embittered, continues his testimony: "And up there we know we're lost and done for whether we're dead or alive. Three years we've had of it, four years, and every day a year and every night a century, and our bodies are earth and our thoughts are clay, and we sleep and eat with death. We're done for because you can't live that way and keep anything inside you." Despairing of any success at reaching the boys, Paul leaves, convinced that he should never have come home on leave, and determined to return to the front immediately. Paul's outburst summarizes the message of the film in a vivid scene that has retained its power.
In the novel, Paul has two leaves, and he does indeed encounter Kantorek during the first. Kantorek has been drafted into the reserves, in a company commanded by Paul's friend Mittelstaedt. Mittelstaedt, to Paul's huge delight, is making Kantorek's life as a soldier as miserable as Kantorek had made their lives as students. The scenes depicting Kantorek's humiliation are recounted with schoolboy glee at the revenge that they are wreaking on the man who persuaded them to join up. The substitution of a bitter, disillusioned speech for a juvenile prank significantly intensifies the film's message of pacifism.
The second added scene has become a permanent icon in our lexicon of First World War images, so much so that few viewers realize that the scene is not in the novel. I am referring, of course, to the closing scene in which Paul Bäumer, just before war's end, reaches for a butterfly and is shot by a sniper. In the closing scene of the novel, an omniscient narrator recounts Paul's death in October of 1918, on a day so quiet that the official dispatch reads only "all quiet on the Western Front." The bitter irony of the novel's conclusion is softened in the film, in that Paul's death while reaching for a butterfly, with its inherent symbolism of beauty, fragility, ephemerality, and spirituality, incarnates what Wilfred Owen called "the pity of war." And that sense of pity and meaningless loss greatly enhances the film's pacifism.
The seriousness with which war films were regarded in Europe became apparent when All Quiet opened in Paris on November 27, 1930. The version shown was in English with French subtitles, and was shortened from the American version by the excision of the scene depicting the visit of the German soldiers to the French girls. French critics seemed uncertain whether the cuts were made for aesthetic or political reasons, René Lehmann concluding only that they were "necessary," while another reviewer decided that they were done to avoid distracting the viewer from the message of the film.[31] Most reviews emphasized fine performances, realism, and the strength of the film's pacifist message. Although the French reviewers clearly perceive and honor the film's pacifism, their analyses differ from American and British reviews in two significant ways. First, some remark is always made that the film depicts German soldiers and is based on a German book. The rightist press generally dismissed the book as, at best, competent journalism. Lehmann, in the same review discussed above, notes above all "the surprise that such a cry of suffering and rebellious humanity could possibly have come from Germany."[32]
Secondly, the French reviewers, from no matter what segment of the French press, are invariably veterans. They often use their reviews to evoke their own war experiences, or to criticize the realism (or lack of it) in the film. A single example will suffice. Richard Pierre-Bodin provided a review of sorts for Le Figaro, a relatively conservative mainstream newspaper. He is clearly an ancien combattant, and refers several times to how "we" feel about the war. "One thing," he states, "is important. I defy the spectator to leave the theater with any other sentiment in his heart than that of the horror of war. There are war films that work for peace. This masterpiece is better than a masterpiece: it is a good work."[33] Pierre-Bodin is playing on the French chef - d'œuvre and une bonne œuvre. He concludes his review with a passing reference to the graveyard scene in the film - virtually the only direct reference to the film - leading to an evocation of August 1914. This quasi-review in a respectable, traditional paper signals the seriousness with which ordinary Frenchmen regarded the depiction of the war in artistic media and the degree to which pacifism had permeated the ranks of the veterans.
After its positive reception in the United States and western Europe, a dubbed, "toned-down" version of All Quiet was scheduled to open in Berlin on December 4, 1930. [34] Despite a protest from the Defense Ministry that it cast aspersions on the German Army, the German censors passed the film, stating that it did "full justice to the courage, steadfastness and comradeship of the German soldier."[35]
The reviews that appeared in the German film journals give only slight hints of what was to come. Their length and seriousness clearly indicate the importance that Germans attached to this American depiction of the German war experience. Given the critical furor created by the publication of the novel, the film could be expected to create considerable controversy. The reviewer for Der Film, for example, tackles the question immediately, and concludes that the film is in no way anti-German as this was the way "the common man saw and suffered the war."[36] Siegfried Kracauer also provided a long review for the Frankfurter Zeitung, admiring the anti-heroic honesty and lack of sentimentality in the film.[37]
The timing of the film's arrival in Germany coincided with the rising influence of the German right, and especially with the first major electoral gains of the National Socialists. The new Gauleiter of Berlin and member of the Reichstag, Dr. Paul Goebbels, who had long recognized the potential of film for propaganda, seized the opportunity offered by the premiere of All Quiet.[38] According to newspaper reports in Germany, the United States, Britain, and France, the invited audience at the showing on December 4 was deeply impressed, but the first public showing on December 5 was interrupted by disturbances led by Goebbels.[39] After Goebbels gave the signal by flashing his Reichstag pass (which gave him immunity from arrest), some 200 - 300 Nazis (reports vary) began booing and catcalling, threw stink bombs, and then, as the French rightist paper Je suis partout reported the incident, released white mice "to frighten the ladies."[40] Fighting broke out, the showing of the film was stopped, and the police had to clear the theater. The Nazi version of the incident, as reported in the Völkischer Beobachter, was naturally somewhat different. Their account, labeled a "storm of protest," demanded that the insult to German soldiers and the fallen created by the "Jewish-Bolshevist underworld" be ended, and blamed the Marxists for starting the riot in the theater.[41] The next night, Goebbels led a substantial demonstration outside the theater, followed by nightly protests.[42] Spectators were searched for stink bombs and white mice before entering the theater.[43] The Völkischer Beobachter carried detailed accounts of the Nazi protests outside the theater, including Goebbels's speech against the film. According to the report, he proclaimed that it was a "cultural shame" that a film that belittled "the best soldiers of all time, the German front soldiers" should be allowed to run.[44] The Berlin police were finally forced to ban all demonstrations in front of the theater. On December 11, the film was again reviewed by the censors and, after a five-hour inquisition, banned. Two articles in the Neue Preußische Kreuz-Zeitung provide a detailed account of the censors' review and conclusions. The head censor declared it "not a presentation of German war, but of German defeat, and thus is painful and depressing to the German viewer."[45]
The storm of controversy surrounding the film of All Quiet is an enhanced echo of that surrounding the novel. The extreme critical positions are a measure of the extent to which German culture had been politicized in the two-year interval between the publication of the novel and the appearance of the film. The Berlin reporter of the New York Times, clearly in a snit, reported on December 6 that the critics of the nationalist and moderate papers were "governed exclusively by political opinions, not by a desire to discuss the film as art."[46] The entire scandal was followed closely in the foreign press, particularly in the New York Times and in the French press. The French rightist press showed special interest. Candide and Action française ran a series of articles about the events in Germany and on censorship in general. The new rightist weekly, Je suis partout, provided its readers with a very long review of German press reactions, cartoons from various German papers, usually ridiculing the German censors, and analyses of the cultural state of Germany. In Germany, the film was denounced as anti-German by the moderate and rightist press, as well as by the veterans' organizations. Almost alone, the socialist organ Vorwärts denounced the suppression of the film and warned that liberalism was engaged in the final battle with National Socialism, "the outcome of which will determine the future of the German people for a long time, perhaps for decades." [47] Berlin am Morgen deplored the fact that "the new German imperialistic war spirit" was so far developed that it could not tolerate even "harmless pacifism."[48] Even the moderate Germania, official organ of Chancellor Brüning's Catholic Center Party, finally concluded that the film showed only the "bad side" of life at the front, and was "not a caricature of war, but of the German soldier in war."[49]
What, finally, does the transformation and reception of the war narratives tell us about European attitudes toward the First World War? First, the importance accorded the books and especially the films suggests the continuing centrality of the experience of the First World War in the minds of Europeans. Neither critics nor general audiences seemed to regard these works as entertainment, but as significant moral and/or political statements. Although the reactions are opposite, the premiere of Les Croix de bois before the League of Nations and the riot-torn opening of All Quiet in Berlin both argue for the seriousness with which even fictionalized accounts of the war were regarded. As Jean Norton Cru noted in 1929, the public readily accepted regular novels as fictions, but war novels were regarded not as fictions, but as depositions.[50]
Second, the reaction to the films indicates the full emergence of contradictory national war myths. In the case of Les Croix de bois, the French press summarized the sentiments of audiences and especially of veterans, saying that the film was a hymn to peace and a moving plea for the abolition of war.[51] All Quiet was likewise viewed in France as a condemnation of the butchery of the war.[52] The film of Les Croix de bois incarnates growing French pacifism through its transformation of the novel. The French myth of the war - centered on death and suffering, and ending in a Pyrrhic victory - is embodied in Bernard's film even more forcefully than in Dorgelès's equation of victory and survival. That myth clarifies the French conviction that war must be avoided at all costs - a conviction that colored French politics, internal and external, between the wars.
The reception of the two war films in Berlin illuminates the singularity of the German war myth, with its focus on comradeship, spiritual survival, and the rebirth of the nation - if necessary, by war. Like All Quiet, Les Croix de bois was greeted by Nazi riots in Berlin in September 1932. When the National Socialists acceded to power four months later, the film was banned, along with G. W. Pabst's Westfront 1918.[53] In a nation convinced of the injustice of its defeat and humiliation, there was, by the early thirties, little room for pacifist and internationalist ideologies. The grounds on which All Quiet was banned in Germany were unflinchingly national ones. The American film - seen in the United States and even in Britain and France as a universal statement on war - was seen in Germany as anti-German, and, in effect, as enemy propaganda in a renascent German nation. This evaluation of the film in national terms further reflects not merely the survival, but the growing dominance of the German nationalist right and its cultural obsessions in the late twenties.
Finally, in spite of the general political orientation indicated above, these works reveal the complexity and fragmentation of attitudes toward war and nationhood during the period, and the escalating importance of film as an instrument of persuasion. Even those French critics who regarded Les Croix de bois as a great patriotic epic which glorified the French race were, despite the apparent contradiction, in accord with those who feared that the realism of the battle scenes in All Quiet would excite young minds rather than disgust them. In both cases, they perceived that the films were efforts to persuade the viewer of the truth of the war experience depicted in the film. And if the filmmaker could convince the viewer of the truth - not merely the verisimilitude - of his film, then he could also persuade that viewer of the validity of his political arguments.
Notes
[1]
Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991)
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[2]
E.J.Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 131.
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[3]
Joseph Daniel, Guerre et cinéma(Paris: Colin, 1972) 93.
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[4]
Quoted in Maurice Rieuneau, Guerre et révolution dans le roman français de 1919 á 1939 (Nancy: Klincksieck, 1974) 284.
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[5]
Henri de Montherlant, Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun (Paris: Grasset, 1925): 121. All translations are my own.
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[6]
Antoine Prost, Les Anciens combattants et la société français, 1914-1939 vol. 3 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1977) 54.
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[7]
Prost 3: 69-70
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[8]
Roland Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois (1919; Paris: Albin Michel, 1931) 149.
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[9]
Dorgelès, 371.
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[10]
Jean Debia, "Roland Dorgelès nous parle des Croix de bois," Pour Vous, 2 July 1931: 4.
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[11]
René Lehmann, "Les Croix de bois à Genève," Pour Vous, 17 March 1932: 10.
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[12]
Aline Bourgoin, "Avec Vanel, Gabrio, Blanchar, les interprètes des Croix de bois," Pour Vous 24 March 1932: 5.
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[13]
Lenny Borger, "Les Croix de bois de Raymond Bernard," Cinématographie (July-August 1983): 33-34.
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[14]
Henri Malherbe, "Un grand film français sur la guerre: Les Croix de bois," Pour Vous, 17 March 1932: 8.
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[15]
Danile 93. See also Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) 209-210.
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[16]
Michèle Lagny, "L'imaginaire de la guerre dans le cinéma français," Mémoire de la Grande Guerre; Témoins et témoinages, ed. Gerard Carnini (Nancy: Presses universitaires, 1989) 121.
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[17]
Ann P. Linder, Princes of the Trenches: Narrating the German Experience of teh First World War (Columbia, S.C.:Camden House, 1997) 151-78.
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[18]
Michael Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr des Weltkriegs in der Literatur (Kronberg/Ts.: Scriptor, 1978) 309-314;
and Hans-Harald Müller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986) 72-79, 80-92.
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[19]
Gollbach 343-45.
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[20]
Müller 80-85.
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[21]
Quoted in Müller 81.
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[22]
Müller 81-83.
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[23]
Müller 68-71, 79-80.
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[24]
"All Quiet as a Film" New York Times, 19 January 1930, full city edition, sec.11:5.
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[25]
Alexander Bakshy, "Stark War," The Nation, 11 June 1930: 688.
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[26]
Daniel 106.
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[27]
Mordaunt Hall, "A Strong War Picture," New York Times, 4 May 1930, full city edition, sec. 11:5.
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[28]
"Film Version of the Novel," Times,(London), 6 June 1930, royal edition: 14.
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[29]
"Through German Eyes," New York Times, 28 April 1930, full city edition, sec. 9:6.
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[30]
All Quiet on the Western Front, screenplay by George Abbott and Maxwell Anderson, dir. Lewis Milestone, perf. Lewis Ayres, Universal, 1930.
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[31]
René Lehmann, "Un grand film américain sur la guerre:A l'Ouest, rien de nouveau," Pour Vous, 28 November 1930: 8. N.F., "A l'Ouest, rien de nouveau, film américain...,"
Pour Vous, 10 October 1930: 6.
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[32]
Lehmann, "Un grand film."
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[33]
Richard Pierre-Bodin, "A l'Ouest, rien de nouveau," Le Figaro, 30 November 1930: 6.
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[34]
"All Quiet Arouses German Critics' Ire" New York Times, 6 December 1930, full city edition: 8.
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[35]
"Berlin Censors Pass All Quiet Film" New York Times, 30 November 1930, full city edition, sec.1:3
"Uproar over All Quiet," Times(London), 6 December 1930, royal edition: 12.
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[36]
Bärbel Schrader, ed., Der Fall Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues. Eine Dokumentation (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992) 106-107.
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[37]
Schrader 109-112.
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[38]
David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) 1-3.
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[39]
Schrader 132-22, 135-38; "German Critics' Ire" ;see "New War Spirit in German Film Row," New York Times, 7 December 1930, full city edition, sec 1:10.
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[40]
"A l'Ouest, rien de nouveau interdit en Allemagne," Je suis partout, 13 December 1930: 4.
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[41]
Schrader 134-35.
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[42]
Schrader 139-41, 146-48; "Fascist Youth Riot as All Quiet Runs," New York Times, 9 December 1930, full city edition: 17.
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[43]
Guido Enderis, "Nazis Renew Fight on Remarque Film'" New York Times, 10 December 1930, full city edition: 10.
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[44]
Schrader 142-43.
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[45]
Schrader 159; Guido Enderis, "All Quiet Banned by Reich Censors," New York Times, 12 December 1930, full city edition: 12.
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[46]
"German Critics' Ire."
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[47]
Schrader 167.
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[48]
Schrader 167.
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[49]
Quoted in "L'opinion après l'interdiction du film de Remarque," Je suis partout, 20 December 1930: 3.
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[50]
Jean Norton Cru, Témoins (Paris: Les Étincelles, 1929) 50.
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[51]
Borger 34.
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[52]
Borger 32.
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[53]
Borger 35.
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[54] Borger 32, 34.