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The war blockbuster "No War on the Western Front" adapted from the famous German writer Remark has attracted much anticipation before it was released. On October 28, 2022, "No War on the Western Front" will be launched on Netflix On the media platform, the Douban score was once as high as 9 points, and now it has a high score of 8.6 points.
, which has been hailed as the best war movie of 2022, I felt slightly disappointed after watching it. Granted, the new film is certainly technically better than the 1930 and 2012 film versions, but the big problem is that if you haven't read the original novel, you probably don't even know what the movie is talking about.
Remarque's novels were first serialized in Fox News. Because of its popularity, newspaper sales have tripled. The book was published in full in 1929 and immediately became a sensation overseas, but Remarque was hated by the Nazis for his exposure of the war in the text, and he eventually had to leave his homeland for the United States. In 1930, director Lewis Milestone put this novel on the big screen and won two heavyweight Oscars for best picture and best director that year. This director is also the director of "Eleven Arhats".
The 1930 edition of "All Quiet on the Western Front"
49 years later, in 1979, the American CBS television station produced a 150-minute TV movie, which won the Golden Globe Award Best TV Movie. And the director Delbert Mann is the director of the most famous version of "Jane Eyre" in the 1970s.
1979 edition of "All Quiet on the Western Front"
In the second half of 1927, Remark began to write the novel "All Quiet on the Western Front", which he had been brewing and conceived since the end of the war. Taking full advantage of his spare evenings, he wrote the novel in just six weeks, but the manuscript sat in a drawer for half a year. One bookstore was reluctant to publish the work, but another publisher finally accepted him. It was first serialized in the Fox News, and then after some modifications were made, it was published in a single edition. When it was serialized, the newspaper's sales tripled. After the whole book was published in January 1929, it caused a sensation in Germany and many other countries in the world. In Germany alone, 1.2 million copies were sold in the first year. In March of the same year, it was first translated into English and published in the UK, selling 275,000 copies within six weeks. Including translations in many other languages, the total circulation of this book should be more than 5 million copies, which shows its popularity. The reason why this novel
became an instant hit has a lot to do with the author's personal experience. In November 1916, Remarque was involuntarily conscripted from the Catholic Normal School in Osnabrück where he was attending, to fight in the First World War, while he was still a sophomore at the normal school.
Remarque arrived on the Western Front on June 12, 1917, after a lengthy military training at the Caprivi barracks at Osnabrück .
Writer Remark
was wounded five times during the war, especially the last time in the battle of Flanders, when he rescued a wounded comrade from the line of fire, he was shot by several grenades in a surprise attack by the British army The injury was quite serious, and after a long period of treatment, only an irreversible scar was left on the right wrist.
In mid-August, he went to a Catholic field hospital in Duisburg to recover from his injuries. On September 9, Remarque's mother died and he went home for a funeral. On October 31, 1918, he returned to Osnabrück as a soldier "available for garrison".
Although Remark did not actually participate in the war for a long time, the brutal First World War brought huge trauma to his body and mind. In fact, his time on the front line was only 6 weeks. These short 6 weeks changed Remark's life and shattered the fantasy of bloody romance among hundreds of millions of readers around the world.When they went to the front line, they stayed in the trenches day and night. "Life" was full of absurdities. They competed with mice to grab bread, distinguish different cannonballs, learn to cover, and resist poisonous gas... Soldiers whose heads were slashed by shrapnel were still running and grabbing Lost his leg after losing his beautiful boots...
These battlefield scenes haunted him like a nightmare, which is the main reason why he wrote "All Quiet on the Western Front".
opens "All Quiet on the Western Front" with Remark's words:
This book is neither a condemnation nor a confession. It's just an attempt to describe a generation that, despite dodging the shells, was devastated by war.
The brutal war is naturally the top priority of the novel. Once on the battlefield, the protagonist Paul sees a hellish scene:
Every time an attack is launched, the soldiers rush out in rows, and then fall down in rows; The machine gun fired, and was burned to death by poison gas.
During a retreat, buddy Kermorich was hit by a bullet. Paul desperately called for the doctor and the paramedic, but the answer he got was: "Sixteen people have died today, and Kemmerich is about to become the seventeenth." On the battlefield, they saw 's skull blown away were still alive; they saw soldiers running with smashed feet; they staggered into the nearest pothole, leaning on the stumps of their shattered feet; a private was crawling on two hands Two kilometers away, dragging his battered knee forward; another private went to the emergency room, his intestines slipping from his stomach to his two hands; they also saw some mouthless, A man with no jaw, no face; they found a man clenching his teeth on an artery in one of his arms for two hours, lest he bleed to his death. The sun has risen, the night has come, the grenade has been whistling, and life has come to an end.
Carter was shot, Paul and Carter both felt that the problem was not a big problem, it was a minor injury. Paul desperately rushed to the hospital behind his back. The sanitation soldier pointed at Carter and said, "He is dead."
On the eve of the end of the war, the protagonist Paul finally did not become the lucky one who ushered in the dawn of peace, and he still did not escape the fate of being killed in battle. The author of
wrote:
He was killed in October 1918. The whole front was so calm and silent that day, so the army command's battle report only read this sentence: No war on the Western Front.
He fell forward, lying on the ground as if asleep. People turned him over and saw that he probably didn't suffer for long; there was a calm expression on his face, almost a look of satisfaction, because it was finally over that way.
These are the last two paragraphs of the novel.
The book "All Quiet on the Western Front" is well written because Remarque recorded what he saw on the battlefield in a real way, without the slightest ambition of metaphysics and literary history, which he surpassed 99% An important magic weapon for German writers who are long-winded and bored at home.
Remark is a German, and it is not uncommon for British and American writers to write concise and smooth novels, but Remark is an alternative among Germans.
Although the novel is not very long, it only has more than 200 pages, but compared with the movie, the capacity of the movie is smaller. This two-and-a-half-hour movie is only a few snippets from the novel for processing. It's very high, but it's a bit thin compared to the novel. The novel
earned Remark a huge reputation, but was also persecuted by the Nazis for it.
In 1930, the Nazis found his head. They attacked him for his anti-heroic approach to the First World War, and Remarck had to leave Berlin and even Germany. After leaving Berlin, he went to Switzerland and settled in the port of Longdale on Lake Maggiore, where he heard the news of the Nazi coup. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Remarque's work was publicly burned along with works by Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Brecht, and others, and was subsequently stripped of his German citizenship in 1938 because of his steadfast refusal to return. . The following year, he moved to the United States, and until 1942, he spent most of his time in Hollywood, putting his works on the screen, and became an American citizen in 1947. Although Remarque was in exile, the Nazi regime did not ease its persecution of him. In December 1943, his sister Elfried, who was still in Germany, was sentenced to death by a Nazi court on a trumped-up charge of falsely accusing him of not believing Germany would win.
In 1958, Remarque married Hollywood actress Pauline Gaudí, the ex-wife of comedy superstar Chaplin . She and Chaplin divorced in 1942, and her marriage to Remarque continued until Remarque's death in 1970, and she inherited a large fortune from Remarque, which included some contemporary art in Europe.
Pauline Goldie, wife of Remarque
Pauline Goldie passed away on April 23, 1990 at the age of 80. There is a saying that the rich Hollywood woman Li Chunping met was Pauline Godai. If this is true, it means that a large part of Li Chunping's inheritance came from Remark. Of course, I am afraid that only Li Chunping himself knows whether this statement is true or not.
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