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The subject of this chapter is the Oscar-winning film All Quiet on the Western Front. After discussion of why the Laemmle family’s Universal Studios wanted to make film of Erich Maria Remarque’s celebrated novel, the chapter considers the screenplay adaptation, casting of Lew Ayres in leading role, the revolutionary sound design, influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage technique, reception and political reaction to the film in the United States, and changing attitudes towards World War I. The final section focuses on the hostile reception of the film in Germany, where it was used by the Nazi leaders, especially Joseph Goebbels, for propaganda purposes, and how the film’s global renown changed Milestone’s life.

This chapter treats Milestone’s life and work from 1945 to 1949. The highly publicized failure of the expensive feature Arch of Triumph, produced by new Enterprise Studios, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in an adaptation of Remarque’s novel about refugees in Paris before the Nazi invasion, damaged Milestone’s artistic reputation. This coincided with Milestone being named by the HUAC as one of The Hollywood Nineteen and accused of pro-Communist sympathies. Although not called to testify, he supported those who were and attended HUAC hearings. A discussion of No Minor Vices and The Red Pony, another Steinbeck adaption starring Robert Mitchum and Copland’s score, concludes the chapter.

Two of Sirk’s last three films were driven by the experiences of earlier times. The Tarnished Angels, adapted from William Faulkner’s Pylon, was a project he’d originally planned to make at UFA; A Time to Love and a Time to Die is a drama about Germany in a state of collapse towards the end of World War II and tells a story that was very close to Sirk’s heart. Both provide evidence of a filmmaker working at the peak of his art.

This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a predicament in which war itself becomes a kind of Ithaca, the only home to which the adolescent soldier has any intimate or tangible connection. Narrator Paul Bäumer and his schoolfellows inhabit a No Man’s Land of their own: they are young but have lost hope; they feel old but have no yesteryear; they are refugees whose yearning is without shape or object. Whatever images of home they had when they enlisted, whatever plans for the future, were too nebulous, too lacking in resilience to compete with war’s intensity, its ubiquity and noise. The chapter shows that, despite its apparent pessimism, All Quiet was envisaged as a first step towards finding the ‘way back’ and pointing out ‘the road onward’, and that writing the book was itself a form of nostos.

Arguing that the war in the east has been overshadowed in public remembrance by literary depictions of the war on the western front, Eva Horn delves into novelistic portrayals of the eastern front. The chapter finds that, in contrast to the traumatic technologized trench warfare of the west, the “wild war” on the eastern front was “not a war of machines but a war of bodies and mentalities, not a war of nations but of ethnicities, not a war of destruction from a distance but a dirty, destructive interaction between enemies.”