SOURCE: Geisler, Michael. “The Battleground of Modernity: Westfront 1918 (1930).” In The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, edited by Eric Rentschler, pp. 91-102. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Geisler examines the ways in which Pabst's film Westfront 1918 reflects Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic rather than the events of World War I depicted in the film.]

A number of major texts in film history have never been accorded their due because more popular contemporary releases have pre-empted the audience's as well as the critics' attention and interest. Pabst was twice unlucky in this respect. The Joyless Street (1925) had had to compete with D. W. Griffith's 1924 release, Isn't Life Wonderful?, which dealt with inflation-ridden post-World War I Germany. Likewise, when Westfront 1918 premiered on May 23, 1930 at the Berlin Capitol Theater, it was soon superseded by Lewis Milestone's slicker and technically more sophisticated All Quiet on the Western Front (released in Germany in December of 1930). Milestone's film benefited from the spectacular international success of Erich Maria Remarque's novel of 1929,¹ whereas Pabst had adapted a relatively obscure narrative by Ernst Johannsen, Vier von der Infanterie.²

Although present-day critics tend to see Westfront as an achievement of equal value to, or perhaps even surpassing All Quiet on the Western Front, the canon will not be corrected quite so easily.³ In 1961, thirty filmmakers, theorists, critics, and historians were asked the curious question, which films were “most effective” in addressing the problems of war and peace. All Quiet on the Western Front showed up on twelve lists, while Westfront was named only twice.⁴ Given this kind of reception history, my primary goal in this essay is to open up an access route to the film by exploring how it interacts with the immediate socio-historical and cultural environment, the final crisis-ridden years of the Weimar Republic, and not, as one might expect, its narrative referent, the end of World War I.

THE TEXT

Pabst wanted his first “talkie” to reflect the aesthetic potential of sound.⁵ Both All Quiet on the Western Front and Westfront 1918 established a basic convention of the war film genre; the relentless assault on the acoustic nerves of the audience through the verisimilitudinous reproduction of artillery noise, machine-gun fire, and the screams of the wounded and dying has become a stock component of (most) combat war films, part of a calculated synthesis intended to shock the viewer into reliving the experience of battle.

The film's opening sequence introduces three of the four central characters in a genre picture, or, as Aubry and Pétat call it, an “image d'Epinal.”⁶ Behind the German front lines, a group of soldiers, billeted in a French house, are shown flirting with a young French woman, Yvette, who lives in the house with her grandfather. We are introduced to the scene through the subjective perspective of “the student.” The jovial “Bavarian” is playing cards with Karl, the only one of the foursome introduced by name and in some ways the film's protagonist. A friendly, but serious and reserved character, Karl is apparently a white-collar worker (in the book he is an engineer). The idyllic scene is suddenly disrupted by a short burst of artillery shelling, during which the student and Yvette discover their mutual attraction.

A brief transition introduces the lieutenant and takes us to the front lines. Shelled by their own artillery, Karl and the Bavarian are buried alive beneath the rubble, but saved by fellow soldiers in a dramatic rescue operation. Since the telephone lines are down, the lieutenant sends the student, as a volunteer, to relay the message that the German trenches are being shelled by ‘friendly fire.’ The student uses the opportunity to sneak back to the village for a brief reunion with Yvette. Returning to the front, he runs into Karl, who is on leave visiting his wife for the first time in eighteen months. Resting on the edge of a shell crater, in the middle of a vast, empty, war-torn landscape, the two soldiers have a chat, with the student telling Karl he is in love with Yvette.

A long transitional sequence follows in which we see a chanteuse and two music hall clowns perform for hundreds of soldiers at a front theater. Besides bridging the gap in narrated time created by Karl's journey home, this sequence gives Pabst a chance to show off the production values of the new sound film.⁷

Coming home, Karl first runs into a local businessman who asks why they haven't taken Paris yet. Meanwhile, Karl's mother has been standing in line for hours at the butcher's. A neighbor discovers Karl crossing the line to get to his apartment, but the mother, although desperate to see her son, cannot afford to wait for days or weeks for another chance to get a piece of meat. In the end, the store is sold out just as she reaches the entrance.

Entering his apartment, Karl finds his wife in bed with a lover—the butcher's son, who has bought her affections with food. Dumbfounded, Karl stumbles back to the kitchen, picks up his rifle, and returns to the bedroom, where he forces his wife and the lover to kiss at gunpoint, but then his anger gives way to resignation. Dropping the weapon, he sees a draft notice on the table. “You too?” he asks the lover. The man nods and quietly leaves. Karl's wife blames the hunger at home for her actions, repeating stereotypically, “Ich kann doch nichts dafür” (“It isn't my fault”). Karl does not reproach his wife any further, but refuses to show (or accept) any signs of affection during his entire leave, departing without a gesture of reconciliation.

The scenes at home are contrastively interspersed with sequences at the front where, during a sudden attack by French troops, the student is killed in hand-to-hand combat. Her house destroyed by artillery shelling, Yvette is relocated by the German army. She does not want to leave her village, for fear that the student will never find her; she has not heard of his death yet.

Returning to the front, Karl, in an obviously suicidal gesture, volunteers for a dangerous mission ahead of the German front. Although fully aware of the danger, the Bavarian nevertheless goes with him. The lieutenant has been informed that the French are planning a major attack and that he has to hold the line at all cost. What follows are the film's most spectacular sequences, a crescendo of increasingly heavy shelling and massive infantry combat scenes, culminating in a tank attack. In the course of the onslaught, the Bavarian is killed by a French hand grenade, and Karl fatally wounded. In what is probably the best-known shot of the film, the lieutenant, his mind cracked from the insanity of the slaughter, slowly rises from a heap of dead bodies to offer a final, lunatic salute to his unseen superiors.

The final sequence shows the aftermath of battle. A transition shot takes us, along with the mad lieutenant, into an army hospital filled with the screams and groans of the wounded and dying. Before dying himself, Karl experiences a hallucinatory vision of his wife, accusing him of having left her without a reconciliation. “It isn't my fault,” she says. “We are all guilty,” Karl responds in a mumble. Without realizing that Karl is already dead, a wounded French soldier lying next to him takes his hand, and, caressing it slowly, assures him, “Moi, camarade … pas enemie, pas enemie …”

Westfront 1918 was shot during the spring of 1930, after Pabst's return from England, where he had familiarized himself with the new sound technology. Having seen a number of Hollywood sound productions in London, he was very dissatisfied with the way they immobilized camera and crew inside stationary soundproof booths. For Westfront, he chose instead to opt for the far more mobile “blimps,” a soundproof casing which encloses only the body of the camera (with the controls extended through the casing), leaving it free to roam the soundstage. This was all the more important because of the new continuity problems presented by sound. German sound production at the time was still fairly primitive and sound mixing technology was not yet available.

For the combat sequences, Pabst and his editors Hans (later Jean) Oser and Paul Falkenberg inserted pieces of sound track containing the explosions by hand between lines of dialogue, sometimes between words, to match the visuals. The resulting synchronization problems were enormous, since the slightest mistake would make the explosions obscure the dialogue.⁸ Pabst realized that he could not employ the “invisible cutting” which had become his directorial trademark since The Joyless Street. Relying on the mobility of the blimp camera to the fullest, Pabst used a visual technique he had tried successfully in The Love of Jeanne Ney, a mode of internal montage sometimes referred to as editing-within-the-shot. A pan or travelling shot of very long duration is subdivided by the arrangement and composition of movement within the frame. The careful coordination of camera movement and blocking conveys the impression of a series of different shots organized around a natural dramatic progression.

The first shot of the initial trench sequence demonstrates this technique. Lasting a total of sixty-five seconds, it opens with a “marker”: a not very high-angle view of barbed wire covering the trenches. From the lower border of the frame emerges a group of soldiers led by the lieutenant; tracking with the group, the camera travels to the right along the line of the trench. Hesitating briefly when the lieutenant stops to receive the report, it then leaves him to pick up a group of soldiers entering the frame from behind the officer and follows them to their stations along the battle line. Another halt is motivated by two groups of soldiers who have been waiting in a connecting trench. Again emerging from the lower border of the frame, one troop moves to the left, one to the right; the camera, as if uncertain where to go, first follows the troop moving to the left, but then, reconsidering, resumes its previous track to the right, finally stopping and tilting up to open the view to the area in front of the German lines. In doing so, it defines the stage for the first major explosions which cloud up the image, providing a logical point for a cut.⁹

Along with the creative use of the long take and the traveling shot, Pabst also exploited the creative tension between sound and image. Characteristically, he used sound as a bridge between sequences. The idyllic scene in Yvette's house ends with an older soldier playfully spanking a younger comrade; at that precise moment, a grenade explodes, thrusting the house into darkness and setting the stage for the war sequences to follow. Similarly, at the end of the front theater sequence, the band plays a marching song which dissolves into another march (Ludwig Uhland's “Ich hatt' einen Kameraden”) played by the band of a troop of young recruits who are leaving Karl's home town for the front. The audio overlap links the two heterogeneous sequences, bridging the time/space ellipsis. Audio-visual counterpoint creates ironic tension and provides a sense of foreboding. As Karl ascends the stairs to his apartment (where he will find his wife in the embrace of another man), the soldiers in the streets sing, “In der Heimat … da gibt's ein Wiedersehen” (“Someday, coming home, we will meet again”).

According to his collaborators, Pabst actively solicited advice from his production team. One of the more impressive shots of the final sequence is said to have been suggested by the cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner. To cover up Gustav Diessl's consummate overacting in his death scene, Pabst told him to simply lie perfectly still, with his eyes open, while Wagner slowly turned a light away from his face. The result is an eerily underplayed, highly suggestive impression of death.

Pabst's editor on Westfront, Hans Oser, claims that Pabst, under pressure from the producers, excised an important scene:

During the last days of World War I it was pretty quiet: the French were living in their trenches, and the Germans in theirs, and really they didn't have a war going between them anymore. And somehow they even had fun with each other; they yelled at each other and all. And there is one sequence then where the French are on their parapets—they are lying in the sun; and the Germans on theirs. And suddenly a German general comes to visit the Front. He comes in, looks through his binoculars, and says: “Are you crazy? Look at them all exposed! Come on! Load! Shoot!” So the Germans start shooting. Naturally, the French immediately make an attack which leads to the end of the movie and the entire slaughter scene.¹⁰

If Oser's account is correct, this would be a significant omission. The scene would have been one of the very few moments where Pabst (and scenarists Ladislaus Vajda and Peter Martin Lampel) would have broken through the restrictive perspective of simply showing the sufferings of the common soldier; it might even have been one of the few points where the film would have hinted at an answer to Karl's final self-accusation. As described by Oser, the omitted sequence suggests an allusion to Germany's attack on neutral Belgium at the beginning of World War I and thus could have been interpreted as an admission of guilt.

CONTEMPORARY RECEPTION

Summarizing contemporary response to Westfront, Lee Atwell claims: “Although acknowledging Pabst's artistry, the press found little to praise in a work that so graphically showed German military defeat, especially at a time when the country was already primed for another war for the Fatherland.”¹¹ Apart from the historical inaccuracy—in 1930 few Germans were interested in fighting another war—a survey of leading film critics contradicts Atwell's account. With the obvious exception of the Hugenberg press and the fascist papers, most contemporary critics liked the film. Writing in the Berliner Tageblatt, Eugen Szatmari extolled the film's realistic portrayal of the horrors of war, while at the same time pointing to Pabst's refusal of Hollywood-style “realism,” which permits special effects to dominate the narrative. He saw the significance of the principal characters in their function as types, representatives for the millions of soldiers who died in the front lines. Although he criticized Pabst for his inadequate portrayal of the misery and hunger at home, Szatmari concluded: “In the fight against war, this film is … worth more than thousands of books, pamphlets, and articles.”¹² In the journal Die literarische Welt, Ernst Blass compared the film to the greatest achievements of the Russian filmmakers, calling it “the first sound film that justifies this invention” and “the most important German film in years.”¹³ According to Herbert Ihering, the influential critic of the Berliner Börsen-Courier, the film's very strength—the realistic representation of the chaos of war—also provides its central weakness. The chaos is simply duplicated, instead of becoming an integral part of an organized, unified idea. The film “lacks a consistent effect, because it is not based on a specific point of view, because it lacks a guiding idea.” Yet Ihering also praises Pabst for his use of sound, adding that “one can only criticize any aspect of this film after having emphasized that it towers high above the average German production.”¹⁴

In his Frankfurter Zeitung review, Siegfried Kracauer, like Szatmari, faulted the film's portrayal of the conditions at home, but he praised Pabst's creativity in handling sound and the film's authentic presentation of the war experience. He strongly recommended Westfront as a historical document: “Already a generation has reached the age of maturity which does not know those years from personal experience. They have to see, and see time and again, what they have not seen for themselves. It is unlikely that the things they see will work as a deterrent, but they must at least know about them.”¹⁵ At the time, Kracauer still seems to have believed that works of art might serve as instruments of raisonnement, if not as agents of political change—enough so, at any rate, to recommend the film as a catalyst for the construction of public memory. Sixteen years later, as he settled accounts with Weimar cinema in From Caligari to Hitler, he would reverse his 1930 evaluation. Kracauer now charged Westfront with the same shortcomings traditionally held against texts of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a weakness consisting in

not transgressing the limits of pacifism itself. This indictment of war is not supported by the slightest hint of its causes, let alone by insight into them. … Westfront 1918 amounts to a noncommittal survey of war horrors. Their exhibition is a favorite weapon of the many pacifists who indulge in the belief that the mere sight of such horrors suffices to deter people from war.¹⁶

Not unpredictably, Die Rote Fahne, the Communist Party newspaper, attacked the film's “pacifist obfuscation” which avoided any true criticism of the imperialist war. As Michael Gollbach has pointed out in his analysis of anti-war novels of the Weimar Republic, this was standard procedure: the Communists attacked pacifism even more vehemently than they attacked the militarists on the Right. They considered pacifism a dangerous delusion, since it kept people from thinking about the real causes of war.¹⁷ Against this backdrop it is all the more remarkable that Die Rote Fahne's anonymous reviewer, having made his anti-pacifist point, proceeded to commend the film for its “courageous realism” and its lack of sentimentality.¹⁸

General audience response seems to have been mixed: several critics report that moviegoers were shocked by the realistic depiction of the slaughter,¹⁹ and the Nazis apparently tried to disrupt the premiere, but were shouted down by war veterans.²⁰ Eight months later when All Quiet on the Western Front opened in Berlin, the Nazis succeeded, through riots and mass demonstrations, in effecting the banning of Milestone's film until September of 1931, when a heavily censored version was released. Eventually, of course, the Nazis would get their way with Westfront as well. On April 27, 1933, after Hitler's ascension to power, the film was banned in Germany.

Westfront was widely distributed in France (in a French version and in the original German), and was highly acclaimed by critics there as well as in England, where it circulated on a smaller scale.²¹ In the United States, the film was handicapped by its release after the spectacular success of All Quiet and James Whale's screen adaptation of Robert C. Sherriff's Journey's End, and by the fact that no English-language version seems to have been available. While the reviewer for Variety, reporting from Berlin in May 1930, enthusiastically extolled “this overwhelming picture with its clear and true to life view on the horrors of war,” the New Yorker, after the American release of early 1931, showed signs of battle fatigue: “It's the horrors of war again, and there are some bits as truly agonizing as anything we have seen of the sort. If you don't know German, however, you are going to be floored by the story.”²² Mordaunt Hall, in the New York Times, conceded that “this film is undoubtedly another good argument against war,” but went on to complain that it was “not a good entertainment,” since “many of the interesting phases of battles are excluded.”²³Time, however, hailed the film as “one of the best directed and most gruesome of War pictures,” noting especially that Pabst was less of a moralizer than Milestone. And in what has since turned out to be the blueprint for nearly every German production successfully distributed in the United States, the reviewer gave Pabst credit for creating, with small resources, “a picture that in every technical respect except sound can compete with the best Hollywood product.”²⁴

Although it could never seriously compete with the popularity of All Quiet, Westfront managed to establish itself as one of the premier anti-war films and a brilliant example of a director's optimal use of a new cinematic code, even while the technology still lay in its infancy. In 1960, it was included in a series of articles focussing on “Great Films of the Century,”²⁵ and in 1981, it was one of four Pabst works to be re-released in Paris.²⁶ While it is often grouped with The Threepenny Opera and Kameradschaft as part of Pabst's “Social Trilogy,” this classification is somewhat misleading.²⁷ If there are similar concerns in Pabst's texts of this period, they are to be found in Westfront and Kameradschaft, and not so much in The Threepenny Opera. The two films address a common issue through very different but obviously complementary narratives. Kameradschaft picks up exactly where Westfront leaves off. The fraternization between the French soldier and the dying Karl (“Moi, camarade … pas enemie”) anticipates the solidarity of the German workers overcoming the ideology of the “arch enemy” to come to the rescue of their French comrades. The opening sequence of the two boys, one French, one German, fighting over marbles in Kameradschaft relegates the atrocities of Westfront to the realm of immature behavior. In one often-cited scene of Kameradschaft, an old French miner, seeing the German rescuer approaching with his gas mask over his face, experiences a hallucinatory flashback to the war. And the ironic final sequence, cut from some contemporary versions, returns us to the world of Westfront 1918 with the inscription over the border gate reading “Frontière 1919.” Kameradschaft thus works as a companion piece to Westfront, pointing to the possibility of positive action where the earlier film had been content to show the relatively passive suffering of the soldiers.

In contrast, The Threepenny Opera looks more like a throwback to the chiaroscuro, the decor, and the romantic netherworld of the expressionist phase.²⁸ The painted sets and dreamlike streets of Macheath's Soho have little in common with the documentary realism of the trench scenes in Westfront or the shower room sequence in Kameradschaft. And the steamy intrigues of Polly, Macheath, and Peachum are more reminiscent of the liaisons dangereuses of Pandora's Box than of the cool, detached group portraits of both Westfront and Kameradschaft—which are, ironically, much less illusionist, since the lack of a central identification figure undermines empathy for the sake of a concentration, however distracted, on the narrative itself. I would therefore, as Aubry and Pétat do,²⁹ group Westfront and Kameradschaft together as a diptych which shares with The Threepenny Opera little more than the same moment in Pabst's life.³⁰

The one feature of Westfront that almost all reviewers and critics seem to agree on is the “near-documentary realism” of its portrayal of the war. In fact, the word “documentary” crops up in nearly every article or book written on the film.³¹ Applied to the context of 1929, “documentary” does more than describe a particular style. It points to a specific period in German cultural history and the aesthetics associated with it, namely the Neue Sachlichkeit.

NEUE SACHLICHKEIT AND THE WAR NOVEL

Westfront 1918 was the first major feature film from Germany to portray life at the front and combat in the trenches, and, apparently, one of the first anti-war features on the international scene.³² Thus, while there were at the time no preestablished patterns of cinematic reception (hence the strong reactions to the vivid battle scenes), the film nevertheless inserted itself into the contemporary discourse of war novels in the late twenties and early thirties. Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grischa (Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa, (1927), Ludwig Renn's War (Krieg, 1928), Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Western nichts Neues, 1929), Theodor Plivier's The Kaiser's Coolies (Des Kaisers Kulis, (1930), Edlef Köppen's Higher Command (Heeresbericht, 1930), and Adam Scharrer's Renegades (Vaterlandslose Gesellen, 1930) are notable examples of a wave of anti-war novels, most of them thinly fictionalized diaries, that swept Germany during the late Weimar years. They stood in contrast to an equally strong reaction from the Right which valorized the war experience, following the early example set by Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern, 1920). While few of these works except for Jünger's diaries have achieved a permanent place in the literary canon, it is important to keep in mind that, at least after 1930, they far outstripped the pacifist literature in terms of quantity (even though none of them attained the popularity of Remarque's book).³³ In the years immediately following the war there was, in fact, a surge of books dealing with World War I in which the militaristic perspective dominated.³⁴ Against these uncritical glorifications of the German military, the few critical books that came out during this period could not prevail, particularly since very few of them had the literary qualities of Egon Erwin Kisch's reportage Soldier in the Prague Korps (Soldat im Prager Korps, 1922).

For the first ten years of the Weimar Republic, the interpretation of events as provided by the military thus became the official view of the war. This contributed significantly to the eventual acceptance of the “stab-in-the-back” legend, the myth, promoted by the German General Staff, that the army, undefeated on the battlefield, had been cut down from behind by a war-weary home front.³⁵ These were the specific historical developments to which the neusachlichen war narratives reacted. Among the many radically different, and sometimes even contradictory currents of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the most obviously fallacious, yet most intriguing and influential one, is grounded in the persuasive power of documentary authenticity and factual reportage.³⁶ In an effort to create a critical public sphere through documentary drama and film, through the new techniques of collage and montage, through the newspaper editorial, the muckraking investigation, and the new genre of literary reportage developed by Egon Erwin Kisch and others, critical realists attempted to provide information that would otherwise be restricted to a small circle of industrialists and militarists.

In this light, the pathetic irony of the end of All Quiet on the Western Front assumes an added, political dimension: “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All Quiet on the Western Front.”³⁷ Hard to translate into English, the original conveys a subtle, yet important variance between the title and the way the line is quoted at the end of the novel: “im Westen sei nichts Neues zu melden” (my italics).³⁸ In the indirect speech, the subjunctive form “sei” contains a basic tension, a claim to put the record straight by telling things as they really were, a claim that informs not only Remarque's book, but most of the anti-war novels and diaries of the time. In Edlef Köppen's Higher Command, the juxtaposition of the official war reports issued by the Army High Command (long documentary inserts taken from official army news releases), and the actual experiences of the soldiers is not only thematized, it becomes the structural basis for a complex narrative montage.³⁹ The documentary realism of the Neue Sachlichkeit, especially in the anti-war novels of 1929-1930, thus seeks to establish a counter-history from below, to undermine the dominant historiography by confronting it with the facts.⁴⁰

In retrospect, the naiveté of this strategy is apparent. It took the operative fiction of the bourgeois public sphere—the free flow of information as a corollary to the free exchange of other commodities—at face value, as if it existed in historical reality. At the time, however, things may have looked different. The Weimar constitution gave Germany, for the first time in history, something akin to freedom of expression. With the advent of the stabilization period, when it appeared that the fragile Republic might be more robust than any of its supporters had dared to hope, the time seemed right to try and set the record straight. Given the tremendous ideological smokescreens thrown up by the militant Right for more than a decade, was it really such a farfetched idea to think that the public, once confronted with the facts, would stop believing fairy tales? Yet this only partially explains the sudden boom in war narratives and the record-breaking sales of Remarque's novel. What had changed in the fabric of German society to bring about this renewed interest in war narratives in 1929-1930?

No doubt the world economic crisis that began with the New York stock market crash on October 25, 1929 is of importance here. While the crisis hit most Western nations hard enough, the German situation was exacerbated by the fact that people had just barely gained confidence in the economic and political stability of the Republic, based on a mere five years of relative calm and prosperity. Most Germans remembered the decade between 1914 and 1923-1924 as a continuity of war, terror in the streets, massive inflation and unemployment, and national humiliation—this in contrast to a Wilhelmine Empire which, along with authoritarian rule, had brought Germans an unprecedented half century of peace and relative prosperity.⁴¹ The crisis reignited the debate about the lost war and its aftermath, for both the Left and the Right, the “root cause” of Weimar's economic and societal woes.⁴² On a psychological level, the return to World War I went beyond the goal of establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between 1918-1919 and 1928-1929. Rather, the renewed debate amounted to a displaced attempt at coming to terms with the problems of 1929-1930. Besides being its possible “root cause,” the war also provided a convincing metaphor for widespread economic anxieties, feelings of undeserved victimization, and general fears that the fabric of society was coming apart at the seams.⁴³

Many of the literary texts associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit share common thematic and political concerns with the war novels—concerns that go beyond similarities in form and style. The randomization of life (and death) in the city, as expressed in such diverse works as Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927), Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), or Erich Kästner's Fabian (1931), closely resembles the experience of random injury and death in the trenches as related by the war novels and films, with the big city replacing the war as the impersonal agent of fate. The protagonists of these novels—and here one could add Hans Fallada's Little Man—What Now? (Kleiner Mann—was nun?, 1932)—are largely passive individuals, clearly not in control of their own lives, exactly the predicament of the nonheroes of the anti-war novels. Helmut Lethen writes of the death of Erich Kästner's civilian hero Fabian that “the demise of the moralist condemns the survival strategies of all the other characters in the novel as immoral” (and hence, by implication, those of Weimar society as a whole).⁴⁴ Analogously, the deaths of the four protagonists of Westfront 1918, like the death of Remarque's Paul Bäumer, are not merely an indictment of Prussian militarism, but also an accusation of contemporary society in the late Weimar Republic.⁴⁵

Against this backdrop, several of the episodes in Westfront take on additional significance: the vagaries of the soldiers' lives, the unexpected strokes of luck which have to be enjoyed with a carpe diem mentality before they dissipate into thin air, as well as the completely unpredictable misfortunes, including sudden death, mirror the incidental perspective in the novels of the Neue Sachlichkeit. This neusachliche mentality is visualized by Pabst in the brief sequence where the student, returning from his short reunion with Yvette, runs into Karl, who is going home on leave. We first see Karl in a long shot as a small figure silhouetted against an expansive wasteland of charcoaled tree trunks, brush wood, and bomb craters. The two then sit down on the edge of a large shell crater, their legs dangling over the side, and share their experiences, chatting happily, quite unperturbed by their incommodious accommodations. Reinforced by the framing (a two shot which excludes the desolate background), this scene recalls Walter Benjamin's classic characterization of the neusachliche mentality: “Never have people made themselves more at home in an uncomfortable situation.”⁴⁶

The short-lived relationship between the student and Yvette originates during his brief stay at her house. They are separated when the student is called to the front, but he finds his way back, twice risking his life for the chance to spend one night with her. Their eventual separation contains a typically neusachliche sense of irony. As Yvette screams from offscreen for fear that the student might not be able to find her again, the audience knows that she need not bother: he has already been killed. The only difference between their affair and the many nearly identical ones in the ‘civilian’ novels of Neue Sachlichkeit is that here the protagonists' completely randomized existence can “still” be traced back to an identifiable, plausible, if insane, cause: the war. The lieutenant's crazed salute at the end is not merely an accusation of Wilhelmine militarism; it is also an allegorical reflection of the desperate, cynical irony of a middle class and its intelligentsia uprooted not by the war, but by its progressive proletarianization, which became particularly virulent during the world economy crisis.⁴⁷ Since one is unable (or unwilling) to comprehend the economic forces underlying this process, one must either capitulate to a totally randomized experience (speaking of Neue Sachlichkeit's cynical resignation) or displace the problem to another plane, where a more transparent cause-effect relationship can be substituted. War, being the classic repository of chance existence, is still one step away from complete randomness.

For the writers and filmmakers of the late Weimar Republic, war became a non-synchronous, but identifiable metaphor to express their experience of lost values and identities, their social, economic, and political anxieties. This rhetoric of war is by no means confined to the war novel proper. The protagonist of Kästner's Fabian finds himself in a dream in which he observes scores of people standing on an endless stairwell, each with his or her hand in the pockets of the person on the next higher rung of the ladder, while simultaneously being robbed by the people behind them. Fabian's idealistic friend Labude announces that advent of the age of reason, cheered on by the people, who nevertheless continue to pick each other's pockets. The scene now turns into one of bloody civil war reminiscent of the Spartacus uprising, with figures shooting from windows and roof tops. The people on the stairwell take cover, but continue to steal from each other; they are killed with their hands still in each other's pockets.⁴⁸ Kästner's text foregrounds the interrelationship between economic exploitation, the failure of the German Enlightenment, and apocalyptic violence, doubly displaced, however, onto the level of moral exhortation and the realm of dreams. Similarly, Pabst thematizes, in the scenes between Karl, his wife, and her lover, the interdependence of economic reification (she sleeps with the butcher because he provides her with food), political events (the draft notice), and ethical values (Karl is admonished by his mother and his wife not to apply the yardstick of “normal” moral behavior to extreme situations). Karl's subsequent death in battle is the direct result of his inability to adapt to a system of ethics predicated on the commodification of values. The privileged position Pabst grants to the homecoming scene suggests that the discussion of value commodification is the film's hidden center—a reading already established in the preceding scene when the mother must suppress her desire to welcome her returning son in the interest of keeping her place in line at the butcher's.

This interpretation would go beyond a reading of war as a displaced metaphor for the general uncertainty of the times. It would align Westfront with the concerns expressed by Pabst in such apparently different texts as The Joyless Street and Pandora's Box by revealing, at the heart of the text, a reflection on the reification of ethics and human relationships, an issue which is one of the central themes of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Pabst throws Karl's character into higher relief by giving him a name rather than a simple designation like “The Bavarian,” “The Student,” “The Lieutenant.”⁴⁹ This underscores the importance of the character in the narrative's overall configuration. Together, the three types constitute a microcosm of the German class system: the proletarian, the officer, and the academic (who doubles as the youth). Karl's brief encounter with the capitalist adds a crucial social type. Pabst thus gives, on the one hand, a dispassionately “objective” account of the war, taking pains to relate it to all facets of German society, which is offset, on the other hand, by a subjectivized approach showing the dehumanizing effect of the war on the personal sphere. The overall impression is one of pervasive destruction.

CHATTING ON THE EDGE OF A SHELL HOLE

The operative limits of Westfront are circumscribed by the limits of liberal opposition to war, a framework in which war is understood and presented as a natural disaster, inexorable, incalculable, inescapable. As Richard Whitehall puts it, Pabst's preoccupations “are not those of a man running counter to popular thought,” but instead have to be seen as “the reliable reflection of liberal European thought in general.”⁵⁰

However, it is this seismographic consciousness (along with Pabst's undisputed directorial skills) which makes Westfront such an extremely intriguing text after all. By keeping viewers at arm's length from most of the character types, Pabst denies them genuine identification, avoiding the empathic short-circuit so characteristic of many war films. This effect is further enhanced by the contradictions in Karl's personality; in collapsing the barriers between public sphere (front) and private domain (home), the film transcends both its own dichotomous vision and the limitations of the war film genre. War is shown as an overwhelmingly destructive social force which cannot be contained either geographically (at the front) or psychologically (by seeking salvation in interpersonal relationships unaffected by the war experience).

The only real escape from war is incidental, ephemeral, and bracketed in time and space (as in the student's brief, risky reunion with his lover). When projected against the portrayal of war as all-encompassing destruction, affecting every aspect of human interaction, the film's vignettes of evanescent happiness, culled from the surrounding chaos, are precise visual analogues to their counterparts in Steppenwolf or Fabian, with war, in Westfront, replacing less clearly defined agents (the Big City, modernism, vague notions of objectification) as the displaced cause for the destruction of values and lives. These surprising analogies between a classic war film and key texts of the Neue Sachlichkeit point to underlying affinities extending far beyond the pale of the war novels proper.

However, the dominance of the war metaphor in texts of the Neue Sachlichkeit, at least on the left-liberal side of its spectrum, cannot be explained in terms of a particular Weimar predisposition towards militarism. Nor is Peter Sloterdijk's interpretation of Weimar culture's use of “the front” as a metaphor for the Republic's modernist cynicism entirely convincing.⁵¹ I would instead suggest that the pervasive rhetoric of war, even on the Left, points to an awareness among Weimar intellectuals of living in an uncertain peace beneath which the real conflicts behind World War I remained unresolved. In a recent book on the Holocaust, Arno J. Mayer calls the time between 1914 and 1945 “the second Thirty Years War,” referring to the continuing tensions and armed conflicts in Central Europe.⁵² It is this sensibility, the feeling of existing in a temporal no-man's-land somewhere between undeclared peace and undeclared war, which finds its most characteristic expression in the texts of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Westfront supplies the key visual image for this sensibility: the meeting between the student and Karl, in the middle of a wasteland, where the two sit on the edge of a crater. The quintessential expression of the neusachliche perspective on life—“chatting on the edge of a shell hole”—is the Weimar Republic's equivalent to Paris dancing on a volcano.

Notes

1. In Germany, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) sold more than one million copies within sixteen months of its first publication by Ullstein Verlag in January of 1929; by the end of 1929, the book had been translated into twelve languages. See Michael Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr des Weltkrieges in der Literatur (Kronberg/Taunus: Scriptor, 1978), 42. It is probably to this day the single most popular book ever published by a German author.

2. Translations of Vier von der Infanterie (Hamburg: Fackelreiter-Verlag, 1929) supplied some of the various alternative titles of the film in foreign releases: Four Infantry Men, Comrades of 1918, Shame of A Nation. In France, the film is generally known as Quatre de l'infanterie.

3. “The controversy over the superiority of All Quiet or Westfront continues today. Both are distinguished movies, but Pabst's film is probably the better.” See Jack Spears, “World War I on the Screen,” Films in Review 17 (May-June/July 1966): 361. Spears argues that Pabst's film has “more sustained realism” and “less sentimentality” than Milestone's. Compare also William Uricchio, “Westfront 1918,” in Magill's Survey of Cinema. Foreign Language Films, 8 vols., ed. Frank N. Magill (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Salem, 1985), 7:3350: “Unlike the more successful All Quiet on the Western Front, Westfront 1918 avoids sensationalist pathos and emotionalism, providing instead a sober exposé of the consequences of war.”

4. Robert Hughes, ed., Film: Book 2. Films of War and Peace (New York: Grove, 1962), 154-202.

5. See Noël Carroll, “Lang, Pabst, and Sound,” Ciné-tracts (Montreal) 2.1 (Fall 1978): 15-23.

6. Yves Aubry and Jacques Pétat, G. W. Pabst (Paris: Editions l'Avant-Scène, 1968), 333. This is an apt comparison, as it links the sequence to the rich but largely neglected tradition of popular visual narrative. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the French city of Epinal was the center of the illustrated print, a medium, which, at that time, played a similar role in the popular imagination as film and television have in this century.

7. Here, as in other parts of the film, Pabst takes great care to expose the viewer to a variety of German dialects. This is a feature the film shares with much of the contemporary war literature, a reminder that, for many of the soldiers, the encounter in the trenches with comrades from all over Germany was also the first physical experience of their country as a united body, the German nation-state being less than fifty years old.

8. Gideon Bachmann, “Interview with Marc Sorkin,” in “Six Talks on G. W. Pabst,” Cinemages (New York) 1.3 (1955): 39.

9. This kind of precision work within the frame was possible because Pabst, according to his assistant director, editor, and long-time collaborator Paul Falkenberg, usually set up, blocked, and shot entire sequences with the final edited product already firmly in mind. See “Six Talks on Pabst,” Cinemages: 44.

10. Bachmann, “Interview with Jean Oser,” in “Six Talks on Pabst,” Cinemages: 60.

11. Lee Atwell, G. W. Pabst (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 80.

12. Eugen Szatmari, “Westfront 1918,” Berliner Tageblatt, 25 May 1930.

13. Ernst Blass, “Neue Filme,” Die literarische Welt 6.23 (6 June 1930): 7.

14. Herbert Ihering, “Westfront und Cyankali,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, 24 May 1930. Reprinted in Herbert Ihering, Von Reinhardt bis Brecht. Vier Jahrzehnte Theater und Film (Berlin/GDR: Aufbau, 1961), 3:308-309.

15. Siegfried Kracauer, “Westfront 1918,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 27 May 1930.

16. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 234-235.

17. Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr, 309ff.

18. “Westfront 1918. Ein pazifistischer Tonfilm,” Die Rote Fahne, 27 May 1930.

19. See Kracauer's review and the one in Die Rote Fahne. According to some accounts, up to twenty people are supposed to have fainted during the premiere.

20. Richard Whitehall, “Westfront 1918—Great Films of the Century No. 5,” Films and Filming, 6 (September 1960): 34.

21. Whitehall, 34, and Atwell, 80-81.

22. “Mag.,” “Four Infantry Men,” Variety, 18 June 1930, 55; “J. C. M.,” “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker, 28 February 1931, 59.

23. Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen,” The New York Times, 20 February 1931, 18.

24. “The New Pictures,” Time, 2 March 1931, 26.

25. Compare Whitehall.

26. Along with The Joyless Street, Kameradschaft, and the French production Salonique, nid d'espions (Mademoiselle Docteur). For contemporary reevaluations, see Renaud Bezombes, “Les perdants de l'histoire,” Cinématographe (Paris) No. 65 (February 1981): 57-59; and Daniel Sauvaget, “Quatre films de G. W. Pabst,” La Revue du Cinéma, No. 359 (March 1981): 43-48.

27. See Atwell, 75.

28. See Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 317.

29. Aubry and Pétat, 333.

30. If one insists on looking for a trilogy, I would suggest that, had he been given a chance to do it, Pabst's unrealized script, War is Declared, sold to Paramount in 1934, might have been a more likely candidate than The Threepenny Opera. Peter Lorre was to have played a wireless operator on an ocean liner who, as a hoax, tells the passengers that war has broken out: “The tranquil, friendly atmosphere of the ship becomes divided into combative camps along nationalist lines. When they ultimately learn of the hoax, they are shocked into a realization of their folly and are made to realize their common humanity” (Atwell, 116).

31. Aubry and Pétat speak of “cet aspect documentaire” (333); Falkenberg mentions Pabst's “penchant for the documentary touch” (50); Bezombes singles out “la veine documentaire” (57); and Sauvaget talks of “les charactères réalistes, quasi documentaires” (46).

32. Although not conceived as an anti-war film, King Vidor's The Big Parade seems to have been the first American production to be received as one—due mostly to its realistic trench sequences.

33. Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr, 276.

34. Hans-Harald Müller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller. Der Kriegsroman der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 20-35.

35. This was the almost inevitable result of the rigorous censorship exercised by the German Army High Command throughout the entire war, particularly after the Marne battle. See Kurt Koszyk, Deutsche Presse 1914-1945 (Berlin: Colloquium, 1972), 21. See also W. Nicolai, Nachrichtendienst, Presse und Volksstimmung im Weltkrieg (Berlin: Mittler und Sohn, 1920). Nicolai's report is a revealing, if obviously biased, insider account by the officer in charge of public relations and censorship.

36. For a critique of the Neue Sachlichkeit as a coherent movement comparable to, for instance, Expressionism, see Jost Hermand and Frank Trommler, Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1978), 119.

37. Erich Maria Ramarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. W. Wheen (New York: Fawcett, 1987), 296.

38. Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Ullstein, 1976 [orig. 1929]), 204.

39. For an in-depth analysis of Higher Command, see Martin Patrick and Anthony Travers, German Novels on the First World War and Their Ideological Implications, 1918-1933 (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Heinz, 1982), 129ff.

40. I am speaking here of only one of a number of rather heterogeneous currents within the Neue Sachlichkeit. Edmund Gruber's attempt to synthesize all the various types of war novels under the common label of ‘objectivism’ is highly problematic, given the political and aesthetic contradictions within the movement. See “Neue Sachlichkeit and the World War,” German Life and Letters 20 (1966-1967): 138-149. See also Müller, 306n.

41. See Walter Laqueur, Weimar. A Cultural History 1918-1933 (New York: Putnam, 1974), 2-3.

42. Gollbach, 2.

43. The documentary pull of the naturalistic descriptions of combat scenes and the seemingly autobiographical first-person narration has been so strong that Remarque's book, even today, is read in introductory social science courses as reportage on World War I, rather than as a comment on the contemporary Germany of 1929 (at, for example, Boston University). I am indebted to Michael Kaern for this reference.

44. Helmut Lethen, Neue Sachlichkeit 1924-1932. Studien zur Literatur des “weissen Sozialismus” (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970), 143.

45. Compare Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues, 184-185: “What will our fathers do when we will stand up and come forward and demand that they justify their actions? What do they expect us to do when the time comes where there won't be any war? … What will happen afterwards? And what is to become of us?” (My translation—M.G.)

46. Walter Benjamin, “Linke Melancholie,” Gesammelte Schriften, 4 vols., ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 3:281.

47. Compare Ernst Bloch's concept of nonsynchronicity, developed against the historical backdrop of the late Weimar Republic, and first outlined in his Heritage of Our Times. See the German original, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Zurich: Obrecht und Helbling, 1935).

48. Erich Kästner, Fabian, in Gesammelte Schriften für Erwachsene, 8 vols. (Munich and Zurich: Droemer Knaur, 1969), 2:124-126.

49. This is a significant departure from Johannsen's story, where only “The Student” is typified. “The Bavarian” has a name, and “The Lieutenant” of the film replaces another (named) character. Although he appears in the book, the Lieutenant plays only a minor role.

50. Whitehall, “Westfront 1918,” 34.

51. Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 2:748-754.

52. Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (New York: Pantheon, 1989).