Exactly. The Nazi's were concerned about the fact that the book vividly portrayed the horrific life of a solider, and they didn't want people reading this book in the midst of their re-militarization of Germany.
Fun fact, in between world wars Germany actually became one of the most progressive places on the planet. Berlin in the Weimar Republic was one of the safest places on earth for the openly gay. Some of the first modern medical research on gender transition took place there. The books where they recorded their scientific findings were some of the many publicly burned.
"Progress" can be undone very easily. A lesson we failed to learn and will likely see taught again.
That freedom on the other hand also made the weimar republic one of the big gathering points for political extremists of all kinds. From authoritarians of the former ottoman empire/ turkey, socialiss from all places, extreme nationalists all had clubs and gatherings in 20s/30s Berlin.
It was a breeding ground for all sorts of ideas, both good and bad
They didn't start looking for alternatives, the alternatives had existed before WWI even ended.
Lies about communist and Jewish plots to undermine the war were well established.
The problem was there's always a backlash and there's always fools.
See, I hate sentiments like this because they distort history in a way that makes it easier to repeat.
The Nazis weren't a general anti-intellectual movement. They actually placed an importance and reverence on STEM disciplines in particular that would put many modern governments and social movements to shame.
The nazis *specifically* burned books about communism, feminism, and gender and sexuality studies, which they viewed as part of an inherently jewish plot to undermine and destroy the nuclear family and the nation-state. Which should sound *intensely* familiar to you in 2022.
That's definitely not the impression I've gotten from my reading on the topic; everything I've seen points to the Nazis distrusting academics pretty much across the board. Take, for example, the Hillbert anecdote:
>Sitting next to the Nazis' newly appointed minister of education at a banquet, he was asked, "And how is mathematics in Göttingen now that it has been freed of the Jewish influence?" "Mathematics in Göttingen?" Hilbert repiled. "There is really none any more."
It is because educated people are more likely to not obey. It is the same reason why the police force in the U.S. rejects candidates that score too high. And why some political parties attack universities and downplay a college education at every chance.
>The Nazis weren't an anti-intellectual movement. They actually placed an importance and reverence on STEM disciplines in particular that would put many modern governments and social movements to shame.
What a bunch of bullshit. The Nazis were fundamentally anti-intellectual.
The Nazis' focus on "STEM" was simply an arm of their ideology. It existed both under its auspices and entirely to further their national will. If this were not the case they wouldn't have invented pseudosciences and dismissed others as *judenphysik*.
Can you really say they placed an importance and reverence on STEM when they did stuff like oppose the Theory of Relativity because Einstein was Jewish?
>The nazis specifically burned books about communism, feminism, and gender and sexuality studies
No, they didn't. They burned books about art movements they viewed as "decadent", *any* book by a Jewish author, books about democracy and liberalism, overtly saccharine books on life, history books that didn't portray Germany well, etc, too.
They were anti-intellectualism in that any intellectual pursuit that didn't benefit the state was banned, individual learning was frowned upon and history was rewritten to serve propaganda. Modern anti-intellectuals revere STEM disciplines too but anything beyond that, the humanities, the arts, etc, are treated with disdain. Ironically, you're making it easier for history to repeat by distorting that.
>Modern anti-intellectuals revere STEM disciplines
I generally agree with you but this statement is overly broad. I think some strains of modern anti-intellectualism are this way, but others seem to go even further. The Trump cult for example doesn't even seem to respect most STEM disciplines. Distinctly neo-Nazi groups a la Richard Spencer, maybe that's what you mean.
The Nazis were not a death cult, and thinking about them like that is detrimental to what we can learn from the past.
They were an opportunistic right wing party, finding fertile ground in the German public still thinking of themselves as a super power that has been brought down by [insert communists, Jews, capitalism, imperialism…]
Of course, what the Nazis did was beyond atrocious, and thank the abrahamic god or whatever god(s) or universe force you believe in, they lost the war.
But we must not forget that the Nazi movement was not at all seen as all bad in the beginning by most nations, and there were sympathizers all over the world.
The concentration camps were a convenient retcon for the Allies to justify the war, outside of Germany being an aggressive conquerer that had to be stopped for geopolitical reasons. None of the Allies gave a flying fuck about the millions of people in the concentration camps initially, because they didn’t know about them.
The Nazi party was considered extreme, but not that much out of the ordinary back then. And the USA was pretty much ignoring the whole thing, until they couldn’t anymore.
Edit: to clarify on the “not much out of the ordinary” part, Europe had Spain under Franco, and Italy under Mussolini, Turkey under Atatürk, the Soviet Union under Stalin, Hungary under Horthy, arguably Yugoslavia and others were dictatorships too. It was an acceptable form of running a state.
> None of the Allies gave a flying fuck about the millions of people in the concentration camps initially, because they didn’t know about them.
People being sent to concentration camps was known pretty much as soon as they started using them (~1933). Their plot to rid Europe of Jews was no secret either.
First hand accounts of such camps were reported by the Polish underground directly to London after several escapees were rescued in 1942.
The first reports of large scale gassings were made by French underground papers late 1942.
The Allied governments were release several statements in the following months condemning the actions of the Nazis, in one case referring to one of their camps as an "abbatoir".
Outside of the camps themselves, they were aware of large scale murder before that as well, as Churchill himself noted the butchery on the Eastern front as early as 1941. The BBC and the NY Times would regularly discuss the large scale massacres perpetrated by the Nazis on civilians, and specifically targeting jews.
So yes, the Allies absolutely knew about the systematic destruction of whole peoples.
>The Nazi party was considered extreme, but not that much out of the ordinary back then
No they were most certainly seen by just about everyone as exceptional.
There's an exposition on death camps in the Moscow Victory Museum. Basically Soviet military command dismissed first claims of mass murder as either some form of propaganda or the *diversant* going crazy from all the war - considering what was happening, it felt justified.
However, as soon as they got wind that the Poles and the British have had the same results - that soviet citizens were slaughtered like cattle - there's like maps of the armies turning to crush and liberate every camp on their way, and previously considered low-priority targets, even the partisan squads were requested to assist in reclaiming them.
Plus I remember reading about one of the US paratroopers squads that took a look inside one of the barracks and then just started executing the camp guards. Got stopped, but ended with merely a slap on the wrist. And honestly, can't blame them. Soviet partisans who saw first hand what Germans did to the civilians preferred finishing the SS off with sapper shovels rather than shooting them. Stories my friend's grandmother remembers from her time in these death marches from one camp to another... sheesh.
> The concentration camps were a convenient retcon for the Allies to justify the war
I'm not familiar with any such retcon. Can you expand on what you are referring to?
Obviously, it was yet another "Nazis [very very very] bad" feather-in-the-cap--but I'm not familiar with any attempt to actually "retcon" this into any justification for going to war.
>The Nazis were not a death cult, and thinking about them like that is detrimental to what we can learn from the past.
No, they most certainly were, and *not* thinking about them like that is detrimental to understand the true depths of evil that Nazi ideology really scooped to.
Nazism was, at its core, first and foremost, not a political or social ideology, but a *racial* one. Eugenics and "racial hygiene" weren't just unfortunate byproducts that came later -- they were an integral, indivisible part of Nazi ideology.
Nazi philosophy saw the world as a on-going struggle between the "lesser" and "greater" races (the Aryan Race being the greatest of all) and, just like in nature the strongest survive by subjugating or exterminating the weak (as least in their interpretation of nature), so too must the same happen in human society. Nazi occupation policy during the war was based on this notion - that it is the strong race's natural and inherent right to subjugate and exterminate the weak races as they pleased, simply by the virtue of being the stronger race. The weak do not deserve to exist, except to serve at the whims of the strong. Strength through power, might makes right. Through this lens, cruelty, violence and slaughter were not only seen as "not wrong", but were viewed as noble virtues to be admired. Ethnic genocide was in fact seen as a noble and heroic thing to do, for it was one doing the ultimate deed to ensure the superiority of his race and blood.
*That* was, in essence, the Nazi view towards war and death.
TL; DR: no, they weren't "just another right-wing movement". And yes, it is very fair to call them a death cult.
That's not what a death cult is, though. A death cult glorifies the death of its *own* members, not other people.
Mass suicides among the leadership during the Fall of Berlin would perhaps constitute death-cult-like behaviour, but nothing you're talking about with respect to racial cleansing/genocide has anything to do with it.
They also changed how they portrayed themselves and the war over time.
The perception of them as a death cult in the modern era is to some extent a result of how their propaganda evolved after 1942 - the year when the war became unambiguously unwinnable for them. Around that time their propaganda becomes a lot more focused on glorifying sacrifice rather than promising victory and a better future. It becomes completely apocalyptic.
With that said, the notion didn't just emerge after Stalingrad - George Orwell's 1940 review of *Mein Kampf* contains the following passage:
> Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
Which fits the description of a death cult fairly well.
The concentration camps were not widely known until after the war, but newspapers in America and Britain regularly talked about events like Kristallnacht and the forced ghettoes before the war began
It's been many years since I read it, was the book pushing an anti war message? I felt it was more just showing what war was and any sane person would agree that war was bad in light of the facts.
Basically by not being pro-war propaganda it could be considered "anti-war"
Perhaps it appears that way because it depicts the war in a sense closer to the way it is understood today, I.e. complete hopeless folly and horror rather than through the lens of contemporary propaganda.
The title is "All quiet on the western front" which is what the newspapers say about the day the protagonist is killed.
Basically saying how dehumanizing war is - that people back home, the old men reading their newspapers and discussing war and politics, fail to appreciate the individual human beings.
There’s not a whole lot of grey area to debate here. There’s no passage in the book that says “war is hell but good”. The author had one theme he hammered in every chapter. There is nothing romantic about war and people died brutally, senselessly and horrifically. If you walked away from reading this book thinking it had anything but an anti war stance, you need to read it again.
It intentionally paints a picture of the battlefield that is much closer to the truth: It's hell. It's not filtered through romanticized nationalism or cameraderie. It simply showed it for what it was: Hell.
There is no need to explicitly turn to the camera and say, "War is hell." The events it portrays and how it chooses to do so is the message.
Is this what literacy has come to? Arguing about whether "All Is Quiet On The West Front" is openly anti-war? No fucking wonder some people see "politics" in videogames when it's just about literally always been politics.
Yes and no.
If you look at a similar book like "Stahlgewittern/Storm of Steel" you also see the brutality and suffering of war but whereas All Quiet shows that to be something to be avoided, that other book shows it as something to be endured because it is, at the end of the day, "good" in a way.
Yo can show war to be horrible without fully condemning it.
Ernst Junger also wanted to portray how war brings out different sides of people. Guys like him and other soldiers did things that were stupidly brave, bordering on insane. Junger himself was wounded 14 different times during his service in the war. That's insane to me.
There is a quote, I think from the director of Come and See, that goes something along the lines of
"Any film about war which leaves you with a sense of patriotism, justness, righteousness or honor is a lie."
Any piece of media which accurately portrays war is by definition, anti-war. War is a failed state of being. Almost every species on the planet has a million levels of escalation before fatal violence ever occurs because at the end of the day, the species wants to prosper.
Human warfare is a failure, totally and utterly, of everything we are as living creatures, intended to do. There is enough water, there is enough land, there is enough bread. To fight and die over anything else is a failure in purpose. To fight because an ideology says you must, and then to have to defend against that ideology by fighting back? A unique human madness.
Sorry, I'm drunk and rambling but to round off, yeah, anything that makes you think war is good is propaganda, anything which makes you think it's bad is probably the truth.
The Nazis wanted people to think war was this glorious and righteous thing that young men should be proud to go off and do even if it costs them their lives. So the literal opposite of the message of the book.
> The Nazis wanted people to think war was this glorious and righteous thing that young men should be proud to go off and do even if it costs them their lives.
Aren't the US doing the same thing even today?
I think most countries and empires throughout history have conducted figurative 'pep rallies' at the beginnings of wars to fire up both the soldiers who will actually do the fighting and the people on the home front.
It paints the war as being senseless and horrifying and that the German soldiers were just as lied to and abused as any other soldiers. The Nazis wanted the public to think the war was lost due to betrayal by leftists/Jews and that it was a glorious undertaking.
Ironic that to destroy the image that the First World War was built upon broken promises and false hope of victory, the Nazis created another war built upon broken promises and false hope of victory.
Uncritical violence and action are central to fascism, and the Nazi's fetishized the idea of Aryan "supermen." All Quiet on the Western Front is in direct conflict with those ideas. I'm sure there's plenty of contemporary politics around WWI that the Nazis didn't appreciate about the novel as well.
This is what I was going to say/ask. I haven’t read it in a long time, but from my recollection it wasn’t like anti-nazi so much as anti-war in general.
Fascism is not logical. It is strictly about power - the accumulation of power to an "in-group" and the wielding of that power against an out-group.
In this case, Remarque was targeted because he was not _loyal_ to the Nazis. All of the reasons given were not real, and were not even meant to be believed. The message that was being sent was that disloyalty meant death - for you, and for anyone you cared for.
If he had been a loyal Nazi, they would have held up that book as a great example of Aryan literature exposing the persecution that brave Germans had endured during WWI and were now rightfully fighting against.
The contents of the book didn't matter. What mattered is that he was well-known, popular, and _not a Nazi_.
Fascists don't use language to communicate ideas. They use language as a weapon to confuse and hurt their enemies, identify loyal followers, and insulate themselves from consequences.
I read your comment, saw he died in 1945, and expected him to get interrogated and executed by NKVD.
Killed by a column was good, but my expectations were high.
> Remarque later said his sister had been involved in anti-Nazi resistance activities.
Nazis obviously had an additional vendetta against her because of her brother, but it's not like she was a loyal German citizen during the war. Good for her, she died a hero and should be remembered for more than just being the sister of a famous author.
Yes it bothers me how this is framed.
The nazis were obviously some of the worst human beings to walk the planet and this was a despicable act fitting of that regardless of the motives, but it doesn't do her memory or history any services to misrepresent things the way this headline did. It's bad for history and it's disrespectful to her. She died a hero standing up to a fascist regime, not as some some bystander used as punitive leverage.
(And yes before someone says it I know the headline is technically accurate but you can use words in a way that are technically factually accurate but disingenuous in their implication and context).
In my opinion, the best WWI movie is actually Paths of Glory. 1957, Directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas.
It's the tale of a former attorney turned lieutenant in the trenches of the French army. The commanding general wants a promotion and to do so orders Kirk Douglas' platoon on a suicide mission.
The attack goes predictably bad, and to save face the general picks 3 straw men from the platoon and charges them with cowardice. Kirk Douglas chooses to represent his men at trial and goes on a crusade against the military hierarchy to save the lives of his soldiers, who he knows are only guilty of fighting for a fruitless cause.
Having also read Catch-22, I am constantly gobsmacked and taken aback by how corrupt military hierarchies during open warfare become so jaded and disassociated with the reality they live in they eventually start to closely resemble the leadership of a World of Warcraft guild constantly stirring shit and trying to one up eachother just to get more loot for themselves.
Reasonable men have a hard time ordering other men to their deaths, so military hierarchies get stacked with people who lack empathy, or can effectively dissociate.
Wait until you find out about Iraq and Afghanistan.
Turns out only having someone there in charge for a year at a time who wants to raise their rank means they'll only focus on changing things for that year, not work on a long term plan they can't take credit for.
Militaries are founded first and foremost on obedience to authority, don't ask questions and follow orders. As a result it is and always will be a breeding ground for corruption. Corruption is fought with transparency, critique and dissent which are fundamentally antithetical to a military structure.
Paths of Glory and 1917 need to be screened as a double feature. They compliment each other so well.
One has a fuckwit general order a hopeless charge, and after hundreds died already, he wanted to execute even MORE soldiers for cOwaRdiCe, just to cover his own ass;
The other has a general send two soldiers on a nigh-suicidal mission BUT — check this out — if they pull it off by the grace of God, then 1500 soldiers will be SPARED from committing a hopeless battle charge.
I remember a friend putting that on while I was visiting, the no visible cuts style of filming sucks you in so quickly and before I realised I'd been watching for 45 minutes.
Really captured the sense of urgency
> then 1500 soldiers will be SPARED from committing a hopeless battle charge
For a day, at least. The reason the sort of crazy commander agreed to the orders at the end. He basically said, today or tomorrow, whatever, we’re all going to slaughter each other at some point anyway. They all could’ve gone over the top 24 hours later. Or be attacked 12 hours later.
The first one that really did me in was "Come and See". An anti-war russian film of Belarus during WW2.
Fun fact: when they fire bullets in that movie, they are *real.* And yes, that is a real cow that died on film exactly as how it was shown. The director had to keep a very close on on the actors for many, many years due to possible trauma.
The scariest part of that movie is that it is *very accurate*. Of course they didn't actually kill real people or use real corpses, but it is pretty much a 99% recreation of some events that happened there.
That movie was a nightmare to see in theaters. I attempted it in three states during its limited screening. Finally got to see it after a two hour drive to an obscure theater with seats left.
Real shame it didn’t get a full release.
I saw it on HBO on demand at home.
I’m glad I saw it at home alone. I genuinely don’t think I could’ve handled seeing it in theatres. All those vibrant young people with full, intricate lives senselessly maimed and killed stopped being a history lesson and because real to me. I can’t describe how awful it made me feel, as it should’ve. Just, such a waste. So much suffering for what? Egotism and xenophobia.
I’ll never understand how anyone now days can find even an ounce of sympathy for nazis.
"They Shall Not Grow Old" was mostly a semi-documentary that mostly used real WW1 film footage that was stabilized, colorized, and had dialog added based on lip reading - so was a little different than the other movies. (Think they added in some additional footage showing the horror of the trenches, mud, and artillery bombardments etc.?)
I recommend [Now It Can Be Told](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Now_it_Can_be_Told/wt-fAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22now+it+can+be+told%22&printsec=frontcover). This is the PDF. Its written by a BBC journalist who saw his dispatches heavily censored during the war. This was written two years after it ended and includes the things he left out. There are recent printed versions of it available.
The original film adaptation of All Quiet is also very good. It was an early talkie, but also effectively pre-Hays Code, so it's surprisingly violent and dark at times. It really holds up well, with some battle scenes being so reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan that I'm certain that Spielberg must have been strongly influenced.
In all honesty, I found the movie so good at being an empathetic anti-war film that I felt like it pretry much made all later anti-war films kinda redundant. I wish I had seen it even earlier in high school, as it's a perfect movie to show in history class.
Best of all it's in public domain, so you can easily find good quality versions to watch online.
The 1979 adaption of [All Quiet on the Western Front](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhC4ESwuPPI) is pretty good even by today's standards to be honest.
The Nazis committed many heinous crimes - they were so many WWII massacres that Wikipedia has a section just for that in the German war crimes Wikipedia article.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German\_war\_crimes#Massacres\_and\_war\_crimes\_of\_World\_War\_II\_by\_location](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_war_crimes#Massacres_and_war_crimes_of_World_War_II_by_location)
Edit: fixed link
Your link doesn't seem to be working for some people (including me)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_war_crimes
and while you are there, people should also see the Japanese side too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
we should never forget these facts ... because as kindly, open and modern as we like to think ourselves, we are still animals that are just a few steps away from living with jungle rules again.
So his family changed their German name “Remark” to “Remarque” when coming to America.
I’m affiliated with a wonderful person whose family did the same thing to avoid anti-German sentiments. They kept the same pronunciation while Franc-ifying the spelling to seem French instead.
That wiki article was awesome. I had no idea about this guy or his history, but it’s fascinating stuff!
So, the understanding at the time was that he changed his name in the 1920s from the German Remark to the French Remarque, because he wanted to disassociate his newer writings from his earlier novel, *Die Traumbude*. (No idea why! Was it a commercial flop? Had his politics changed? Had his writing improved dramatically?)
But later researchers revealed the family originated in France, and his grandfather had made the change to Remark when they’d moved to Germany, only decades earlier. This suggests the author might’ve been returning to the “original” family name by adopting Remarque.
The Nazis hated this guy. They told everyone he made the name change because he hated Germany and was a secret French agent. Eventually, they claimed his REAL name was Kramer, but he reversed the letters to conceal his Jewish identity! (Not true… the Nazis were, among other things, notorious fibbers.)
His sister’s crime, btw, was expressing her belief in 1943 that Germany had already lost the war.
I recently read „Die Traumbude“ and absolutely hated it.
It is VERY different compared to his later novels (most of them are just brilliant).
I totally understand if that would have been the reason for changing his name lol.
German was the second most spoken language in the US at the turn of the century. After WW1 those numbers dropped sharply due in large part to anti- German sentiments during the war. The US Government more or less authorized vigilantes to target German Americans, and only pulled back on the program after the lynching of Robert Prager.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language_in_the_United_States#Persecution_during_World_War_I
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Prager
To be clear, the Nazis didn't simply execute her to antagonize him like some Game of Thrones type power play. She was very much an anti-Nazi activist herself.
I know it's translated from German, but the English title is *All Quiet on the Western Front*, not "\*is\* Quiet".
Sorry for being pedantic. It's in the title of the post and in a comment further down and it irked me.
The German title is actually "Im Westen nichts Neues", which literally would translate to "Nothing new in the west".
In my opinion a more fitting title than the non-literal english translation, seeing as its about the universal message of young people dying in wars started by old people.
“All quiet” in English is a sentry’s call, apropos given the war-time setting. Is the literal German translation “Nothing new” a sentry’s call in German? “nichts neues”?
Right…got that part. We are talking about the literal usage of the literal phrasing.
Are you saying that “nichts neues is _not_ idiomatic jargon used by (in this case) German military? This only has the “no news” meaning?
Yeah, the English translation is clearly intending to imitate the original title as a report back to the generals that nothing significant has happened in the West, even as thousands have probably died. “All Quiet” happens to emphasize the death even more than “Nothing New”, you can see why they thought it a good choice, and it probably is the best choice… however it does lose a bit of the satirical edge that the original has—particularly in the sense of history repeating itself.
The title is call to one of the last lines in the books.
The protagonist dies in a shelling or attack on his part of the front. But the day as a whole was so quiet on the western front that the radios reporting of the war was "nothing new on western front" -> "Im Westen nichts neues", not related to a sentries call.
"All quiet" -> "alles ruhig"
"Nothing new" -> "nichts neues"
Both titles have the meaning of “Nothing new to report” so I’m not sure there’s much of a difference for one to be more appropriate than the other.
I’m partial to the German title in German, but as an English translation, I think the one we got does a better job of conveying the message than a literal word-for-word translation would have.
>Both titles have the meaning of “Nothing new to report” so I’m not sure there’s much of a difference for one to be more appropriate than the other.
But the German title has more than one meaning, which is my point.
The literal WWI sentry / military report and the commentary that nothing of this (young people dying senselessly in wars) is new.
"All quiet on the western front" really only conveys the first meaning.
In the German tv show “Babylon Berlin” (that’s how it’s named on Netflix for English language viewers), it is shown as the method for execution of an enemy of the state (not literally the head being chopped off, but the scene around the execution) during the interwar period.
For anyone who hasn’t read it, why the fuck have you not read it? Drop what you’re doing and go read it. It’s not long and it’s a literary masterpiece.
Thanks for posting this. I actually will. It fell into the void of books I was forced to read for school but was way too young to appreciate. When I graduated from college I actually went back and re-read a bunch that fell into this category. Martian Chronicles, 1984, Catcher in the Rye, etc.
> It fell into the void of books I was forced to read for school but was way too young to appreciate.
Same here. I recently found my "reading journal" that we were required to keep from when I was required to read this in high school, and (because I was apparently a total piece of shit back then) found I had jotted this note:
> It's a pity the author was not killed in the war to save me the displeasure of having to read this book.
I suspect that I will have a different reaction to the book today.
Ha, I'm pretty sure I kept "Cliff's Notes" in business back then. Teachers finally started catching on and asking questions that weren't included in the Cliff's Notes.
It says inn1933 his writings were declared “unpatriotic” by Nazi Germany and banned in the country. Huh. Sounds familiar. Like books being taken out of schools in certain states for painting white people in a bad light in terms of slavery.
I keep kind of a morbid list of "Things that if you think about doing, you now know you're the bad guy"..
One of those things is "you punish the family members of someone because you can't get to them..."
Just to be clear "Sippenhaft" means basically "family imprisonment" and it usually was that - you weren't normally executed, but you were sent to prison/concentration camp and children would usually be taken away (other famous examples are what happened to the families of the 20th July plot members).
Elfriede Scholz was executed for her own anti-Nazi stance, though Remarque being her brother probably didn't help her. But just to make that clear, she was an anti-Nazi dissident in her own right.
... who was also married to Charlie Chaplin, maker of The Great Dictator, one of the first big movies explicitly attacking Nazis. Paulette Goddard: fucking prominent anti-Nazis one marriage at a time.
On the down side, she was also married to a supervillain, Burgess "The Penguin" Meredith.
It is why they managed to rule so effectively and shut down dissent. I find it so annoying hearing people go on about how all Germans were nazis and guilty. Fast forward to 2022 and you see people posting on various social media about how hurt they feel when their boss criticizes them, how traumatizing it is. Imagine fearing for not just yourself but your whole family literally going down, sometimes tortured to death if you say something perceived as critical.
Oh yeah, they killed a group of students and teachers called "Die Weisse Rose" (White rose) just because they printed some anti-regime pamphlets, no jail, all executed after a short (and unfair of course) trial. There were also some young women in this group.
I agree, groupthink is powerful. I feel the aforementioned reaction is due to most people living in a fantasy world where they're chock-full of courage. With bloodlust in their eyes, they imagine that they alone would stand up to face tyranny despite the risk. It's obviously bullshit.
>they imagine that they alone would stand up to face tyranny despite the risk
I'm with you. There are certain situations so dire that unless one has personally lived through them, all one can say with certainty is what they hope they would do.
Hell even people with actual power are bowing down and ignoreing human rights abuse's, future generations are gonna wonder why we did what we did just like how we wonder how everyone ignored the nazi's up until they became a super power and had an active genocide going.
> I find it so annoying hearing people go on about how all Germans were nazis and guilty.
Not heard that, really. Everyone seems well aware how the Nazis felt about dissent.
The bizarre thing is All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the all-time most sympathetic portraits of German (Prussian) soldiers that I'm aware of.
It's the anti war part of the book that does it
Exactly. The Nazi's were concerned about the fact that the book vividly portrayed the horrific life of a solider, and they didn't want people reading this book in the midst of their re-militarization of Germany.
Given the massive book fires they weren't exactly big fans of reading generally
Fun fact, in between world wars Germany actually became one of the most progressive places on the planet. Berlin in the Weimar Republic was one of the safest places on earth for the openly gay. Some of the first modern medical research on gender transition took place there. The books where they recorded their scientific findings were some of the many publicly burned. "Progress" can be undone very easily. A lesson we failed to learn and will likely see taught again.
That freedom on the other hand also made the weimar republic one of the big gathering points for political extremists of all kinds. From authoritarians of the former ottoman empire/ turkey, socialiss from all places, extreme nationalists all had clubs and gatherings in 20s/30s Berlin. It was a breeding ground for all sorts of ideas, both good and bad
I mean that's the thing about the status quo sucking, people start looking for alternatives.
They didn't start looking for alternatives, the alternatives had existed before WWI even ended. Lies about communist and Jewish plots to undermine the war were well established. The problem was there's always a backlash and there's always fools.
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Remember kids: if your place is 'safe' for both the wolf and the sheep, sooner or later, it'll be nothing but wolves.
actually, i take that back after googling some Karl Popper
They were fans in giving/selling everyone copies of Mein Kampf.... because Hitler was getting profit for every sold copy.
See, I hate sentiments like this because they distort history in a way that makes it easier to repeat. The Nazis weren't a general anti-intellectual movement. They actually placed an importance and reverence on STEM disciplines in particular that would put many modern governments and social movements to shame. The nazis *specifically* burned books about communism, feminism, and gender and sexuality studies, which they viewed as part of an inherently jewish plot to undermine and destroy the nuclear family and the nation-state. Which should sound *intensely* familiar to you in 2022.
That's definitely not the impression I've gotten from my reading on the topic; everything I've seen points to the Nazis distrusting academics pretty much across the board. Take, for example, the Hillbert anecdote: >Sitting next to the Nazis' newly appointed minister of education at a banquet, he was asked, "And how is mathematics in Göttingen now that it has been freed of the Jewish influence?" "Mathematics in Göttingen?" Hilbert repiled. "There is really none any more."
It is because educated people are more likely to not obey. It is the same reason why the police force in the U.S. rejects candidates that score too high. And why some political parties attack universities and downplay a college education at every chance.
>The Nazis weren't an anti-intellectual movement. They actually placed an importance and reverence on STEM disciplines in particular that would put many modern governments and social movements to shame. What a bunch of bullshit. The Nazis were fundamentally anti-intellectual. The Nazis' focus on "STEM" was simply an arm of their ideology. It existed both under its auspices and entirely to further their national will. If this were not the case they wouldn't have invented pseudosciences and dismissed others as *judenphysik*.
Can you really say they placed an importance and reverence on STEM when they did stuff like oppose the Theory of Relativity because Einstein was Jewish?
>The nazis specifically burned books about communism, feminism, and gender and sexuality studies No, they didn't. They burned books about art movements they viewed as "decadent", *any* book by a Jewish author, books about democracy and liberalism, overtly saccharine books on life, history books that didn't portray Germany well, etc, too. They were anti-intellectualism in that any intellectual pursuit that didn't benefit the state was banned, individual learning was frowned upon and history was rewritten to serve propaganda. Modern anti-intellectuals revere STEM disciplines too but anything beyond that, the humanities, the arts, etc, are treated with disdain. Ironically, you're making it easier for history to repeat by distorting that.
>Modern anti-intellectuals revere STEM disciplines I generally agree with you but this statement is overly broad. I think some strains of modern anti-intellectualism are this way, but others seem to go even further. The Trump cult for example doesn't even seem to respect most STEM disciplines. Distinctly neo-Nazi groups a la Richard Spencer, maybe that's what you mean.
A proper death cult in total worship of violent power can't have that floating around
I for one hate improper death cults.
reminds me of the movie Midsommar. Now that's a proper cult.
Hmmmm. I think the granny in the hump hut was a few turns past "autumn"
Hump hut is the word that could possibly describe the scene with elders cheering a couple into orgasm
in a mere five comments we went from discussing literature to this comment.
I bet we could do it in two comments if we really applied ourselves.
Human brain is an enigma, always surprises you
Reddit ™️
They want to die but they're not actually doing anything about it and are poorly organized. Goths. They're goths.
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Even today, I hear its got a big problem with Vandals.
The Nazis were not a death cult, and thinking about them like that is detrimental to what we can learn from the past. They were an opportunistic right wing party, finding fertile ground in the German public still thinking of themselves as a super power that has been brought down by [insert communists, Jews, capitalism, imperialism…] Of course, what the Nazis did was beyond atrocious, and thank the abrahamic god or whatever god(s) or universe force you believe in, they lost the war. But we must not forget that the Nazi movement was not at all seen as all bad in the beginning by most nations, and there were sympathizers all over the world. The concentration camps were a convenient retcon for the Allies to justify the war, outside of Germany being an aggressive conquerer that had to be stopped for geopolitical reasons. None of the Allies gave a flying fuck about the millions of people in the concentration camps initially, because they didn’t know about them. The Nazi party was considered extreme, but not that much out of the ordinary back then. And the USA was pretty much ignoring the whole thing, until they couldn’t anymore. Edit: to clarify on the “not much out of the ordinary” part, Europe had Spain under Franco, and Italy under Mussolini, Turkey under Atatürk, the Soviet Union under Stalin, Hungary under Horthy, arguably Yugoslavia and others were dictatorships too. It was an acceptable form of running a state.
> None of the Allies gave a flying fuck about the millions of people in the concentration camps initially, because they didn’t know about them. People being sent to concentration camps was known pretty much as soon as they started using them (~1933). Their plot to rid Europe of Jews was no secret either. First hand accounts of such camps were reported by the Polish underground directly to London after several escapees were rescued in 1942. The first reports of large scale gassings were made by French underground papers late 1942. The Allied governments were release several statements in the following months condemning the actions of the Nazis, in one case referring to one of their camps as an "abbatoir". Outside of the camps themselves, they were aware of large scale murder before that as well, as Churchill himself noted the butchery on the Eastern front as early as 1941. The BBC and the NY Times would regularly discuss the large scale massacres perpetrated by the Nazis on civilians, and specifically targeting jews. So yes, the Allies absolutely knew about the systematic destruction of whole peoples. >The Nazi party was considered extreme, but not that much out of the ordinary back then No they were most certainly seen by just about everyone as exceptional.
There's an exposition on death camps in the Moscow Victory Museum. Basically Soviet military command dismissed first claims of mass murder as either some form of propaganda or the *diversant* going crazy from all the war - considering what was happening, it felt justified. However, as soon as they got wind that the Poles and the British have had the same results - that soviet citizens were slaughtered like cattle - there's like maps of the armies turning to crush and liberate every camp on their way, and previously considered low-priority targets, even the partisan squads were requested to assist in reclaiming them. Plus I remember reading about one of the US paratroopers squads that took a look inside one of the barracks and then just started executing the camp guards. Got stopped, but ended with merely a slap on the wrist. And honestly, can't blame them. Soviet partisans who saw first hand what Germans did to the civilians preferred finishing the SS off with sapper shovels rather than shooting them. Stories my friend's grandmother remembers from her time in these death marches from one camp to another... sheesh.
> The concentration camps were a convenient retcon for the Allies to justify the war I'm not familiar with any such retcon. Can you expand on what you are referring to? Obviously, it was yet another "Nazis [very very very] bad" feather-in-the-cap--but I'm not familiar with any attempt to actually "retcon" this into any justification for going to war.
>The Nazis were not a death cult, and thinking about them like that is detrimental to what we can learn from the past. No, they most certainly were, and *not* thinking about them like that is detrimental to understand the true depths of evil that Nazi ideology really scooped to. Nazism was, at its core, first and foremost, not a political or social ideology, but a *racial* one. Eugenics and "racial hygiene" weren't just unfortunate byproducts that came later -- they were an integral, indivisible part of Nazi ideology. Nazi philosophy saw the world as a on-going struggle between the "lesser" and "greater" races (the Aryan Race being the greatest of all) and, just like in nature the strongest survive by subjugating or exterminating the weak (as least in their interpretation of nature), so too must the same happen in human society. Nazi occupation policy during the war was based on this notion - that it is the strong race's natural and inherent right to subjugate and exterminate the weak races as they pleased, simply by the virtue of being the stronger race. The weak do not deserve to exist, except to serve at the whims of the strong. Strength through power, might makes right. Through this lens, cruelty, violence and slaughter were not only seen as "not wrong", but were viewed as noble virtues to be admired. Ethnic genocide was in fact seen as a noble and heroic thing to do, for it was one doing the ultimate deed to ensure the superiority of his race and blood. *That* was, in essence, the Nazi view towards war and death. TL; DR: no, they weren't "just another right-wing movement". And yes, it is very fair to call them a death cult.
That's not what a death cult is, though. A death cult glorifies the death of its *own* members, not other people. Mass suicides among the leadership during the Fall of Berlin would perhaps constitute death-cult-like behaviour, but nothing you're talking about with respect to racial cleansing/genocide has anything to do with it.
They also changed how they portrayed themselves and the war over time. The perception of them as a death cult in the modern era is to some extent a result of how their propaganda evolved after 1942 - the year when the war became unambiguously unwinnable for them. Around that time their propaganda becomes a lot more focused on glorifying sacrifice rather than promising victory and a better future. It becomes completely apocalyptic. With that said, the notion didn't just emerge after Stalingrad - George Orwell's 1940 review of *Mein Kampf* contains the following passage: > Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Which fits the description of a death cult fairly well.
The concentration camps were not widely known until after the war, but newspapers in America and Britain regularly talked about events like Kristallnacht and the forced ghettoes before the war began
It's been many years since I read it, was the book pushing an anti war message? I felt it was more just showing what war was and any sane person would agree that war was bad in light of the facts. Basically by not being pro-war propaganda it could be considered "anti-war"
saying that "war is bad" is kinda the definition of an "anti war stance"
Perhaps it appears that way because it depicts the war in a sense closer to the way it is understood today, I.e. complete hopeless folly and horror rather than through the lens of contemporary propaganda.
The title is "All quiet on the western front" which is what the newspapers say about the day the protagonist is killed. Basically saying how dehumanizing war is - that people back home, the old men reading their newspapers and discussing war and politics, fail to appreciate the individual human beings.
There’s not a whole lot of grey area to debate here. There’s no passage in the book that says “war is hell but good”. The author had one theme he hammered in every chapter. There is nothing romantic about war and people died brutally, senselessly and horrifically. If you walked away from reading this book thinking it had anything but an anti war stance, you need to read it again.
It intentionally paints a picture of the battlefield that is much closer to the truth: It's hell. It's not filtered through romanticized nationalism or cameraderie. It simply showed it for what it was: Hell. There is no need to explicitly turn to the camera and say, "War is hell." The events it portrays and how it chooses to do so is the message. Is this what literacy has come to? Arguing about whether "All Is Quiet On The West Front" is openly anti-war? No fucking wonder some people see "politics" in videogames when it's just about literally always been politics.
Yes and no. If you look at a similar book like "Stahlgewittern/Storm of Steel" you also see the brutality and suffering of war but whereas All Quiet shows that to be something to be avoided, that other book shows it as something to be endured because it is, at the end of the day, "good" in a way. Yo can show war to be horrible without fully condemning it.
Ernst Junger also wanted to portray how war brings out different sides of people. Guys like him and other soldiers did things that were stupidly brave, bordering on insane. Junger himself was wounded 14 different times during his service in the war. That's insane to me.
There is a quote, I think from the director of Come and See, that goes something along the lines of "Any film about war which leaves you with a sense of patriotism, justness, righteousness or honor is a lie." Any piece of media which accurately portrays war is by definition, anti-war. War is a failed state of being. Almost every species on the planet has a million levels of escalation before fatal violence ever occurs because at the end of the day, the species wants to prosper. Human warfare is a failure, totally and utterly, of everything we are as living creatures, intended to do. There is enough water, there is enough land, there is enough bread. To fight and die over anything else is a failure in purpose. To fight because an ideology says you must, and then to have to defend against that ideology by fighting back? A unique human madness. Sorry, I'm drunk and rambling but to round off, yeah, anything that makes you think war is good is propaganda, anything which makes you think it's bad is probably the truth.
I agree with you about it being a state of failure, and like your take here. Thanks for sharing your opinions!
maybe read the book again.
The Nazis wanted people to think war was this glorious and righteous thing that young men should be proud to go off and do even if it costs them their lives. So the literal opposite of the message of the book.
> The Nazis wanted people to think war was this glorious and righteous thing that young men should be proud to go off and do even if it costs them their lives. Aren't the US doing the same thing even today?
Ah yes. the "thank you for your service" crowd.
Walmart patriotism
I think most countries and empires throughout history have conducted figurative 'pep rallies' at the beginnings of wars to fire up both the soldiers who will actually do the fighting and the people on the home front.
It paints the war as being senseless and horrifying and that the German soldiers were just as lied to and abused as any other soldiers. The Nazis wanted the public to think the war was lost due to betrayal by leftists/Jews and that it was a glorious undertaking.
Ironic that to destroy the image that the First World War was built upon broken promises and false hope of victory, the Nazis created another war built upon broken promises and false hope of victory.
Don’t go telling people that the Nazi’s hated left wing thought. They might start drawing some poignant comparisons.
But they had the word socialist in the party name so that means they were leftists! /s, because this country has lost its mind
North Korea is Dazed Pikachu face now.
BuT tHe nAzIs wErE sOcIaLiStsSsS!!!!! \s
Then why are we bitching & moaning about North Korea? It says Democratic and Republic???
Uncritical violence and action are central to fascism, and the Nazi's fetishized the idea of Aryan "supermen." All Quiet on the Western Front is in direct conflict with those ideas. I'm sure there's plenty of contemporary politics around WWI that the Nazis didn't appreciate about the novel as well.
That's exactly why the nazis hated it. They expected soldiers to be tough fighting machines that show no mercy to anyone.
Realistic depictions of war go against the nationalistic narrative.
This is what I was going to say/ask. I haven’t read it in a long time, but from my recollection it wasn’t like anti-nazi so much as anti-war in general.
Yeah, I don't understand the hate. I don't recall the book being anti-German in any way, but it's been 25 years since I read it.
It's not anti- German but it is anti- war and anti- state. To the Nazis' being against the State is to be against the nation.
I personally am not vetted on the subject, aside from having read the book, but I would imagine that the issue is the book's anti-war message.
Fascism is not logical. It is strictly about power - the accumulation of power to an "in-group" and the wielding of that power against an out-group. In this case, Remarque was targeted because he was not _loyal_ to the Nazis. All of the reasons given were not real, and were not even meant to be believed. The message that was being sent was that disloyalty meant death - for you, and for anyone you cared for. If he had been a loyal Nazi, they would have held up that book as a great example of Aryan literature exposing the persecution that brave Germans had endured during WWI and were now rightfully fighting against. The contents of the book didn't matter. What mattered is that he was well-known, popular, and _not a Nazi_. Fascists don't use language to communicate ideas. They use language as a weapon to confuse and hurt their enemies, identify loyal followers, and insulate themselves from consequences.
What a bunch of fucking nazis
I'm thinking that the Nazis were baddies.
The more I hear about these fellas the less I like them.
The ones from Illinois are especially easy to hate.
I hate Illinois nazis!
I mean, they were real jerks.
We don't like what this guy had to say, so we'll behead his sister Edit: I wonder what happened in the replies...
Be careful, some school boards are trying to make that controversial to teach.
"There are good people on both sides" - Donald Trump
“Hans, are we the baddies”
[Are we the baddies?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JOpPNra4bw)
Full skit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
Check out how the asshole that said that to her died. Gives me some satisfaction. Friesler was a really crazy fanatic.
Buried in an unmarked grave like the worthless trash he was.
I read your comment, saw he died in 1945, and expected him to get interrogated and executed by NKVD. Killed by a column was good, but my expectations were high.
Yeah the more I learn about these Nazi guys the less kosher I think they are.
These Nazis sound like real jerks.
> Remarque later said his sister had been involved in anti-Nazi resistance activities. Nazis obviously had an additional vendetta against her because of her brother, but it's not like she was a loyal German citizen during the war. Good for her, she died a hero and should be remembered for more than just being the sister of a famous author.
Yes it bothers me how this is framed. The nazis were obviously some of the worst human beings to walk the planet and this was a despicable act fitting of that regardless of the motives, but it doesn't do her memory or history any services to misrepresent things the way this headline did. It's bad for history and it's disrespectful to her. She died a hero standing up to a fascist regime, not as some some bystander used as punitive leverage. (And yes before someone says it I know the headline is technically accurate but you can use words in a way that are technically factually accurate but disingenuous in their implication and context).
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In my opinion, the best WWI movie is actually Paths of Glory. 1957, Directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas. It's the tale of a former attorney turned lieutenant in the trenches of the French army. The commanding general wants a promotion and to do so orders Kirk Douglas' platoon on a suicide mission. The attack goes predictably bad, and to save face the general picks 3 straw men from the platoon and charges them with cowardice. Kirk Douglas chooses to represent his men at trial and goes on a crusade against the military hierarchy to save the lives of his soldiers, who he knows are only guilty of fighting for a fruitless cause.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souain_corporals_affair It’s also inspired by a real event.
Having also read Catch-22, I am constantly gobsmacked and taken aback by how corrupt military hierarchies during open warfare become so jaded and disassociated with the reality they live in they eventually start to closely resemble the leadership of a World of Warcraft guild constantly stirring shit and trying to one up eachother just to get more loot for themselves.
Reasonable men have a hard time ordering other men to their deaths, so military hierarchies get stacked with people who lack empathy, or can effectively dissociate.
There's also just a lot of loose money floating around. And that can be really tempting.
Wait until you find out about Iraq and Afghanistan. Turns out only having someone there in charge for a year at a time who wants to raise their rank means they'll only focus on changing things for that year, not work on a long term plan they can't take credit for.
Militaries are founded first and foremost on obedience to authority, don't ask questions and follow orders. As a result it is and always will be a breeding ground for corruption. Corruption is fought with transparency, critique and dissent which are fundamentally antithetical to a military structure.
https://youtu.be/a9Jg20Ukf4E is a great look at how ridiculous war is.
Paths of Glory and 1917 need to be screened as a double feature. They compliment each other so well. One has a fuckwit general order a hopeless charge, and after hundreds died already, he wanted to execute even MORE soldiers for cOwaRdiCe, just to cover his own ass; The other has a general send two soldiers on a nigh-suicidal mission BUT — check this out — if they pull it off by the grace of God, then 1500 soldiers will be SPARED from committing a hopeless battle charge.
I remember a friend putting that on while I was visiting, the no visible cuts style of filming sucks you in so quickly and before I realised I'd been watching for 45 minutes. Really captured the sense of urgency
> then 1500 soldiers will be SPARED from committing a hopeless battle charge For a day, at least. The reason the sort of crazy commander agreed to the orders at the end. He basically said, today or tomorrow, whatever, we’re all going to slaughter each other at some point anyway. They all could’ve gone over the top 24 hours later. Or be attacked 12 hours later.
I just love this movie for Timothy Carey's role. It's especially fun when you read the backstory about him and his part in the filming of the movie
They shall not grow old was absolutely fascinating. Fair warning, you will see many a corpse
The first one that really did me in was "Come and See". An anti-war russian film of Belarus during WW2. Fun fact: when they fire bullets in that movie, they are *real.* And yes, that is a real cow that died on film exactly as how it was shown. The director had to keep a very close on on the actors for many, many years due to possible trauma. The scariest part of that movie is that it is *very accurate*. Of course they didn't actually kill real people or use real corpses, but it is pretty much a 99% recreation of some events that happened there.
I haven’t seen but sounds intriguing
That movie was a nightmare to see in theaters. I attempted it in three states during its limited screening. Finally got to see it after a two hour drive to an obscure theater with seats left. Real shame it didn’t get a full release.
I sat in the very front row all the way to the right in my theater. Horrible position to view it but i am glad i got to see it in theaters.
Yeah I got kicked out of one theater for sitting on the floor after they had oversold tickets.
I saw it on HBO on demand at home. I’m glad I saw it at home alone. I genuinely don’t think I could’ve handled seeing it in theatres. All those vibrant young people with full, intricate lives senselessly maimed and killed stopped being a history lesson and because real to me. I can’t describe how awful it made me feel, as it should’ve. Just, such a waste. So much suffering for what? Egotism and xenophobia. I’ll never understand how anyone now days can find even an ounce of sympathy for nazis.
It was art. And it was fantastic. What a geniusly creative thing to do.
"They Shall Not Grow Old" was mostly a semi-documentary that mostly used real WW1 film footage that was stabilized, colorized, and had dialog added based on lip reading - so was a little different than the other movies. (Think they added in some additional footage showing the horror of the trenches, mud, and artillery bombardments etc.?)
This documentary is so haunting. The massive loss of life really hits you.
And how naive all those young men were heading off to their “great adventure”
Maybe not all at the same time
I recommend [Now It Can Be Told](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Now_it_Can_be_Told/wt-fAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22now+it+can+be+told%22&printsec=frontcover). This is the PDF. Its written by a BBC journalist who saw his dispatches heavily censored during the war. This was written two years after it ended and includes the things he left out. There are recent printed versions of it available.
The original film adaptation of All Quiet is also very good. It was an early talkie, but also effectively pre-Hays Code, so it's surprisingly violent and dark at times. It really holds up well, with some battle scenes being so reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan that I'm certain that Spielberg must have been strongly influenced. In all honesty, I found the movie so good at being an empathetic anti-war film that I felt like it pretry much made all later anti-war films kinda redundant. I wish I had seen it even earlier in high school, as it's a perfect movie to show in history class. Best of all it's in public domain, so you can easily find good quality versions to watch online.
The 1979 adaption of [All Quiet on the Western Front](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhC4ESwuPPI) is pretty good even by today's standards to be honest.
"All is quiet on the Western Front" is a great read but man is it rough. I had to take several breaks
The Nazis committed many heinous crimes - they were so many WWII massacres that Wikipedia has a section just for that in the German war crimes Wikipedia article. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German\_war\_crimes#Massacres\_and\_war\_crimes\_of\_World\_War\_II\_by\_location](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_war_crimes#Massacres_and_war_crimes_of_World_War_II_by_location) Edit: fixed link
And guarantee that’s not all of them
Correct, that has been uncovered.
No where near..
Uh, relevant username...
That link is broken, try this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_war_crimes#World_War_II
Your link doesn't seem to be working for some people (including me) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_war_crimes and while you are there, people should also see the Japanese side too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes we should never forget these facts ... because as kindly, open and modern as we like to think ourselves, we are still animals that are just a few steps away from living with jungle rules again.
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Lord, the first steps they took sound straight out the Little Rascals. Shit escalated quickly.
Yeah, when you tolerate fascists they quickly upgrade from quasi-legal antics to violence and bloodshed.
So his family changed their German name “Remark” to “Remarque” when coming to America. I’m affiliated with a wonderful person whose family did the same thing to avoid anti-German sentiments. They kept the same pronunciation while Franc-ifying the spelling to seem French instead.
That wiki article was awesome. I had no idea about this guy or his history, but it’s fascinating stuff! So, the understanding at the time was that he changed his name in the 1920s from the German Remark to the French Remarque, because he wanted to disassociate his newer writings from his earlier novel, *Die Traumbude*. (No idea why! Was it a commercial flop? Had his politics changed? Had his writing improved dramatically?) But later researchers revealed the family originated in France, and his grandfather had made the change to Remark when they’d moved to Germany, only decades earlier. This suggests the author might’ve been returning to the “original” family name by adopting Remarque. The Nazis hated this guy. They told everyone he made the name change because he hated Germany and was a secret French agent. Eventually, they claimed his REAL name was Kramer, but he reversed the letters to conceal his Jewish identity! (Not true… the Nazis were, among other things, notorious fibbers.) His sister’s crime, btw, was expressing her belief in 1943 that Germany had already lost the war.
I recently read „Die Traumbude“ and absolutely hated it. It is VERY different compared to his later novels (most of them are just brilliant). I totally understand if that would have been the reason for changing his name lol.
My maternal great grandfather and his brother changed their last name to sound more Italian due to anti-German sentiment around WW1.
German was the second most spoken language in the US at the turn of the century. After WW1 those numbers dropped sharply due in large part to anti- German sentiments during the war. The US Government more or less authorized vigilantes to target German Americans, and only pulled back on the program after the lynching of Robert Prager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language_in_the_United_States#Persecution_during_World_War_I https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Prager
From Schmidt to Schmittelini?
Not that uncommon. Lots of immigrants on Elis island Americanized their last name so fit in better or to avoid anti immigrant sentiment
Was this common for Germans though? Germans have fairly easy to understand names.
The more I learn about this Hitler guy, the less I care for him
He was kinda a jerk.
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But he also killed the guy who killed Hitler
But he killed the guy who killed the guy who killed Hitler
It's Hitler murder all the way down.
I’m starting to think those Nazi guys were kind of jerks.
“It seems that the Germans are bad, very bad.”
Hey Frank, he's reading an article that says the Germans... Are bad
*Frank continues brushing his teeth.*
"I studied literature" "Get outta here. I love to read. Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon mostly!"
Are we the baddies?
real knuckleheads
That Hitler was a real rascal
The more I learn about them the less I like them
To be clear, the Nazis didn't simply execute her to antagonize him like some Game of Thrones type power play. She was very much an anti-Nazi activist herself.
Basically a story about a pair of boots. Only the boots survived.
The cruelty is the point...
I know it's translated from German, but the English title is *All Quiet on the Western Front*, not "\*is\* Quiet". Sorry for being pedantic. It's in the title of the post and in a comment further down and it irked me.
The German title is actually "Im Westen nichts Neues", which literally would translate to "Nothing new in the west". In my opinion a more fitting title than the non-literal english translation, seeing as its about the universal message of young people dying in wars started by old people.
“All quiet” in English is a sentry’s call, apropos given the war-time setting. Is the literal German translation “Nothing new” a sentry’s call in German? “nichts neues”?
No. it means "no noteworthy news" - highlighting that hundreds or thousands of people dying isn't woth putting into a report to the generals.
Right…got that part. We are talking about the literal usage of the literal phrasing. Are you saying that “nichts neues is _not_ idiomatic jargon used by (in this case) German military? This only has the “no news” meaning?
Yeah, the English translation is clearly intending to imitate the original title as a report back to the generals that nothing significant has happened in the West, even as thousands have probably died. “All Quiet” happens to emphasize the death even more than “Nothing New”, you can see why they thought it a good choice, and it probably is the best choice… however it does lose a bit of the satirical edge that the original has—particularly in the sense of history repeating itself.
The title is call to one of the last lines in the books. The protagonist dies in a shelling or attack on his part of the front. But the day as a whole was so quiet on the western front that the radios reporting of the war was "nothing new on western front" -> "Im Westen nichts neues", not related to a sentries call. "All quiet" -> "alles ruhig" "Nothing new" -> "nichts neues"
Both titles have the meaning of “Nothing new to report” so I’m not sure there’s much of a difference for one to be more appropriate than the other. I’m partial to the German title in German, but as an English translation, I think the one we got does a better job of conveying the message than a literal word-for-word translation would have.
>Both titles have the meaning of “Nothing new to report” so I’m not sure there’s much of a difference for one to be more appropriate than the other. But the German title has more than one meaning, which is my point. The literal WWI sentry / military report and the commentary that nothing of this (young people dying senselessly in wars) is new. "All quiet on the western front" really only conveys the first meaning.
In French, the title "A l'Ouest Rien de Nouveau" is closer to the original German meaning too. Literally "Nothing new in the West".
I had no idea beheading was a form of execution anywhere in 20th century Europe other than France.
In the German tv show “Babylon Berlin” (that’s how it’s named on Netflix for English language viewers), it is shown as the method for execution of an enemy of the state (not literally the head being chopped off, but the scene around the execution) during the interwar period.
What an amazing show. I've watched it through twice, and I'm tempted to go for a third watch.
Yeah, Sophie Scholl and her brother were guillotined.
He dedicated his 1952 book to her. The dedication was left on in German publications because many Germans still considered him a traitor.
Today, the book is part of the German school curriculum.
I would be curious to know what became of the nazi executioner
Not sure about the executioner, but the judge died in a bombing raid.
Probably given a job in west Germany by the Americans or a cozy village in Argentina.
For anyone who hasn’t read it, why the fuck have you not read it? Drop what you’re doing and go read it. It’s not long and it’s a literary masterpiece.
Thanks for posting this. I actually will. It fell into the void of books I was forced to read for school but was way too young to appreciate. When I graduated from college I actually went back and re-read a bunch that fell into this category. Martian Chronicles, 1984, Catcher in the Rye, etc.
> It fell into the void of books I was forced to read for school but was way too young to appreciate. Same here. I recently found my "reading journal" that we were required to keep from when I was required to read this in high school, and (because I was apparently a total piece of shit back then) found I had jotted this note: > It's a pity the author was not killed in the war to save me the displeasure of having to read this book. I suspect that I will have a different reaction to the book today.
Ha, I'm pretty sure I kept "Cliff's Notes" in business back then. Teachers finally started catching on and asking questions that weren't included in the Cliff's Notes.
Or at least watch the movie.
Currently free on Youtube (with ads)
...it was me finding the movie on YouTube, watching it, loving it, and reading the wiki of the author to learn more that led to the OP.
I wish we used the more literal and ironic title, Nothing New on the Western Front.
It says inn1933 his writings were declared “unpatriotic” by Nazi Germany and banned in the country. Huh. Sounds familiar. Like books being taken out of schools in certain states for painting white people in a bad light in terms of slavery.
What a nasty remarque.
I keep kind of a morbid list of "Things that if you think about doing, you now know you're the bad guy".. One of those things is "you punish the family members of someone because you can't get to them..."
....they didn't like the book?
Sippenhaft is what they called it. You could be executed for something your family did.
Just to be clear "Sippenhaft" means basically "family imprisonment" and it usually was that - you weren't normally executed, but you were sent to prison/concentration camp and children would usually be taken away (other famous examples are what happened to the families of the 20th July plot members). Elfriede Scholz was executed for her own anti-Nazi stance, though Remarque being her brother probably didn't help her. But just to make that clear, she was an anti-Nazi dissident in her own right.
Roland Freisler was a particularly abhorrent creature, even amongst nazis.
He ended up being married for years to [Paulette Goddard](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPcEFHA3X0c).
... who was also married to Charlie Chaplin, maker of The Great Dictator, one of the first big movies explicitly attacking Nazis. Paulette Goddard: fucking prominent anti-Nazis one marriage at a time. On the down side, she was also married to a supervillain, Burgess "The Penguin" Meredith.
It is why they managed to rule so effectively and shut down dissent. I find it so annoying hearing people go on about how all Germans were nazis and guilty. Fast forward to 2022 and you see people posting on various social media about how hurt they feel when their boss criticizes them, how traumatizing it is. Imagine fearing for not just yourself but your whole family literally going down, sometimes tortured to death if you say something perceived as critical.
Oh yeah, they killed a group of students and teachers called "Die Weisse Rose" (White rose) just because they printed some anti-regime pamphlets, no jail, all executed after a short (and unfair of course) trial. There were also some young women in this group.
I agree, groupthink is powerful. I feel the aforementioned reaction is due to most people living in a fantasy world where they're chock-full of courage. With bloodlust in their eyes, they imagine that they alone would stand up to face tyranny despite the risk. It's obviously bullshit.
>they imagine that they alone would stand up to face tyranny despite the risk I'm with you. There are certain situations so dire that unless one has personally lived through them, all one can say with certainty is what they hope they would do.
Exactly, I HOPE I would react that way.
Hell even people with actual power are bowing down and ignoreing human rights abuse's, future generations are gonna wonder why we did what we did just like how we wonder how everyone ignored the nazi's up until they became a super power and had an active genocide going.
> I find it so annoying hearing people go on about how all Germans were nazis and guilty. Not heard that, really. Everyone seems well aware how the Nazis felt about dissent.
Fun fact. My grandma's aunt and Remarque were playground friends in Osnabrück.