There are no anti-war films.

There are only war films that live up to their theme and others that don't.

The fact that Lewis Milestone's "Nothing New in the West", the first film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel from 1928, is still considered an anti-war film has to do with the fact that Milestone dared something in 1930 that no war film director had dared before: He told a story without heroes.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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His main character Paul Bäumer is one of many, one face among millions, and in the end, also in violation of every film convention, Bäumer is dead. The National Socialists, who had already agitated against Remarque's book, pulled out all the stops against Milestone's film, they threw stink bombs into the cinemas, white mice drove through the floor, mobbed visitors.

In the end they were banned from performance by the state, the effect of which was only slightly mitigated by the later release under strict editing conditions.

The associated censorship card from the Supreme Film Review Board of the Weimar Republic is publicly accessible in the Berlin Kinemathek.

Edward Berger's remarque film adaptation - the third after Delbert Mann's 1979 television version - also wants to be a story without heroes.

That's why she starts with images of an assault, in which men in gray uniforms fall out of their trench, run through no man's land under enemy fire, shoot, scream, fall and finally end up on a pile of the fallen who are frisked and stripped of their clothes by salvage squads.

The blood-soaked uniforms go to the dry cleaners and then onto the workbenches of seamstresses who mend the holes torn by bullets and shrapnel.

At the end of the recycling cycle, the items of clothing are in the material distribution for the soldiers' supplies.

One of the jackets still has the name tag of its previous owner when it is handed over to the next war volunteer.

Berger's film takes about 15 minutes before the story shifts to the first-person perspective in which Remarque's template is written.

This change of perspective is not a problem for a novel because it can constantly readjust the relationship between reader and narrator.

A film, on the other hand, sticks to its main character as soon as it begins to see the world through their eyes.

Berger's camera therefore quickly jumps back into the long shot and draws Paul Bäumer into a panorama of customs from the Imperial Era.

"Northern Germany, Spring 1917" is a world in which entire high school classes, cheered on by their German teachers, report as a whole for frontline action.

After the uniforms were handed out, Bäumer and his friends were honed at Remarque's in the barracks yard.

Her instructor's name, Himmelstoss,

stood in the late Weimar Republic for the German spirit of commiseration.

Berger, on the other hand, has eliminated the grinder.

He wants to get to the point - and overlooks the fact that he is aiming past it without a hit to the sky: war as a social, not just military, phenomenon.

What can then be seen is described by the film assessment board in Wiesbaden in its report on "Nothing New in the West" as follows: "Berger and his cameraman James Friend impressively establish the setting of the trenches ... The recordings are so precise and exactly composed that they seem almost beautiful in the midst of all this cruelty, also because Berger and Friend keep showing uplifting shots of trees and nature.

At the sound level, a recurring bass-heavy melody creates a creepy foreboding mood of fear...".

That's the conclusion of a shocker with a cultural film insert, a battle record with an aesthetic topping.

Unfortunately the description is correct.

It should be added that the director and his cameraman not only set the ditch,

but also to work through the entire war in a catalog-like manner, from single shots to barrage, from throwing hand grenades to using spades, from being buried to tank and flamethrower attacks.

And that the image of the upper half of a man's corpse in a branch fork also belongs to the "almost beautiful"-looking shots.

It's as if the film were trying to catch up on the barracks lessons that were axed on the battlefield, without forgetting the genre's usual snapshot from hell.