Nothing new on the western front

Netflix is no longer available in Russia but I wish Putin, and the Russian people, could somehow see this harrowing film, and reflect.

Felix Kammerer in All Quiet on The Western Front. Picture: Reiner Bajo

Too much world. Sometimes it just feels like that, as the monstrous news cycle casts its net again and again in its relentless trawl for new ways to shock, to awe, to have us cowering in fear of the future. Stop the world I want to get off, I just want to scream sometimes, particularly now as the warmongers among us threaten and flex. What a fragile, hate-distracted species humans are, capable of so much astonishing beauty yet so much destructiveness, too.

In our year of discord, 2022, the world has been stained by war in Ukraine, which plunges us back to those great, stupid orgies of destruction and barbarity from last century known as World War I and II. Europe, oh Europe, who knew we could enter that zone of thuggish destruction all over again, yet Putin has shown us the possibility is ever thus. Then there are the restive rumblings from North Korea, Iran and China, the biggie, looming over us. Over the planet.

Australia’s outgoing foreign intelligence chief Paul Symon recently told the ABC that war between the world’s major powers is no longer “unimaginable”. Comforting. As he steps down as head of ASIS, our secret intelligence service, Symon says there should be no automatic assumption that we’d join the US in any war with China over Taiwan. He believes any such decision would need to be made in light of Australia’s “national interest” – and he’d like to see, in terms of the relationship between nations, the placing of “a little bit more emphasis on peace and stability rather than conflict”.

Our national interest, ah yes, and may our politicians heed that one when the call to fight another country’s war comes yet again. I speak as the mother of three sons who’s just watched All Quiet on the Western Front, Netflix’s harrowing new film based on the classic novel that told the story of World War I from an ordinary German soldier’s perspective. It contrasts the shock of war on the Western European frontline with the pampered old men nowhere near any battle, too easily sending their nation’s young to be slaughtered. For what? Greed, ancient enmities, anger, stupidity, wilfulness. All ignoble traits.

The beautifully coiffed German commanders eat their fine food in crisp uniforms, all pink and pampered and in stark contrast to their soldiers, mud-caked and starving and sobbing and vomiting with terror about being imminently shot or blown up or torched. We desperately want these boys to live; yes, boys, in their late teens. As a mother I can hardly bear to watch. Did not give birth to three sons to have deluded, vain and dishonourable old men ever force them into something like this. Did men like that back then have sons, grandsons? Empathy? Does Putin, with his emptying of prisons for frontline fodder and national conscription drives to feed his deluded legacy?

I ask anyone urging war, wanting war, enjoying watching war, to catch this film. “We are not youth any longer,” Erich Maria Remarque, the author of the original novel, wrote. “We don’t want to take the world by storm. We’re fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were 18 and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.” Thus you think of Ukraine.

The novel was first published in 1928. Declared “degenerate art” by the Nazis. Banned and burned, deemed counterproductive in a remilitarising Germany. Remarque stated his book doesn’t take a political position – it records the soldier’s experience. His novel rings true, which is why it was so dangerous.

It also rings true in terms of the brutality in Ukraine right now. Imagine a book like that written by a Russian soldier forced against his will to fight in this grubby modern war. Contrast his experience with that of Putin and cronies in their gilded compounds; imagine what a book or film like that would do to the aggressor’s frontline morale. Netflix is no longer available in Russia but I wish Putin, and the Russian people, could somehow see this harrowing film, and reflect.