War on Film – All Quiet on the Western Front

In the late 1920s, a spate of novels and memoirs fundamentally challenged the prevailing view about the First World War. They emphasised the futility of the conflict, the endless sacrifice, and the comradeship of the men in the trenches that often isolated them from civilians back home. This view has come to be the dominating interpretation of the Great War, highlighting the horrors of trench life, telling of a troglodyte existence amidst the mud and barbed wire. In Britain, there was Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), along with many others. In Germany, Erich Maria Rema