In many of the great films about WWI there are no battles, no fighting, sometimes not even gunshots. In 1932 Ernst Lubitsch made Remorse, a film about a post-war soldier who visits a German village to look for the family of the last soldier he killed. The Great Illusion (1937), Jean Renoir’s masterpiece, deals with the relationship between officials from different sides in a prison; Senderos de gloria (1957), banned in Spain until the arrival of democracy, taught the cruelty of military justice; La vida y nada más (1989) by Bertrand Tavernier tells of the endless search for the disappeared in France.
All of these films – especially those by Lubitsch and Tavernier – showed that wars do not end when politicians say, nor when guns are silenced, but leave marks that society takes years to shake off. As Ignacio Martínez de Pisón’s extraordinary novel Castillos de fuego (Seix Barral) shows, the post-war period is sometimes as violent as war itself. You can survive a conflict and lose everything when it ends, as many of the characters in Pisón do in Madrid in the 1940s.
More information
Two of the films that made it to the finals of the Oscars, the German All Quiet on the Front and the Irish Banshee in Inisherin, are war films. In the first case, it is a rewrite of one of the great classics of anti-war literature, written by a war veteran, Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), and published in 1929, at the height of Nazism. In the first part, the film shows how crazy patriotism can lead a society to collapse. In the second, he shows – sometimes with a tone more in keeping with video games than cinema – the horrors of the trenches and battles. In Irish film, on the other hand, war is something distant and at the same time very present.
Now that the battles have returned to Europe, it is very interesting to review all this war arsenal – although in reality the war never went very far: Yugoslavia stained the end of the 20th century with blood and, just beginning, that 21st, Vladimir Putin started in Crimea, and then continued his offensive to destroy Ukraine in Donbass. Pundits still debate the origins of World War I—historian Christopher Clarke coined the concept of “sleepwalking” to explain the stupidity of great powers who accidentally stepped into the abyss—but its aftermath was crystal clear: Nazism, World War II, total catastrophe, the Holocaust… “The horrors of 20th-century Europe were born out of this catastrophe, which, in the words of the American historian Fritz Stern, “was the first catastrophe of the 20th century, the catastrophe from which all other catastrophes arose. Clark writes in Sleepwalkers.
All Quiet on the Front teaches us to hate wars; but it also allows us to understand that despotism must be stopped. The shabby pacifism of those who refuse to arm Ukraine and want to hand over half the country to a tyrant who will soon invade other territories and other victims is not that of Remarque, whose books were burned by the Nazis, his small ones Sister executed on charges of defeatism in 1943. Since his American exile, he has never hesitated: he has denounced Hitler’s crimes and collaborated with the Allied secret services. I hated war; but he was aware that if no one opposes evil, it will continue to advance.
All the culture that suits you awaits you here.
subscribe to
Babelia
The literary novelties analyzed by the best critics in our weekly bulletin
GET IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits