‘Better Not to Die at All’
On 5 December 1930, the actor (and, later, director) Leni Riefenstahl attended a Berlin screening of a new war film, All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930). She later recounted the experience:
Quite suddenly the theatre was ringing with screams so that at first I thought a fire had started. Panic broke out and girls and women were standing on their seats, shrieking. The film was halted, and it was only when I was out on the street again that I learned from the bystanders that a certain Dr. Goebbels, whose name I had never heard before, had caused … pandemonium.
Joseph Goebbels had rallied Nazi supporters to disrupt the screening of the ‘anti-German’ film by releasing stink bombs and mice into the cinema aisles, while speeches that denounced it as a ‘Jewish film’ incited attacks on patrons perceived to be Jewish. In fact, the press screening of All Quiet on the Western Front the previous night had been largely successful, with national newspapers printing positive reviews and Variety’s German correspondent reporting that ‘the audience was too stirred and moved to either disapprove or applaud’. Goebbels had planned similar demonstrations for the initial showing, but these had been thwarted when the authorities were forewarned. Riots continued for the next five nights of screenings before the film was pulled from theatres by German censors.
was a Hollywood adaptation of a bestselling German novel by Erich Maria Remarque, which fictionalised his experiences in the trenches of the Great War. The book’s release in 1929 had similarly elicited both protest and praise in Germany. Although nearly 1 million copies were sold that year, it was targeted by the extreme left as indicative of bourgeois sentimentality and naivety, and by the fascist right as dangerous anti-nationalist pacifism. Universal, the Hollywood studio behind the adaptation, had pre-empted criticism of the film and initiated a number of cuts of material deemed sensitive; following the protests of 1930, they enacted further revisions to appease the censors and enable the film’s is an equally fascinating object of study for the events and discussions that surrounded its production, distribution and exhibition in the lead-up to World War II. Examining the discourses surrounding the film illuminates the tensions that existed not just in Germany but around the world as World War I’s legacy was debated and processed.
