The Story in Brief
Paul Bäumer is nineteen years old when he enlists with his classmates in the German army at the outbreak of World War I, swept up by a wave of patriotic rhetoric that dissolves on contact with the Western Front. The novel follows Paul and his comrades — Kat, Tjaden, Müller, Kemmerich — through two years of industrialised slaughter, watching them stripped of everything that defined them before the war: youth, hope, the ability to imagine a future. Erich Maria Remarque published the novel in 1929, drawing on his own service, and it became one of the most important anti-war texts of the twentieth century, promptly banned by the Nazis for its pacifism. Edward Berger's 2022 German-language Netflix adaptation — the first German-language film of the novel, which had previously only been adapted in English — won four Academy Awards including Best International Feature Film and is the most formally ambitious screen version of this material ever made.
Key Differences
The German perspective restored
All previous major screen adaptations of the novel were made in English — most notably the celebrated 1930 Lewis Milestone film — which created an inherent strangeness in watching German soldiers speak English on the Western Front. Berger's film is made in German, by Germans, and this restoration of the novel's original perspective transforms the material: the audience is positioned with Paul rather than against him, inside German experience rather than observing it. For a novel written as a German soldier's account of what the war actually was, this seems so obviously correct it is startling that it took ninety years.
Berger's formal choices
The film makes several significant departures from the novel's structure, most notably the addition of an armistice negotiation subplot — showing German military officials negotiating the November 1918 ceasefire while Paul is still dying in the trenches — that the novel doesn't include. This addition is the film's boldest creative choice and its most controversial: it frames the waste of Paul's death against the bureaucratic indifference of the men who could have stopped the killing hours earlier. The novel doesn't make this argument explicitly; the film makes it the climax. It works, and it goes further than Remarque went.
Paul's interiority
Remarque's novel is narrated in Paul's first person — his observations, his grief, his gradual understanding that the men who sent him here had nothing useful to tell him about what he would find. The novel's voice is its central achievement: young, increasingly hollow, punctuated by moments of beauty that survive the war's efforts to kill them. Felix Kammerer's performance captures Paul's dissolution visually — his face does the work the novel's narration does — but the prose voice is irreplaceable, and the film cannot give you the specific quality of Paul's inner life as he watches himself become someone he doesn't recognise.
The combat sequences
Berger's battle sequences are among the most viscerally effective depictions of World War I combat ever filmed — the mud, the tanks, the gas, the specific mechanical horror of industrial warfare rendered without any of the heroic framing that war films often struggle to avoid. The novel describes the same horror in prose that is deliberately matter-of-fact about atrocity, which is its own formal achievement. Both versions refuse to make the killing beautiful; the film makes it overwhelming in ways that prose, which can be set down, cannot.
The ending
Remarque's ending — Paul killed on a quiet day in October 1918, weeks before the armistice, reaching toward a butterfly — is one of literature's most famous final passages: the army report noting nothing of significance has happened on the day a generation ended. The film uses the butterfly and the armistice framing simultaneously, which makes Paul's death resonate against the very moment when it could have been prevented. Both endings are devastating; the film's is more operatic, the novel's more precise. Readers will feel the difference; neither is the wrong choice.
Should You Read First?
Yes — the novel's first-person narration is the experience of being inside a young man's disillusionment in real time, and it is best encountered before the film's visual weight fills in that space. Read first for Paul's voice. Watch Berger's film for the combat sequences and the armistice framing — which adds something Remarque didn't write and does it honourably.
Remarque's novel is one of the essential anti-war texts of the twentieth century — intimate, furious, and narrated by a young man watching his generation disappear. Berger's film is the most complete screen realisation of this material yet made: formally bold, authentically German, and willing to push the novel's argument further than Remarque did. The book gives you Paul's voice; the film gives you the war's scale. Too close to call — both are essential.