'All Quiet on the Western Front' Director on Netflix Movie: 'War Corrupts All Morals'

On the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th month, everything fell quiet on the Western Front.

On November 11, 1918, conflict between the Allies (France, U.K., Russia, Italy, Japan, and the U.S.) and its last remaining major opponent, Germany, came to an end.

After four years of a long, brutal war it remains a moment in history we will not forget. It's been studied in schools across the world and has played out in award-winning war movies ever since.

In 1929, German novelist Erich Maria Remarque, published the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, bringing to the world's attention the experience of German soldiers in World War I and their detachment from civilian life upon returning home.

As the enemy, before Remarque's novel perhaps the world did not think too much about Germany's human losses or the experience of young and wholly innocent men called up to defend their country under the guise of patriotism, only to meet the same, if not worse, conditions the British, French and Russians soldiers were experiencing in the trenches.

However, Remarque's novel was very well-received. It was adapted into the 1930 Oscar-winning film of the same name by Moldovan-American director Lewis Milestone and it was brought to life on screen again in 1979 by American director Delbert Mann.

Now, German director Edward Berger has become the third director to explore Remarque's story.

Using the same title as the original novel and the two films before it, Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front is available to stream on Netflix from Friday, October 28.

However, this time around, things are inherently different. First of all, Berger is German. He was born in Wolfsburg, West Germany in 1970, giving him a unique perspective on a war his country failed to win.

Secondly, the entire movie is filmed entirely in German, and naturally it's only right to tell a German story in the German language.

Berger told Newsweek why it was important for him to tell this story from a German perspective, sharing that personally, he would "never be able to tell a heroic story" about the war.

He explained: "Whenever I saw American or British war films, I'm really enjoying them but they were specifically from a perspective that I couldn't quite relate to and was different from mine.

"I realized it's because Brits or Americans have a very different approach to the story, just based on their history. The history of America is, in both wars actually, that they were kind of roped into it, they didn't really ask for it. And then, in the Second World War, they liberated Europe from fascism so that leaves a very different history with the filmmakers and with the people that come home. There's a sense of heroism about it, of honorable actions.

"England defended itself, in both wars, and in terms of the filmmakers that come after and that are born out of this history, it does leave just a different relationship to this war. Some healing was allowed, and there is a sense of pride of what you look back on and in Germany, there's nothing like that, you can't look back with pride on it.

He continued: "There's nothing honorable about it, there's just shame and guilt and terror and a sense of responsibility towards that history. I would never be able to tell a heroic story and I felt that, with this movie and with this story, and it's a German novel, to tell it with that perspective, to imbue every creative decision with that history with that sense of guilt or shame, then it just makes a very different movie and I thought it might be interesting for other countries to watch that and to share that with other countries."

In Netflix's, All Quiet on the Western Front Berger has opted to divert slightly from the original book in areas to tell the parallel story of Matthias Erzberger (played by Daniel Brühl), the man who signed the armistice between Germany and the Allied Powers on November 11,1918.

Unlike Remarque, who was inspired to tell the story from his experience of fighting in World War I, Berger told Newsweek he felt it was "the right time" to tell this story, so the world could remember how it was 100 years ago.

He explained: "A couple of years ago when we started [production], it just felt there was a rising sense of nationalism and patriotism that felt unhealthy to me and that reminded me of how this started 100 years ago and how it ended.

"We have Brexit, we have Trump and America, we have Viktor Orbán [Prime Minister] in Hungary, we have Neo-fascist parties being elected all over Europe and these parties are populist politicians, questioning institutions that brought us peace for the longest time in Europe for 70 years, and now these were being questioned.

"It felt like suddenly [the world] was more aggressive and language that I hadn't heard before, crept into the daily discourse, and just felt like a time at the right time to make a movie like this to remember how it was 100 years ago."

All Quiet on the Western Front follows the story of Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) and his friends in 1917. Together they sign up to join the German army, with Paul, who is just 17, lying about his age to go on what he believes to be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure with his friends.

Paul is so naive to the realities of war that when he is given his uniform and notices another man's name on it, he tells the General he has been given somebody else's uniform.

However, audiences watching know Paul has been given the outfit of a recently killed soldier out on the Western Front, so quickly, his body is barely cold yet.

Upon arrival in the trenches, Paul and his friend's upbeat patriotism turns to horror as they are met with the horrifying realities of trench warfare. It's wet and cold, not to mention the omnipresence of death, be it deceased comrades scattered in the trenches and across No Man's Land or the constant machine gun fire and shelling from the enemy.

Berger shared: "It's very much about the loss of innocence. About a young kid who gets manipulated by promises and false idealism into a war, he very soon realizes that all his morals, everything he learned in school from his parents, is worth nothing there.

"It's then about the loss of innocence and how, how this boy or all them become basically killing machines, because they need to. It's an instinct of survival. That's why also there's so much food [in the movie] and when they start eating, they eat voraciously, almost like animals, like beasts, because it's the survival instinct and your survival instinct tells you to kill everything that's in sight.

"I mean, it's either you or them. That's my interpretation of Remarque's book. I interpreted that in order to survive you need to become this killing machine and shut all emotion out, and basically die inside or physically die eventually, and that's the journey of how war corrupts all morals and how in the end you give everything up just for your own because all you think about is how to get through this and be very egotist, it's all about you, it's about, 'I'm going to kill the other or I'm going to get killed.'"

A really "important" scene to Berger, which was brought to his attention by his 17-year-old daughter, is when Paul stabs a Frenchman to death and has to come to terms with what he has done.

Berger described the scene as a "kind of centerpiece" of the film in terms of Paul's journey.

He explained: "In that moment, he realizes that he actually kills another person, he sees death and the struggle for life or what death does, and he realizes the Frenchman is just like him but, he also forgets about it a minute later.

"He walks out of the crater, and then it's just...he's blanked it, it's gone. He has survived, and that emotion is gone. So it's a brief glimpse of humanity, what could be, what could have been, but then what can't be."

There are some slight glimmers of hope throughout All Quiet on the Western Front and most of it centers around the comradeship and real friendship that forms between the men fighting together. They bond over the partners they miss at home, their families, and the future whilst simultaneously grieving the men they've lost and the men they used to be.

Simultaneously, Berger does not shy away from the horrors of war. Audiences watch as men get mauled by tanks, commit suicide, and kill one another, as well as witness the psychological torment war brings to men.

Unlike other war movies, Berger also does not end All Quiet on the Western Front on a positive note, at all. Not even in the slightest.

Berger explained: "The book is our North Star, right? And that's what the book is, it's a report on, how a whole generation signified maybe by this one main character [Paul], so enthusiastically with innocence and youth and hopes were manipulated into something and then came out, on all sides, by the way, not just on the Germans, but on all sides, came out being lost and dead.

"There's a quote in the beginning of the book that says not verbatim, but something like "even if the grenades didn't kill us or didn't get us, they certainly killed our souls, our youth, or they took away our innocence" and so that really doesn't have a happy ending. If you make a film about war, it felt to me anything that would be even in the remotest positive feels like propaganda. So I couldn't really relate to that."

All Quiet on the Western Front is streaming on Netflix now.