“This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war…”

Windows. I can’t get the windows out of my mind. Kind of an odd focus for this film, especially after All Quiet on the Western Front’s particularly somber Weekday Warm-up. But though I’ve seen this movie several times, I had never noticed before just how many images are viewed through windows and open doorways or how many scenes incorporate shots of windows. Honestly, the frequent recurrence of viewing the movie’s action through such portals could simply be a directing choice, a method of providing more visual depth to the film. On the flip side, does a film with extended scenes of battlefield combat—infantry charges through artillery barrages, lines and lines of troops mowed down by machine gun fire, hand-to-hand bayonet duels in the trenches—really need one more layer of action in the background? I’m not convinced it does. Why then all the windows?

In my most recent viewing of All Quiet on the Western Front, I was finally led to accept the fact that the windows are significant when, after numerous scenes of movement behind windows and open doors, the silhouette of a window is prominently featured on the wall of Paul’s bedroom when he briefly returns home toward the end of the movie. In this short but critical scene, Paul stands in the doorway of the room and gazes at what he feels is the remnants of his former life, a life he believes it is impossible to return to now that he is a soldier. His sister proudly presents the suit she’s kept ready for him, but Paul’s attention is arrested by his butterfly collection on the wall. Those who have seen this film know that Paul’s history of capturing butterflies is important for the film’s final scene, but what struck me more than the story’s revelation of Paul’s habits of collection is that Paul literally grew up with death hanging on his wall. He doled out death, collected it, and then proudly displayed it in his most personal space. Now, as a German soldier in World War I, Paul is again inundated with death. Indeed, the whole film presents the soldiers’ struggles to avoid death, come to terms with their own deaths, and comprehend the purpose of death in warfare. Near the end of the film Paul tells a group of young students: “Up at the front, you’re alive or you’re dead and that’s all. And you can’t fool anybody about that very long. And up there, we know we’re lost and done for, whether we’re dead or alive…And our bodies are earth. And our thoughts are clay. And we sleep and eat with death. And we’re done for, because you can’t live that way and keep anything inside you.” What Paul tells the young students mirrors the film’s opening statement about the war leaving no survivors. Paul and his friends go off to war with naïve expectations of glory, but all they find is death. Everywhere.

But how does this connect to the windows? Well, I had this epiphany in class this week, thanks to a comment made by a classmate of mine regarding how we are several steps removed, if you will, from older literary works due to translations and differences in historical eras. In that light, windows can also be levels of removal from fact. We can see through them (most of the time), but they create barriers to that reality we are glimpsing. I believe that the windows in All Quiet on the Western Front serve this purpose too. In the butterfly scene at Paul’s house, the window silhouette—and the glass of the frames that hold the butterfly collection—remind us that we are looking in on a reality that is not completely accessible to us. We are once removed (at least) from the actuality of what is on the other side of the glass.

In this same sense, throughout the film Paul and his fellow soldiers also display a separation between what they see/believe and what is actually reality. The propagandist teacher from the film’s opening scene lures his young pupils to enlist in the military by filling them with unrealistic dreams of battlefield glory and post-war fame. Notably, viewers of the film enter this classroom via its large windows, windows through which the students have been presented with immaculate troops parading in perfect lines through the quaint town. The poignant moments in which the young men see what they could become and envision what they believe is a glorious future are complicated by the barrier of the windows. The future seems to be in clear sight; but should the boys reach for it, they will literally be impeded by the window panes. The dream they see is not attainable. Reality on the other side of the windows is different from what the teacher persuades the boys to believe within the classroom.

Later as actual participants in the Great War, Paul and his friends move in and through the portals that populate the film—yet they always display obvious separation from the reality of the war and the very horrors they experience. One of the movie’s most thought-provoking scenes features the soldiers, all veterans now after having survived their first battle, discussing how the war started and why they are there. Interestingly, this scene takes place outside underneath some shade trees. There are no barriers to look through here; there is just the stark reality that no one understands (or wants) this war. The soldiers are clearly puzzled at the purpose of the war, at first blaming the French for starting it (demonstrating their belief in the untruthful propaganda they have been taught). They move on from the French to debate the causes of war in general and how it is even possible for one country to “offend” another–especially when the soldiers themselves admit they don’t feel offended in the least. At last, the soldiers decide war is like a “fever”: “Nobody wants it in particular. And then all at once, here it is. We didn’t want it. The English didn’t want it. And here we are fighting.”

Paul reiterates this idea of the unspoken camaraderie between soldiers who can’t explain the war and don’t want it. During a battle Paul must take cover in a shell hole with a dying French man whom he has stabbed. Paul vacillates between screaming at the man to die faster and comforting him with the idea that he will live because Paul is caring for him. When the man finally dies after hours of suffering, Paul begs the corpse for forgiveness, explaining, “When you jumped in here, you were my enemy–and I was afraid of you. But you’re just a man like me, and I killed you…Why did they do this to us? We only wanted to live, you and I. Why should they send us out to fight each other? If they threw away these rifles and these uniforms, you could be my brother.”

Both the war debate scene and the shell hole scene demonstrate again a disconnect between the soldiers and reality. They don’t have all the facts about the cause of the Great War, nor do they understand why they should slaughter unoffending men from a few hundred miles away as their mortal enemies. They look through the “windows” of their own reality, seeing not what they are told is truth but what they themselves experience as truth–and what they must make truth out to be in their minds in order to carry on with the bloodshed of which they are a part.

In the movie’s famous final scene (spoiler alert!), there is yet one more window-like feature (thanks to my sister for pointing this out to me!). Through a small square opening in an empty machine gun station, Paul, the only one of the boys still in combat at the end, glimpses a lovely butterfly that has landed on the mud and filth in front of the trench. Paul smiles. It is as if he is no longer conscious of the danger that he is constantly in. He reaches through the portal slowly, trying to catch the butterfly without scaring it. Alas, the portal prevents Paul from reaching far enough to snag the butterfly, so he, apparently without thinking, carefully begins to reach over the barrier to the butterfly. A French sniper takes aim. Just as Paul’s hand approaches the butterfly, the sniper fires. Paul’s hand jerks, then goes limp. We never see the butterfly’s fate.

While before the war, Paul killed butterflies and lined the walls of his room with their corpses, Paul wants this final butterfly alive. He literally wants to obtain and hold onto life. But what Paul sees as life in the butterfly is really death on the battlefield. The barrier Paul attempts to move through to snag the butterfly has lulled Paul into a false sense of security. It isn’t realistic for Paul to have life in All Quiet on the Western Front. What the film says is that, just as Paul’s death in attempting to catch a butterfly is ridiculous and meaningless, so also is all organized killing, i.e. warfare. It is neither glorious nor beautiful to die for one’s country. It is painful and grotesque. The movie, hopeless though it seems at times, seems to be yearning for a better solution to global conflict. Why must people die for political disagreements?

The film closes with an earlier shot of the young German soldiers, all of whom are either dead or wounded at the end of the movie, marching off to war. Each one gazes back straight into the camera, some accusingly, some pleadingly–all already lost as evidenced by the thousands of cross-marked graves over which the superimposed soldiers march. Notably, the end of the film is silent and leaves the audience in darkness for several moments before the credits appear. The Western Front has become quiet. The “good guys” have attained a hard-fought victory. But Paul and his friends were not the “good guys,” and we viewers have mourned their premature deaths.

For Me Then…

Because I am a movie nerd, I think of the scene in Moria in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf and Frodo discuss Gollum and Frodo expresses with disgust how he feels it is a “pity” that his uncle Bilbo didn’t kill Gollum when he had the chance. Gandalf replies, “Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment.” It oftentimes seems easy to consign people or people groups to certain “boxes”–and thus to consider whole communities and civilizations of people to be good or evil. For instance, some World War I stereotypes: The Serbians are ungovernable and must be oppressed; the Germans are barbarians who massacred unarmed Belgian civilians, etc. Yet, All Quiet on the Western Front and its German protagonist complicate this black-and-white thinking–just as Gandalf complicates Frodo’s simplistic thinking about who deserves life and who deserves death.

Back to those windows I can’t get out of my mind. For me, just as Paul and his friends struggled with seeing reality through the barriers that were placed before them, we too, separated as we are by time and culture from WWI and its participants, see the events of the Great War through the windows of our own time and backgrounds. It would be easy to condemn specific countries or groups of people, yet we cannot truly know them or their motives. Furthermore, as Gandalf points out to Frodo, even if we knew for sure who was good and who was evil, is it in our power to convey life or death on others? Are we morally upright enough to assume that power?

I greatly value All Quiet on the Western Front’s place in the study of the First World War—especially because its German anti-war perspective is rare and because the work transcends its characters and its times to bring its readers/viewers into a head-on collision with life and death. But more than the film’s commentary on the Great War, its lasting legacy could be in its asking us to reevaluate our positions relative to others. It is easy to condemn and retaliate. It is much harder to love, forgive, and seek to understand.