In All Quiet on the Western Front, 17-year-old Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) and his school friends enthusiastically enlist to fight for Germany in World War I. But from the moment they arrive in France, it’s clear that the grim reality of war is very different from the tales of glory and patriotism they’ve been weaned on. Somehow, all the songs and speeches forgot to mention the mud, horse carcasses and constant fear of violent death that become a part of the soldiers’ daily routine as they sacrifice thousands of lives for a few inches of land.

Directed by Edward Berger, the film has been nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture and best international feature film. But the 95th Academy Awards won’t be the first time an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s literary classic competes for the gold. Ahead, find out more about this film’s storied past, and how it builds on the novel that started it all.

Is All Quiet on the Western Front a true story?

All Quiet on the Western Front is based on Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same name about the gruesome conditions faced by a company of German soldiers stationed in France during the First World War. The book was an instant global phenomenon: It sold 450,000 copies in the first few weeks and 26 translations were soon published, according to professor Daniel Schönpflug, a historian who consulted on the Netflix movie. “Remarque gives a face to the nameless torment of war,” he told Netflix about the secret to the novel’s appeal.

Though its characters –– like protagonist Paul, who leads the audience into the horror of the trenches –– are fictional, the novel draws on Remarque’s own experiences as a German soldier in World War I. “The perception that it was an authentic report from [a real] experience has certainly contributed to the success of the book,” Schönpflug said. “But in fact, it’s a little more complicated. In addition to his own memories, Remarque also worked in the experiences of others [such as] the diary of his school friend Georg Middendorf and reports from other people with whom he talked during and after the war.”

The book’s visceral depictions of war and its brutal honesty about life on the front were groundbreaking, and Remarque was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1931. Likewise, Berger sought not to sugarcoat the cruelty of the surroundings in his retelling, and films the trenches as cold, muddy death traps.

To prep for the strenuous shoot, Kammerer ran for 10 kilometers (or 6.21 miles) three times a week wearing a 10 kilogram vest (that’s around 22 pounds). “It turned out [that was] rather optimistic,” he told Netflix of his big-screen debut as Paul. “The costume, once it was soaked and covered in mud, and all the equipment, the guns and the mud-caked boots were much heavier. I weighed myself once after a particularly hard day of shooting. The additional weight was just under 45 kilograms (99.2 pounds). If you have to walk around with that on for 16 hours a day, through knee-deep mud, 600 meters (1968.5 feet) in one direction and 600 meters in the other, you really feel it.”

Kammerer also trained with a voice coach to alter his Viennese accent. “Remarque is from Osnabrück, so I wanted to play Paul as if he was from Lower Saxony,” he said, adding that he read about 15 books on war and World War I and pored through hundreds of photographs. “I wanted to be completely oversaturated with information.”

All Quiet on the Western Front has already been to the Oscars.

The film joins Cleopatra, A Star Is Born, Little Women and West Side Story in the club of former best picture winners or nominees whose remakes were also nominated. In 1930, US producer Carl Laemmle adapted the novel into an Oscar-winning movie directed by Lewis Milestone. All Quiet on the Western Front was nominated for four Academy Awards at the third-ever Oscars ceremony in 1930, taking home best picture and best director.

Berger’s adaptation marks the very first cinematic retelling of the novel by a German director. “It was important to me to take on the German perspective,” he told Netflix. “Our view of war is marked by grief and shame, sorrow and death, destruction and guilt…. I felt that making our history, background and attitude towards war the driving force behind the movie was a huge and fascinating challenge.”

Why was All Quiet on the Western Front banned?

Not everyone was taken with the book’s message at the time of its publication. In Germany, the then-on-the-rise Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler viewed its anti-war perspective and lack of German nationalism as a threat to their ideology. Things got ugly at a showing of the Hollywood film in Berlin in December 1930, when a gang of Brownshirts, led by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, stormed the theater and released stink bombs and white mice into the crowd. In response, Universal Pictures edited the film to remove some of the most controversial scenes, but the damage was done. The movie was banned in Germany under the guise of restoring public order.

In 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany, launching a wave of book burnings. Remarque fled the country, and it became a crime for anyone to own a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front under the Nazi regime. 

🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

How does the book differ from the movie?

Matthias Erzberger, played by Daniel Brühl in Berger’s film, doesn’t appear in the book. Based on a real historical figure, he’s part of the German delegation sent to negotiate armistice terms with the French and British in the film. Berger added those scenes in order to give the audience context for the slaughter taking place all around.

“The novel was always the guiding light,” he told Netflix. “But we have also included a completely new idea in the story. On the one hand, it was important to me to create a contrast to the hopeless, endless slaughter and, on the other hand, to find a historical framework for our story, which emphasizes the absolute senselessness of the war. The fictional idea was signing the ceasefire agreement in Compiègne in a small railway wagon, with Erzberger played by Brühl as one of the key German characters. This passage is not in the book… but it puts our movie in a clearly defined historical context. It’s set in the final days of the war, in which young people were burnt up as cannon fodder even though there was nothing left to gain.”

Berger’s emphasis on the final days of the war shapes the way Paul’s death is depicted in the film. In the book, Paul is killed during a lull in the fighting, hence the title, pulled from an army report from the day of his death that states “all quiet on the Western front.” The movie, on the other hand, shows him dying at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, the very minute the war officially ends. The guns go quiet, leaving a silence that feels like a scream.