« Primauté de la peur »

It was in 1929 that Remarque became famous, thanks to the enormous success of his first novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Translated into twenty-five languages, the book reached a print run of 3.5 million copies within eighteen months! The film industry seized on it immediately, and on 29 April 1930 Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation premiered in the United States. The film opened on 4 December in Germany: riots in cinemas were organized by Joseph Goebbels and sympathizers of the Nazi party; on 11 December, the film was banned in Germany by the Film-Oberprüfstelle, the film censorship board of the time. Remarque was forced to flee to Ascona, Switzerland, while his books were burned by the Nazis and his German nationality was revoked. He had to go into exile in the United States in 1939, while one of his sisters, who was in hiding, was found by the Nazis and beheaded in 1943.

It is an understatement to say that the novel found no favor with Bernanos: “a foolishness too poor, too tough,” a “pretentious, ludicrous lyricism, sublime in the manner of a county seat,” of “perfect insignificance”: “If heroism found its place here, by some miracle, it would appear suspect, a kind of sad vice, both frenzied and cold, such as one imagines the debauchery of a bad priest. But it does not appear, any more than cowardice, its opposite. Neither brave nor cowardly. Nothing but the monotonous rumination of fear, made bearable by hunger, cold, and exhaustion. And the strange achievement of this book lies precisely in this disproportion between tragic circumstances and the barely thinking beings who endure them with hideous passivity. Never has a more exhausted animal been placed before death under the name of man […]. Let us say it plainly: neither Marcel Cachin’s Humanité — the USSR’s propaganda services — nor the harmless editors of the ‘Vie Intellectuelle’ will draw much from the poor realism of Ernest (sic) Remarque. The immense success of such a book throughout the world sufficiently demonstrates its perfect insignificance.”