De Gaulle, the Bomb and Berlin: How to Use a Political Weapon

Abstract

There are films about history, the history of which itself reflects history. One of them is the beautiful film by the American director Lewis Milestone about a novel written by a German writer, Erich Maria Remarque, on World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). When this pacifist movie was shown for the first time in Berlin in the early 1930s, the Nazis obstructed the screening by setting free white mice in cinemas where the film was shown. After this event, the film was forbidden. Sixty years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, it was once more possible to gain access to certain underground stations in East Berlin which had been closed for 28 years. There, on the walls of the stations, could be seen posters and advertisements dating from August 1961; they included the cinema programme of that time. One of the films advertised there was All Quiet on the Western Front. Many Berliners felt that this title was a good illustration of the shameful passiveness of the Western powers in 1961, of their impotence, and perhaps even their relief that all had remained quiet when in the East, the Wall had gone up.