Volker Bertelmann’s score for All Quiet on the Western Front begins with an object that seems to be breathing. “Remains” opens on a low mechanical presence: wood creaks, air moves through reeds and three distorted notes arrive with the force of an industrial warning. The instrument is a harmonium formerly owned by Bertelmann’s great-grandmother, built around the beginning of the twentieth century and therefore roughly contemporary with the world depicted in Edward Berger’s film. Instead of using it to manufacture easy period atmosphere, Bertelmann feeds it through amplifiers, increases the bass and retains the noises that a conventional recording would remove. The result sounds simultaneously ancient and modern, domestic and monstrous. It is the defining gesture of this fifty-three-minute album, which presents twenty-four cues from Berger’s 2022 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel.
A war score can easily become trapped between two familiar approaches: solemn orchestral mourning and aggressive action music. Bertelmann avoids both by treating war less as heroic conflict than as a machine that repeatedly starts, stops and consumes human material. His three-note figure does not develop like a conventional theme. It intrudes. The notes are blunt, separated and almost physically oversized, closer to the alarm of heavy equipment than to a melody associated with an individual character. Their return across “Remains,” “Tanks,” “War Machines” and other cues creates a conditioned response. Long before the listener knows which instruments are producing the sound, its meaning is unmistakable: the apparatus has begun moving again.
That mechanical idea is established by the album’s sequencing. “Remains” is followed by “Uniform,” whose title refers to one of the film’s most chilling cycles: clothing is stripped from dead soldiers, cleaned, repaired and issued to new recruits. Bertelmann does not narrate the process with grand tragedy. The cue is spare and impersonal, allowing repetition and texture to express the bureaucracy of death. “Rain & Night,” “Flares” and “Buried & Found” continue in brief, concentrated forms. Many of the early pieces last less than two minutes, yet they seldom feel like incidental fragments. Sounds are introduced, allowed to hang in an uncomfortable space and then removed before they can provide emotional resolution.
The score’s most radical quality is its refusal to reassure. Film music commonly guides an audience through violence by clarifying what to fear, when to grieve and where hope remains. Bertelmann’s interventions can instead appear to oppose the image and destabilise its emotional rhythm. A dry snare attack may erupt without the preparation expected from military music. The distorted harmonium enters with no accompanying march and no promise that its three-note statement will become a complete phrase. High string tones hover above the lower machinery, but their fragility does not automatically translate into consolation. The listener is kept between registers: human vulnerability above, indifferent mass below.
“Ludwig” and “Comrades” begin to place individual experience against this system. The latter is one of the longer pieces and demonstrates how much Bertelmann can achieve without abandoning restraint. Small changes in pulse and harmony suggest companionship while refusing the warm, expansive theme a more conventional film might assign to the soldiers’ friendship. The music recognises intimacy as temporary and exposed. “Search Party” and “72 Hours” then tighten the atmosphere again, replacing any developing security with suspended motion. Bertelmann’s background as Hauschka, particularly his work with prepared piano and the unintended sounds of acoustic mechanisms, is relevant here. He listens not only to a note but to the impact, scrape, pedal and release that make the note possible.
“Tanks” and “War Machines” form the album’s brutal centre. Their power does not come from orchestral size alone. Percussion is isolated so that individual strikes resemble shots or metal collisions, while the harmonium’s distorted bass occupies the space normally reserved for synthesisers. Because its sound begins in air passing through reeds, it retains an unstable organic edge even when amplified into something enormous. The instrument becomes an apt representation of the film’s battlefield: a human-powered mechanism transformed into an engine of intimidation. “Retreat” does not offer release from this pressure. Its gestures remain clipped and urgent, as though movement in either direction belongs to the same process.
The quieter material is equally important. “Bomb Crater” stretches to nearly four minutes and brings the score closer to the bodily scale of the soldiers. Rather than decorating horror, it creates an enclosed psychological space in which time seems to slow. “Night Fires,” “Scarf” and “Tjaden” are small, sombre pieces whose brevity gives them the character of damaged recollections. Bertelmann avoids polishing them into memorial miniatures. Melodic material appears in incomplete outlines, and the recording often leaves exposed air around an instrument. The absence of dense orchestration permits every contact sound to matter.
This sparseness can make the album austere when separated from the film. Several cues operate through closely related drones, string suspensions and percussive interruptions, and listeners expecting continuous thematic development may find the middle portion resistant. Yet the repetition has a structural purpose. Just as the recycled uniform establishes a cycle at the beginning of the film, recurring sonorities make the score feel caught in a system that cannot imagine an ending. The album’s vocabulary is narrow because the soldiers’ world is narrowing. Food, shelter, companionship and the next few hours become more real than the national rhetoric that brought them to the front.
“Fear of What Is Coming” makes that contraction explicit. Its title could invite a conventional suspense cue, but the music’s dread is less concerned with a coming surprise than with the certainty that violence will resume. “Kat” is painfully short, refusing to inflate personal loss into a display of compositional grief. Bertelmann’s restraint is especially effective here because the album has already taught the listener to recognise tenderness through reduction. The human cues do not compete with the war mechanism on equal terms. They survive in whatever space it temporarily leaves unoccupied.
The final sequence is the album’s most sustained. “No End” and “Last Combat,” running for more than nine minutes together, accumulate earlier materials without converting them into a triumphant climax. Percussion, low distortion and tense strings intensify, but the score never grants the violence an exhilarating rhythmic drive. “Making Sense of War” is deliberately unable to fulfil the promise of its title. Its more reflective character suggests an attempt to organise what has happened, yet the familiar sounds remain irreconcilable. The title piece follows as a compressed summation: not a grand end-credits suite, but another encounter with the score’s scarred tonal landscape.
“Paul” provides the decisive conclusion. Recorded entirely with the harmonium, it brings the instrument back from amplified war machine to vulnerable physical object. Tiny microphones were placed inside it so that its wooden operation, bellows and mechanical movements became part of the performance. The machine now seems frail enough to break. This change does not redeem the threatening three-note motif, but it exposes the material from which that threat was constructed. Behind the distortion there was always air, wood, labour and a player’s body—just as the military apparatus was made from individual bodies before it rendered them anonymous.
As a stand-alone album, All Quiet on the Western Front is not an easy or conventionally beautiful listen. Its terse cues and restricted language preserve their severity outside the film, and the famous three-note figure can seem almost too emphatic until its relationship with the quieter material becomes clear. Yet this imbalance is the score’s point. Bertelmann creates a world in which machinery is louder than personality and interruption more truthful than flowing melody. The album’s achievement lies in turning one old harmonium, a handful of percussion sounds and restrained strings into a complete dramatic argument. Its music does not commemorate war from a safe distance. It makes the mechanism audible, then lets us hear the fragile human breath trapped inside it.
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