![]() With these methods, the films attempt to depict a weapon that tends to defy narrative conventions. Smoke then clouds the viewer and the soundtrack shifts to an uncanny silence, punctuated by the sound of heavy breathing and racing heart beats. After the first screams of alarm wash over, the soldiers begin to react, pulling out gas masks and placing them on their faces. ![]() Upon presumably sensing the gas, either via sight or smell, the soldiers begin to scream and panic, thus trying to bring the reader or viewer into a complete sense of disorientation. And while poison gas was just one of several new weapons that Remarque described in order to convey the brutality of modern trench warfare, his gas scenes maintained enough salience to make it into in each of the three subsequent films based on the novel (1930, 1979, and 2022).Īll three of the All Quiet on the Western Front films attempted to convey gas attacks with the narrative methods that Remarque first employed. In the above lines from All Quiet on the Western Front, the renowned German war novelist Erich Maria Remarque introduced his readers to gas attacks in the western trenches of World War I. Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The size is written both on the bottom of the intake piece of the mask and on the middle piece of the box that holds the mask in place.I grab for my gas-mask…Gaaas-Gaaas- I call…my helmet falls to one side, it slips over my face…I wipe the goggles of my mask clear of the moist breath…These first minutes with the mask decide between life and death: is it tightly woven? I remember the awful sights in the hospital: the gas patients who in day-long suffocation cough their burnt lungs up in clots. The mask was produced in four sizes: K (Kinder - Children), F (Frauen - Women), M (Männer - Men) and M-Ue (Männer-Übergrösse - Men-Oversize), with the M-Ue size (presumably) only being produced when specifically ordered, as this was the case with the VM37. The base of the valve is reinforced with steel to make it sturdier, and to aid with putting it on or taking it off. The exhale valve is a simple flapper valve, similar to the ones of various other civilian gas masks of the era. Like all VMs, it uses a simple metal 40mm intake piece with a green rubbered inhale valve and a foam-like ring that helped drying the intake piece from sweat and condensation. Earlier units of the mask were manufactured with a rubber harness, while later ones featured a cloth harness to further reduce the manufacturing cost. It has a very unique type of harness, it uses three straps attached with two metal tightening brackets to the rubber or cloth straps attached to the mask itself. To counteract this, the VM40 uses a simple strap and shaped chin rest to provide a tight seal to the user, making it a full-face protective mask. The inserts feature a print indicating the manufacturer (Auer), a number (likely the production year) and the word 'Innenseite' (inside) to show which way to insert them.ĭue to the rubber crisis that Germany faced during the war, helmet-style masks like the VM37 became too costly to produce. The mask came with replaceable anti-fog lens inserts that were fixed into the eye pieces with a simple snap ring. The eye lenses of the VM40 tend to discolour overtime becoming more yellow or red, like other gas masks with cellulose eye pieces from the same period. The VM40's face piece was made from Buna-S (styrene-butadiene rubber, a synthetic rubber still used and produced to this day) and was colored either dark green or black, with the production stamps located on the lower left and right side of the face piece where the chin would rest when worn. The VM40 is a Second World War civil defense gas mask available for civilians in Nazi Germany. Reichsluftschutzbund (Nazi pre-Civil Defence )
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