“All Quiet on the Western Front”, by Erich Maria Remarque

 

175 pages, Crest/Fawcett Publications, ISBN-13: 978-0449005460

Way back in junior high, when I was in study hall and had nothing better to do (what, I’m gonna study? In study hall?) I came across All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and figured “Eh, what the hell”. And man, am I glad I did. The author (actually Erich Paul Remark; not sure why the name change) was a German novelist with fifteen novels and five other works to his name including this, his most famous piece by far. All Quiet on the Western Front (or Im Westen nichts Neues, “In the West Nothing New”) tells the story of Paul Bäumer, who belongs to a group of German soldiers on the Western Front during The Great War. After his and his comrade’s initial patriotic enthusiasm to fight for Kaiser und Vaterland has worn off, Paul and the other men in his unit find themselves fighting a war they no longer believe in for a cause they no longer support. All Quiet on the Western Front, then, tells the all-too familiar story of men caught in a catastrophic situation not of their making and their futile attempts to escape it – with the only escape possible typically being death.

There are several themes that Remarque tackles across these mere 175 pages, but he does so with such brevity and insightfulness that each powerfully strikes the reader. One is the horror of modern, industrialized warfare, in which men are thrown into the maw of battle like so much raw material in a factory, only instead of churning out products, the war machine produces only corpses. Set in the final years of the war, the novel is famous for its extremely graphic depictions of life and death in the trenches where fighting was grueling, inefficient and pointless and in which the point of battles seemed not victory over the enemy but rather the capture a few hundred yards of land that cost the lives of thousands of men. Those who survived direct attacks often suffered catastrophic shrapnel injuries, losing arms, legs and even faces, to say nothing of the deep psychological trauma they suffered. Soldiers, like those in Paul’s regiment, became detached from the men they killed, and the threat of a vague, unforeseeable death hangs over them all; as Paul observes repeatedly, no one can survive the war completely unscathed.

This leads to another theme of the novel, the simple need to survive the Front. Soldiers must be prepared to act unthinkingly in battle, no matter how horrifying these actions might have once seemed in their long-dead, civilian lives. The men revert to animal instinct under fire, suppressing all higher thought and where emotions like pity, grief, or disgust are fatal to them, as they might cause any one of them to hesitate or second-guess themselves. Paul’s calm, neutral attitude towards his experiences is almost as disturbing as the carnage he describes, but as Paul himself explains, becoming desensitized to the horror around him is the only way he can keep going. Only rarely is an event traumatic enough to briefly break down these mental barriers, as, for example, when Paul is trapped alone for hours with the body of a French soldier he has killed – the only soldier he kills face-to-face, as it happens – or when his best friend Katczinsky (Kat) is killed by a shrapnel fragment. Desensitized, dehumanized, with only the basest desires still intact; that is the life of a soldier on either side of the Western Front.

The soldier’s desire to fight – not for Kaiser or Germany or whatever – for the man next to him is another theme. For Paul, the one positive aspect of the war experience is that it forges extraordinarily strong bonds between soldiers as the men of the Second Company are comrades-in-arms, closer than family or even lovers. They have seen unspeakable horrors and endured unimaginable suffering together, experiences they will never be able to share with those who did not fight. While the war creates sharp distinctions between soldiers and civilians, it also erases other distinctions; well-educated young men, like Paul, fight and die alongside peasants, like Detering. Comradeship is such an intense bond that one would expect the death of one soldier to trigger strong emotional reactions from the others, but grief is a luxury these battle-hardened soldiers cannot afford. Apart from brief outbursts of rage or sorrow, the men are unable to properly mourn their fallen friends, and Paul becomes increasingly numb to these losses over the course of the novel until the novel’s final paragraph suggests that Paul welcomes his own death.

The Lost Generation is another theme, illustrated best when Paul, though often dreaming about his life before the war, knows that he can never return to it. The war has destroyed an entire generation of young men, leaving them “lost” and unable to physically and psychologically recover or unable to readjust to their past lives. Paul experiences the jarring effects of this transformation most clearly when he briefly returns to his home village on leave: while the village hasn’t changed, he has, and so he feels completely out of place there. His old interests in literature and art, represented by the shelves of books in his childhood room, now seem childish and unreal; he feels alienated from his father and his former teachers, who expect him to play the role of the heroic young soldier. Only his ailing mother seems to understand his reluctance to discuss what has happened to him (leave it to Mom to suss out the truth). When his leave ends, Paul is almost relieved to return to the front as his trip home reinforces his conviction that the war has created an unbridgeable divide between the young men who fight and the communities they have left behind.

Last is the hypocrisy of the old generation that sent the new to war. When the war began in 1914, many Germans viewed the conflict as an opportunity for Germany to prove her worth against the other nations of Europe. Young men were expected to support the national cause by signing up for active duty, but these soldiers were volunteers in theory only, according to Paul, for the reality was that most had no say in the matter. Under immense pressure from parents, teachers, and politicians, young men had to enlist or risk being accused of cowardice (one of Paul’s teachers, a patriotic older man named Kantorek, even marched his class down to the local recruitment office to volunteer). Paul feels that these authority figures deceived his generation, filling their heads with romantic ideas about patriotism but failing to prepare them for the horrors of battle. He is disgusted by the hypocrisy of those who preach the virtues of sacrifice, yet are content to let other men die in their place. Even when it has become obvious that Germany cannot win, those in power stubbornly prolong the war, blinded by greed and pride.

Many of the themes in All Quiet on the Western Front are to a great extent universal and appeal to people regardless of race, creed, nationality or what have you. Remarque wrote a humanist novel that all people can recognize and identify with, which explains its longevity.