… all the memories that come … are always completely calm … They are soundless apparitions that speak to me, with looks and gestures silently, without any word … They are quiet in this way because quietness is so unattainable for us now … Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow – a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires- but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us.4 ½ Remarque in the WarI got to wondering how much action Remarque had seen in the war. Not much, it turns out. Conscripted at age 18 (he became 18 on 22 June 1916); so in the second half of 1916, or early in 1917. On 12 June 1917 he was transferred to the Western front, the Field Depot of the 2nd Guards Reserve Division at Hem-Lenglet (northern France, somewhere around Cambrai).Two weeks later he was posted to the 15th Reserve Infantry regiment, Engineer Platoon, stationed between Torhout and Houthult. These towns are both in West Flanders (Belgium), not far north of Ypres, in the area that the Germans referred to as the “Flanders Position”.On 31 July, about a month after that, he was wounded by shrapnel (leg, arm, neck) and spent the rest of the war in an army hospital in Germany. July 31 was, probably not coincidentally, the opening day of the battle known as Third Ypres, or Passchendaele. The bombardment preceding the battle had started fifteen days earlier, and by the time the shelling ended at 4 am on the 31st, over 4 million shells had been fired at the German positions. It seems likely that Remarque received his injuries as a result of the bombardment, or the ensuing British advance that day. Aerial view of Passchendaele village before and after the battle We must assume that this was fortunate for young Remarque. Not only did he miss most of Third Ypres, which lasted over three months, into November, and likely resulted in between 50,000 and 100,000 German deaths; but he also missed the German last-gasp offensives of 1918, in which the German Army sustained close to a million casualties.Thus the battle scenes which are related in All Quiet do not likely describe things that Remarque personally experienced in the war. It is a work of fiction, not a memoir of a surviving soldier who experienced battle in the trenches (as is Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That).The writing and reception of the novelAll Quiet is the story of Private Paul Baumer’s experiences in the Great War. Remarque knew some of these experiences first-hand; the rest, at least in their general outline, he no doubt heard from survivors of the war who he talked with in later years.The story first appeared in several issues of a German newspaper in 1928. It was then published in book form in early 1929. In the ten years after the war Remarque no doubt thought repeatedly and deeply about what we find in the story. In my copy of the book, a brief essay appears after the story by G.J. Meyer. Meyer points out that this delayed appearance of the novel worked in its favor, at least in the English speaking world. Had the novel appeared in the early ‘20s he thinks it would have found a German audience almost exclusively. In both America and Britain, Germany was still under the pall of the “relentless propaganda” of the war years – the narratives claiming that the war was Germany’s fault, that the German armies had acted in “loathsome” ways, that the Allied victory had been necessary to “save civilization”. A story eliciting sympathy for a German soldier would have found few receptive readers. By the late 1920s such notions were fading. The novel has found a place at the forefront of anti-war fiction. Within a few years of its publication it was being burned by the Nazis, who viewed its anti-war sentiments, and its depiction of, in Meyer’s words, “a disillusioned and demoralized German soldiery” to be “intolerably offensive.” Remarque himself, living in Switzerland, was out of their reach, but his sister was beheaded by the Nazis in 1943 after she had stated that she considered the Second war lost. (See Wiki.)For more on reactions to the book, see Receptions.All Quiet on the Western FrontThe world of Remarque’s war story can be divided, neither surprisingly nor originally, into two separate areas of reality, internal and external. External reality, the outer world, is the world outside of Paul Baumer, the world he perceives through his senses. Internal reality, the inner world, is a separate place, inhabited by Paul’s memories, emotions, and thoughts. There is also a part of the outer world which forms a connection between these two realities: the part comprised of other people, most importantly of his fellow soldiers. People in this third world are of course external to Paul. But because they each have their own inner world, they can communicate their thoughts and memories and emotions to Paul and to each other.The outer world of the Great WarPaul Baumer’s outer world, even this world of war, includes many different human experiences and their corresponding play on the emotions – comprised as it is of … medical care in military hospitals … roasting a young pig, with all the trimmings … seriously considering shooting a young fellow soldier … being under bombardment … amputations by the bushel … bodies blown apart … swimming a river nude, clothing held high, to meet French lasses … inheriting coats, boots and other belongings from friends no longer in need … being shelled in a graveyard … rain and mud, being wet for days on end … constant lice infestations … making love to a strange young woman … a nude legless torso in a tree … guarding miserable food from rats … injured soldiers drowning in water-filled shell holes … the hell and humor of boot camp … cadging or stealing food … playing cards … screams of agony from wounded men and horses. Near Hooge in the Ypres salient, 29 October 1917 Most persistently it is a horrifying world, tilted precariously toward experiences which work dreadful injury on the inner world. For me the worst of the experiences was related thus:Kat looks around and whispers: “Shouldn’t we just take a revolver and put an end to it?”The youngster will hardly survive the carrying, and at the most he will only last a few days. What he has gone through so far is nothing to what he’s in for till he dies. Now he is numb and feels nothing. In an hour he will become one screaming bundle of intolerable pain. Every day that he can live will be a howling torture …I nod. “Yes, Kat, we ought to put him out of his misery.” … We look round - but we are no longer alone. A little group is gathering …We get a stretcher. The world of comrades: a transition from outer to innerWithout other human beings to share that outer world with, could any person survive? If all the rest were machines? Or shut you off from contact with them? Comrades, the soldier’s lifeline to sanity … Paul’s fellow soldiers - some friends from home, others met during the war … simple camaraderie away from the battle … sheer unthinking valor to rescue a comrade when under fire … the only ones who know what you do of the outer world, because it’s their outer world too … deflecting and attenuating the horror … At a prisoner of war camp, guarding Russians, Paul begins to sense that the enemy too could be comrades.They stand at the wire fence … Most of them are silent … I see their dark forms, their beards move in the wind. Their life is obscure and guiltless; - if I could know more of them, what their names are, how they live, what they are waiting for, then my emotion would have an object and might become sympathy. But as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life … a word of command might transform them into our friends … I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half, and give them to the Russians.Then the revelation, under duress, that one enemy is also a comrade, a brother-in-arms. Paul attacks a French soldier who has stumbled into his shell-hole, mortally wounding him, and listens to him dying hour after hour.He opens his eyes. He must have heard me, for he gazes at me with a look of utter terror … I bend forward, shake my head and whisper: “No, no, no,” I raise one hand, I must show him that I want to help him, I stroke his forehead … “I want to help you, Comrade, camerade, camerade, camerade – “ eagerly repeating the word, to make him understand … In the afternoon, about three, he is dead … My state is getting worse, I can no longer control my thoughts … The dead man might have had thirty more years of life … I speak to him and say to him: “Comrade, I did not want to kill you … you were only an idea to me … It was that abstraction that I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me … Forgive me, comrade. We always see too late … “And comrades share not only the outer world, but the inner world also. Though each has his own version, they are much alike. At least Paul very reasonably thinks so, since he often says “we” instead of “I” when narrating thoughts and feelings inhabiting the inner world: the feelings of having been tricked or betrayed by their elders about the war …Of Kantorek, their schoolmaster – “I can see him now, as he used to glare at us through his spectacles and say in a moving voice: ‘Won’t you join up, Comrades?’ … We can’t blame Kantorek for this, there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best – in a way that cost them nothing. And that is why they let us down so badly.their shared reactions to battle …“We feel in our blood that a contact has shot home … It is the front, the consciousness of the front, that makes this contact. The moment that the first shells whistle over and the air is rent with the explosions there is suddenly in our veins, in our hands, in our eyes a tense waiting, a watching, a heightening alertness, a strange sharpening of the senses. The body with one bound is in full readiness … Every time it is the same.their dedication to each other …By far the most important result of our training was that it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war – comradeship.The inner world of the Great WarPaul’s memory torments him. Memories come to him, but the thing remembered has lost the meaning that it once had for him. The essential nature of the reality behind the memory has dissipated, then vanished entirely. It’s not that the thing remembered no longer exists, as for example a memory of a long-dead friend or loved one. The person is still alive. But the something that bound Paul to the person has disappeared, and this has happened because of how the outer world of the war has changed him.The inability to connect with the objects of memory is emphasized to an excruciating degree in the chapter on Paul’s return home on leave. He has a premonition of this even as he walks home from the train station: every common sight, the bridge he has crossed a thousand times, the shops he has visited all his life, strike him not as a familiar and welcome landscape, but as sharp, almost breath-taking memories of things which stand out in surprising relief. At his home, he opens the door with its worn latch, and is assaulted, overcome with memories of his mother, his sister, his home, his former life … “against my will the tears run down my cheeks”. But it is not till later, sitting by his mother’s bed, that he becomes conscious of the reason for those tears. I breathe deeply and say to myself: - “You are at home, you are at home.” But a sense of strangeness will not leave me, I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there is the mahogany piano – but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.Paul knows that it is he who has changed. “I now see that I have been crushed without knowing it. I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world.”In his room, Paul confronts his bookshelves. Second-hand classics, “collected works”, moderns, some books borrowed and not returned “because I did not want to part with them”. Schoolbooks.I want to think myself back into that time. It is still in the room, I feel it at once, the walls have preserved it … I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books … The backs of the books stand in rows … I remember arranging them in order. I implore them with my eyes: Speak to me – take me up – take me, Life of my Youth – you who are care-free, beautiful – receive me again – Images float through my mind, but they do not grip me, they are mere shadows and memories. Nothing – nothing - … I cannot find my way back, I am shut out though I entreat earnestly and put forth all my strength. Nothing stirs; listless and wretched, like a condemned man, I sit and the past withdraws itself.I take one of the books, intending to read … take out another … take up fresh books. Already they are piled up beside me … I stand there dumb … Dejected.Words, Words, Words – they do not reach me.Slowly I place the books back on the shelves. Nevermore.What is leave? – A pause that only makes everything after it so much worse. Already the sense of parting begins to intrude itself. My mother watches me silently; I know she counts the day; every morning she is sad. It is one day less.And when his leave is finally up, and he must go back? ”I ought never to have come …” The names of the train stations he had passed on the way home, which had caused his heart to tremble, which had caused him to stand at the window, to hold the frame – those names which marked “the boundaries of my youth”? Paul has learned that though he could recross that border, what is on the other side is no longer his youth, but a strange, heartbreaking land of ghosts, phantoms, silent markers of a former life gone forever.This dissolution of memory wends in and out of a series of thoughts that grip him: that the war has first robbed him of these vital aspects of his memories; but has also, uniquely to young men like him and his friends, removed the very ground of their future lives – if they do have future lives.Paul and his cohort of friends, those drafted right out of school and thrown into the maelstrom, had not started living yet. This theme of Remarque’s struck me powerfully, because I often thought when I was in college, and still think, that I had not really started living until I entered college. It was only then, when I met people from parts of the world outside “the boundaries of my youth”, people with different thoughts and ideas from those of my small-town childhood, and when I was introduced to subjects I had never imagined - philosophy, theology, literary criticism - that I realized that those 17 years prior to college were a prelude to life - not life itself. As Paul reflects in the second chapter, Our early life is cut off from the moment we came here … All the older men are linked with their previous life. They have wives, children, occupations, and interests, they have a background which is so strong that the war cannot obliterate it. We young men of twenty, however, have only our parents, and some, perhaps, a girl … some enthusiasm, a few hobbies, and our school. Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains.Those things – parents, girl, hobbies, school – are all nothing but preludes to life. And not only are they gone, having been left behind as he entered the war, but Paul now knows that even the memories of these preludes to life are dissolved, disconnected from him.Real life itself had not yet started. The preludes, the foundation on which others have built their lives, are gone. Kantorek, their schoolmaster, “would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption … We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land.”The preludes (prologues) to life are irretrievable - what should have followed, the main event, their real lives, possibly built on these foundations, can never occur.Paul Baumer, and his compatriots, are indeed a “lost generation”. The phrase itself is not used by Remarque, but both “lost” and “generation” appear over and over in Paul’s thoughts.(view spoiler)[For more on this topic, see The Lost generation. (hide spoiler)]
This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war - epigraph from All Quiet on the Western Front.EMR's 1929 bleak depiction of war portrays Germany's fundamental intent on total subjugation, and the patriotic call of the Fatherland to its impressionistic "Iron Youth" who, with innocence and idealism in their eyes, were eager to do their duty not fully comprehending the mortal gravity and moralistic value of doing so. Its publication offended the Nazis for its illumination of "disillusioned and demoralized German soldiery", and led to widespread riots; public burning of the book and banning of the film; most revealingly, Remarque's self-preserving decision to emigrate to Switzerland.All Quiet on the Western Front is told, without employing a definitive plot line, from the point of view of young private Paul Baumer: a German soldier giving an authentic account of frontline action in truthful, visceral, humanistic terms - a string of narrative incidents regarding the experiences of its war initiates - from school to basic training; the first taste of the front; retreat ; to the frontline again as its atrocities become more intense ; a little comic and romantic relief secretively crossing demarcation areas for some female company; being wounded, convalescing, then being sent back to fighting again; the increasing apathy, and even the perverse pride of the now- experienced soldier. "We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."The initial eagerness quickly dissolves, the spirit becomes annihilated, dreams and hopes for the future are destroyed. Life and Loss became one and the same. For Baumer, his ideals disintegrate in the trenches when he comes face to face with his 'enemy'. "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and had called forth its appropriate response. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me...Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony- Forgive me, comrade; how can you be my enemy?"Remarque chose no warring sides in his novel; he simply extolled an anti- war sentiment - the weighing of the value and waste of human life as he objectively saw it. There is no question that Remarque had been at the front as he stated in an Observer interview (13th October 1929, pp17-18)- "the details of my book are real experiences, in spite of all the rumours to the contrary, which I will not take the trouble to contradict. I was at the front long enough to have experienced personally just nearly all I have described. I was wounded twice..."All Quiet on the Western Front remains one of the most popular novels of the Great War, if not the most popular and inspiring, that portrays an inglorious war's absolute waste of life, pointlessness and meaninglessness."He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the Army report confined itself to the single sentence: all quiet on the Western front.He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm as though almost glad that the end had come."
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I'm rereading this after nearly 30 years (so I put it back in "currently.") It's just as good the second time.This book had a huge impact on me in my 20s. I read it while recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I was stunned by how well it rang true to my army experience, and expanded on my understanding of it. (Of course I'd never been to battle, as we were at peace.)I had only toyed with writing at that point, had never been to writing school or finished a book of my own. So I came back to reread it decades later, a little apprehensive that the writing might not stand up. It's even better than I remembered/appreciated.The cover of my Ballantine edition boldly proclaims it "The greatest war novel of all time." For once, a book lives up to the hype. I have yet to read a war novel that comes close.The title is brilliant for many reasons, but really captures what's so remarkable about this book: its quiet. From the first scene it is understated. A book about death, mayhem, bruatlity . . . all told in a sweet mellifluous whisper.
—Dave Cullen
Yeah ! My first 5 star read of 2014. Excellent- A mesmerizing and vivid account of war.I bought this novel as an audio book for $2.95 on Audible's daily deal and firstly I have to say the narrator was excellent but after a few pages I realized I just had to have the physical book as the writing was so beautiful I needed to have the book in my hand and re-read some of the wonderfully constructed sentances.This is a story about Paul, a young German soldier who goes to war along with some of his comrades to fight for his country. Through Paul's eyes we travel with him on his journey to witness the horrors of warfare and experience the physochical struggles of these young men whose hopes and dreams are forever shattered. There were times I felt I was in the trench with Paul and I could feel the muck and the rats and the lice. What a wonderful writer that can make you feel you are part of the story and portray such spectacular sense of time and place. The story is told simply and yet powerfully and one memorable sentence follows another and had me re -reading paragraphs just to enjoy the writing. The most vivid and memorable scene for me was when Paul went on leave home. it was wonderfully written and very real. Books like this stay with me for a long long time. Another book A Long Long Way bySebastian Barry made a similar impression on me.There are wonderful quotes in this book and the following is a favorite of mine." Equal rations, equal pay, war's forgotten in a day"This novel is not for everybody as some people don't want to read war novels. But it is a short book and readers who like to read about war will certainly find this novel is extremely well written. Its a book that takes you to war and throws you into the trenches whether you like it or not.A well deserved 5 stars.
—Dem
"Let the months come, and the years, they'll take nothing more from me, they can take nothing more from me...But as long as life is there it will make its own way, whether my conscious self likes it or not." This review is part of my Poppies & Prose feature. You can find out more here.So when I first decided to dedicate my reading this November to books either set in or written during the two World Wars, I decided re-visit some books that I had already read. But it was only when I picked up the copy All Quiet on the Western Front and started to read it did I realised that I’d never read it. Like a lot of teenagers in the UK who chose to study English Literature at A-Level, I received a list of books that weren’t mandatory reading but were seriously On this list were the usuals: Birdsong, The Regeneration Trilogy, Goodbye To All That etc etc and All Quiet on the Western Front. I remember talking about it in our classes and I remember answering questions on it and I remember watching the film. So I just assumed that I must have read it. So this was new for me, even though I knew the story and knew what happened at the end. But I’m so glad that I didn’t just disregard it and think ‘Oh, already read that, no need to bother’ and moved on because I would have missed a compelling, fascinating and necessary piece of literature. It’s been a few days since I finished this book and I’ve been putting off writing this review because I don’t think any review could do this book justice. I’m a collector of quotes, whether it’s ones that make me laugh or ones that make my heart ache, and I normally jot them down in my notebook. With this book, however, I appear to have simply re-written the book. This book stopped me in my tracks. The prose is haunting as Paul, our narrator, describes the inexpressible events that are occurring around him. From the connections he makes will his comrades, the French girls in the village, the British soldiers he encounters and his family, when he returns home for a visit, this book digs deep into human emotion and refuses to look away at any point. Recruited straight for school Paul and his comrades were dropped onto the front line with little to no training and no idea what to expect. I think the passages where Paul laments how it will forever be his time in the war that defines him for rest of his life was what affected me the most. “For years our occupation has been killing- that was the first experience we had. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possible become of us?”And I wouldn’t say that this was truly a theme tune, because I’m not going to pick songs for any of the books that I have read in these two weeks as it would be impossible to find the right fit and I just don’t think it would be appropriate, but… one of the most memorable parts in this book was when Paul visits home. The way that he describes how he feels that he is a stranger in his own home, waiting to find something that he remembers about how he felt when he was living there or who he was when he was living there, really stuck with me.But the part where he is talking to his mother about his time in the trenches and he lies and reassures her that it wasn’t really all that bad over there reminded me of the end song of Oh! What a Lovely War. This has been a favourite of mine ever since I watched it in GCSE history and I will always, always remember the last scene and the goosebumps it never fails to bring up on my arms.“You won’t understand and never will. And I don’t want you to.” What I loved most about this book, however, was that if you removed the front cover and changed the character’s names, you could quite easily believe that this was an account of a British or French soldier or any of the other nationalities who fought on the Western Front. All of the men who fought in the trenches on the western front were in the same position, welded together with the same feeling that there was no definite explanation as to why they were there. They were all just ordinary men placed into extraordinary circumstances and told to do unthinkable things and expected to survive. “It’s as if we were once coins from various countries; we’ve been melted down, and how we have all been re-struck so that we are all the same.”
—Jo
