All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier.  When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.

Earth!--Earth!--Earth!

There is a generally prevalent notion, among literary authors if not among historians, that World War I marks a sort of dividing line in history, a point of irreversible transformation.  The map of Europe was transformed, of course, but along with it came cultural and psychological transformations.  In a reductive sense, much of what defines modern literature--alienation, deracination, nihilism, existentialism, abstractism--has its origin in the that conflict.

Yet I know of very few good literary accounts of the war itself.  My favorite World War I book, Parade's End, provides a few good scenes of Christopher Tietjens being shelled in the trenches, but for the most part it's about what goes on at the fringes of the war, and back home in England.  For the French and Germans, there was no "back home" in that sense, and perhaps for that reason All Quiet on the Western Front could only have come from a continental writer like Remarque.

All Quiet is narrated by a young German soldier, Paul Bremer, who recounts the experiences of his tightly knit group of friends.  It is at times disturbingly graphic about the reality of war, as in one memorable scene in which Paul, unexpectedly finding himself occupying the same foxhole as a French soldier, stabs his enemy to death.  The fear of being murdered is one particular horror, and the murdering another, but it is worse still that Paul must spend the remainder of the skirmish with the man he has killed, looking into his open eyes.  The French soldier is relatively lucky; Remarque goes to great lengths to show us that there are much more gruesome deaths to be had on the front lines.

Even in the midst of the physical actuality of war, Paul and his friends are keenly aware of the way that the war has changed them.  Paul is granted a couple of weeks' leave, but at home he is uneasy and fails to fit in as he once did; home is not what it was because Paul is not what he was.  Remarque clearly spells out the break between the war generation and its predecessors:

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress--to the future.  We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them.  The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.  But the first death we saw shattered this belief.  We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs.  They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness.  The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke into pieces.

...We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from the true, we had suddenly learned to see.  And we saw that there was nothing of their world left.  We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

You might certainly read something similar by an Englishman or an American, but there's a special poignancy in that Remarque writes from the German perspective.  The knowledge that Germany will lose this war hangs over the novel, the knowledge that the atrocities come to nothing.  One might ask what the victors of World War I got for their troubles, too--but I think that only the losing side could produce a novel that really lays bare the pointlessness of the bloodshed.  There's a great scene in which Paul and his friends, stationed near the front lines in France, sneak out in the middle of the night to have sex with a group of French girls, whose brothers and cousins perhaps they may kill the very next day.  The scene with the French soldier in the foxhole says something similar about the two sides:

This dead man is bound up with my life, therefore I must do everything, promise everything in order to save myself; I swear blindly that I mean to live only for his sake and his family, with wet lips I try to placate him--and deep down in me lies the hope that I may buy myself off in this way and perhaps even get out of this; it is a little stratagem: if only I am allowed to escape, then I will see to it.  So I open the book and read slowly:--Gerard Duval, compositor.

With the dead man's pencil  write the address on an envelope, then swiftly thrust everything back into his tunic.

I have killed the printer, Gerard Duval.  I must be a printer, I think confusedly, be a printer, printer--

You can see why the Nazi regime banned All Quiet; Paul's experiences do not leave room for the kind of trenchant nationalism the Third Reich required.  But beyond that there is a tangle of guilt and victimhood that threatens the Nazi justification for war.  Is Paul morally responsible for the soldier's death in the way that he feels at this moment, or does that feeling conflict with the feeling of victimhood, of being pushed into war without understanding it, that pervades the rest of the novel?  I'm so fascinated by Paul's feverish need to "become" the man he has killed--partly to reanimate him, to retract the act of murder, partly out of a sense of justice, but also because to become the printer, Gerard Duval, is to relinquish the role of killer in exchange for the role of the killed.  Is it better to be the dead, or to go on living, as Paul must, with his conscience?

Bonus: Brent's review from 2010.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

"But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. 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 could you be my enemy?"

The front of my copy of All Quiet proclaims it to be, “the best war novel of all time.” Now that I’ve read it, I’m not sure I agree—I’d put The Things They Carried above it, for one—but it is an easy-to-read, yet poetic, novel that manages to capture the brutality of war from a perspective that’s often neglected, that of the losers.

All Quiet is narrated by Paul, a German infantryman during World War I. This in itself was fairly interesting—as important as World War I was, as much as it defined a generation, it’s been largely overshadowed by World War II, both in the public mind and in terms of art. Everyone knows the Nazis were the bad guys in WWII; far fewer could describe the base conflict in the Great War. But I digress.

Paul is a pleasant, if somewhat unaffected narrator. Most of his observations toe the line between dryly clinical and deeply personal. It’s an interesting tone that’s difficult to capture in an excerpt, but one which serves the novel well, keeping it appropriately personal and connected as things get worse and worse for Paul and his fellow soldiers.

The most impressive feat All Quiet accomplishes, I think, is the way in which it inverts our sympathies. Paul is a German, and, as an American, I should logically be hoping that he loses, but—especially ironically, since we all know how the war ended—I never reached that point. Paul presents Germans, Frenchman, and Russians—no Americans get facetime in the book—as simply people, not as enemies or ghouls. The starving Russians in the prison camp are presented as sympathetically as the starving Germans at base camp. This is the overwhelming observation I took away from All Quiet, aside from the obvious “war is hell”: art allows us to see life through the eyes of the other. Movies can do this too, but books are somehow more convincing to me—there are no German military uniforms to serve as a visual reminder of sides. Instead, there is a deep cast of characters, composed of humans rather than weaponized robots, who, as Paul states late in the novel, could, if the right people were to sign a paper, be fighting with and for the men who were their enemies only moments before.