All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque

 

All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque published All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929, eleven years after the armistice, and the Nazis burned it four years later. This sequence of events tells you most of what you need to know about the book's subject and its courage: it is a novel that refuses, with complete steadiness, to make war into anything other than what it is.

Paul Bäumer is nineteen when he enlists, pushed into it by a schoolmaster whose patriotic rhetoric will look different after the first week at the front. That teacher, Kantorek, recurs in Paul's memory throughout the novel — not with hatred but with a specific, exhausted contempt for people who deploy words like 'duty' and 'glory' without any knowledge of what they are describing. Remarque is careful about this: the novel's anger is not at Germany or at the war's opponents or even at the generals. It is at the language of patriotism itself, which misrepresents what soldiers are being asked to endure.

The trenches are depicted with sensory fidelity — the mud, the rats, the wounds, the specific bureaucratic indignity of dying for a few meters of contested ground. Remarque doesn't aestheticize any of it. He also, crucially, doesn't aestheticize the brief pleasures: the food when food is available, the bawdy humor of men who have learned to live in the present because the future is not a reliable concept.

Katczinsky — Kat — is Paul's surrogate father, the experienced soldier whose practical intelligence has kept him alive and whose survival seems to confer a kind of order on the chaos. What happens to him is rendered in a single paragraph that Remarque does not underline or italicize or signal in any way. The restraint is what destroys you.

Paul's leave home is the novel's most quietly devastating section. He returns to find that the words his family uses — the concepts, the assumptions about what the war means and what it is like — have no connection to anything he has experienced. He is already a ghost in the world that formed him, unable to inhabit his old room or his old books or his old ideas about the future. He goes back to the front because there is nowhere else he belongs.

The novel's final sentence is one of the most famous in literature, and Remarque earns it completely. '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 the end had come.' The report notes that the day was quiet on the Western Front. Remarque does not add a word.

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