All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Some books age well. This classic by Erich Maria Remarque is a novel that does just that. Perhaps it is because the experience of war, of combat, the soldier in the battle never really changes that much. The weapons can change but the experience of killing your fellow man has much in common.

I was telling a friend of mine that I would think that one of the most rewarding courses to take and or teach would be a wartime literature course. Comparing the works of Hemingway, Mailer, and recent efforts by Tim O'Brien, Denis Johnson, and Kevin Powers with the book of Remarque would be very rewarding.

In this book we meet the narrator Paul Baumer. Baumer, at the onset of World War I joins the German army at the age of eighteen. Encouraged by a schoolmaster to join with his classmates Paul and a group of friends join the army with all good intentions. Like many young men they join for reasons of patriotism, the glory of the Fatherland, and expect glory and thrills.

By the time we join the characters in the book they are no longer besot with these images and ideas. The book was controversial upon publication, the book was burned by the Nazi's in Germany, it did, after all, not glorify war. Speaking of war as meaningless and as something that nothing good comes out of we see Paul and his friends decimated by the war.

At age 20 he has been in the military two years and seen his friends die, he has seen troops gain and lose, gain and lose, the same land over and over. To him the enemy becomes the leaders in the military. He begins to realize that the French troops on the other side of the lines are no different than he. They are young men and boys, husbands and fathers, men who have been taken out of their lives and told to kill men and boys, fathers and husbands who they have no grudge with.

Paul is given a leave and at home feels completely out of place. He is told by a neighbor in town that he only understands his little piece of the war, that the real strategy and goal can only be seen as a whole. In effect his ambiguous feeling is only because he does not understand the war that he is living every day. His father, seeking to connect, asks about the battles. Paul cannot share, it is not something a man talks about.

Paul is injured and we see scenes of the hospitals, the overworked nurses and nuns, the doctors who amputate constantly and Paul imagines thousands of hospitals just like this across all of Europe and wonders why.

After seeing his friends die one by one Paul knows that peace is about to happen. In the fall of 1918 no one wants to be the last one to die. With peace on the horizon Paul lets up his concentration and the inevitable happens. We are told that on that day the war is so meaningless, that so little matters that the only bulletin on the condition of the war that day is that the situation is All Quiet on the Western Front. His death, any death has really meant nothing.

A brilliant book, as relevant today as it was eighty years ago.