Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet On The Western Front"

Erich Maria Remarque’s account of life as a soldier in World War I, as described in All Quiet on the Western Front, paints a shockingly realistic portrait of the horrors of war and how it affects the men who experienced trench warfare firsthand. Remarque draws upon his own experience as a soldier and tells his story through Paul BÐ"¤umer, the novel’s main character, who is a young German man who is sent to serve his nation on the battlefield. Remarque uses BÐ"¤umer to convey the significant psychological impact a soldier experiences and how it alters his view on his past civilian life, as well as the lives of other civilians. In this essay, I will explore BÐ"¤umer’s personal experience as a soldier and how the war continued to change his outlook throughout the duration of his military service.

Remarque precedes the story with a brief statement which says that “it will try simply to tell of a generation of men, who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.” Regardless of this grim statement, the novel’s tone, which is narrated by BÐ"¤umer, begins on a bright note as he and his friends enlist in the army to serve their nation. They enter the battlefield as naÐ"Їve, hopeful young men fresh out of high school, but the tone soon drifts into darker territory. BÐ"¤umer learns that war is not conducive to the high morale he and his friends shared when they left their homes for the trenches, and that all men essentially must endure the war alone. This change in attitude is prompted by the early death of a classmate, Joseph Behm. BÐ"¤umer sums up the detachment soldiers experience from their comrades, as well as their older and younger generations, when he says that “we were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”

This detachment becomes clearer during BÐ"¤umer’s second visit home, nearly two years after he left to fight in the war. He is reluctant to discuss what he had experienced on the battlefield, because he feels that people could not understand it. There is an obvious internal conflict; he is unable to connect with his family. He observes that “I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world…one can see that they are quite confident they know all about it…they make up a picture of it for themselves.” His feelings of alienation are unavoidable, as he states: “there is my mother, there is my sister, there is my case of butterflies, and there is the mahogany piano вЂ" but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.” When his family asked him how bad conditions were in the trenches, he told them everything was fine but his inner thoughts feared the consequences of speaking truthfully about the war; he asks, “what would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?”

BÐ"¤umer finds that he can no longer be content with civilian life, nor will he be able to return to the life he had before going to war, although it seems there is nothing he would like more than to lead a simple life that is not plagued with emotional trauma. He tries to revisit the past when he sits in his room, looking at his collections of books which used to speak to him strongly when he was young. But despite his efforts, he cannot do so and he realized that his life will never be the same: “words, words, words вЂ" they do not reach me. Slowly I place the books back in the shelves. Nevermore.” At the end of his leave, BÐ"¤umer regrets returning to his home and he concludes that it was nothing more than “a pause that only makes everything after it so much worse.” He does his best to maintain a strong front, but he truly wishes he could break down and cry in his mother’s arms. After all, he says, he is still a child.

Subjection to viewing the deaths of so many men, sometimes at one’s own hands, deeply impacts BÐ"¤umer. While he hides for cover in a shell-hole, the body of a French soldier lands atop him. He is not dead yet; he continues to make gurgling sounds and slightly moves his body. BÐ"¤umer is deeply distressed by this, and he stabs the soldier repeatedly so the sounds will cease. This still does not kill him; BÐ"¤umer crawls to the soldier’s side and his eyes open, staring directly at him. The two soldiers spend a day in the shell-hole, during which BÐ"¤umer is haunted by the slowly-dying Frenchman: “this dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: time and my thoughts. I would give much if he would but stay alive.” The soldier dies shortly afterwards, and he becomes the first man BÐ"¤umer has killed. As a result, BÐ"¤umer realizes that the French and the Germans are the same, and he questions “why do they never tell us that you are just 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.” When he returns to his company, BÐ"¤umer tries to shrug off the frightening experience, saying that “after all, war is war.”

At the end of the novel, BÐ"¤umer confirms

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