All Quiet On The Western Front Comradery

Narrated by nineteen-year-old German soldier Paul Bäumer, All Quiet on the Western Front details the time Paul spent at the French front during World War Two. Through his eyes, author Erich Maria Remarque makes it clear that humans are not built for war. The untapped, bottomless strength advertised as something one possesses by enlisting does not exist – there is only so much a person can take before total collapse. This explains why comradery is valued so highly among Paul and his regiment; the constant suffering of warfare can be distributed between many to reduce the burden of the individual, to an extent. But during the interims in which one is left alone, and in order to sustain the greater body with an explicit contribution of will, survival

depends on becoming a soldier. A soldier is a being between human and animal, and it finds itself needed strictly within the thick of battle. Elsewhere, as Paul learns, the price paid for such transformation is steep and pervasive: to be a soldier, one has to pay the price of one’s own life. This means sacrificing one’s identity, past, and future place in the world they may return to.
In terms of identity, Paul learns a soldier must make sacrifices in different forms. Most straightforwardly, the bureaucracy is of the opinion that conformity and uniformity is required of a soldier, since many of them make up an army. Paul recounts that most of his training involved “a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants” (22). An opinion of more experienced perspective would say that identity must be sacrificed as part of what lies beyond food, hunger, and shelter – the most immediate needs. Paul explains that the constant threat of death has:
transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct--it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought--it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude--it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness. (22)
In other words, anything involving introspection beyond noticing bodily signals and selective attention to preserve minimal sanity is truncated from the mind in order to sustain necessary emotional efficiency for individual survival.

In addition, the theme of comradery is plainly slotted as an alternative to standing alone, in the sense that Paul himself feels that being part of a larger body is a survival tactic. The placement of this statement within this particular thought implies that it, too, requires Paul to surrender his sense of self to his more animalistic side that keeps his body alive. The reader is privy to a less conscious and more painful confusion of identity experienced by Paul after he murders French soldier Gérard Duval. Paul says, of Duval, “This dead man is bound up with my life, therefore I must do everything, promise everything in order to save myself…deep down in me lies the hope that I may buy myself off in this way and perhaps even get out of this…I have killed the printer, Gérard Duval. I must be a printer, I think confusedly, be a printer, printer” (225). In this scene, Paul continually makes promises he cannot fulfill of giving years of his life to Duval if only he would live, clearly showing that time is considered by Paul as a sort of karmic currency. He references some moral need to take Duval’s place in the world and abandon his own in order to repent for what he has taken. Using his identity as a superstitious bargaining chip is another

example of the characteristic willingness of a soldier to sacrifice the self for survival, even if in this situation it is, more abstractly, Paul retroactively placating himself. By giving up his self to his more animal side, to comradeship, and to some greater thing in hope of forgiveness, Paul demonstrates general sacrifice of his identity overall.
Paul discovers that a soldier also forsakes their past in witnessing war.

Paul remarks that, to a soldier, “the things that existed before are no longer valid, and one practically knows them no more” (22). They are alienated from their old lives because the people who lived them did not survive the front, where one’s identity must be sacrificed in order to return home at all. This is epitomized in the scene in which Paul stands in his childhood bedroom during his first leave, trying desperately to feel the connection he has once felt with his home and to ignore the more persuasive tug of his soldier’s reality. He wants to be reassured by his familiar surroundings, hoping that simply being back where he started will remove the effect the front has had on him, especially since he can appreciate it now. Alas, Paul realizes that his soldierly persona is not shed so easily, and he states that he “fear(s) to importune it too much, because I do not know what might happen then. I am a soldier, and I must cling to that” (173). If he tries too hard to regain what he has lost, then he may, in the process, lose what keeps him alive at the front. He acknowledges that his identity is now that of a soldier and that losing sight of that could get him killed. Paul even states explicitly that he “ought not to have come on leave” because he has lost the numbness provided to him through his sacrifices in taking reprieve from the constant suffering of the front (185). The re-realization of his

identity through his attempts at reconciling with the past he has forsaken has make him again vulnerable to pain and fear, where a more complete soldier would not be.
Paul realizes that soldier does not have a place in society when he returns from war. Most of Paul’s survival tactics are corrosive to the mental mechanisms that govern civilian interaction, and the laws of the front are not comfortably transferable between peoples. Paul, for example, has a habit of suppressing thoughts that threaten his personal sustainability, such as how his “enemies” in war could have been allies of his anytime else. He says he will continue to repress such thoughts only until the war has ended, as he sees it as “the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human feeling; this is a task that will make life afterward worthy of these hideous years” (194). Paul wishes to postpone his emotions, which is toxic to his mental health and translates into an avoidance of sentimentality and default to making light of the atrocities that he has seen (232). As a result, Paul’s ability to empathize becomes greatly stunted, as demonstrated during his exchange with Kemmerich’s mother about Kemmerich’s death. Upon Kemmerich’s mother’s insistence that Paul tell her the truth about how Kemmerich died, he thinks to himself: “I pity her, but she strikes me as rather stupid all the same. Why doesn't she stop worrying? Kemmerich will stay dead whether she knows about it or not. When a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over a single individual” (181). This callousness that has developed from the beginning of the book - where when Kemmerich dies, Paul feels much the same as Kemmerich’s mother about it - makes relations between him and others relatively untouched by warfare impossible on the same wavelength. Paul recognizes this, stating that his home is now a “foreign world”, where he can no longer comprehend the “worries, aims, and desires” of the men he talks with, and they cannot understand his (168, 169). At the very end of the book, Paul laments vacantly that the generation preceding him will resume business as usual, forgetting the war. It follows that the generation succeeding him will not understand the way Paul - and others like him - are as a result of being soldiers, and that the soldiers themselves will witness their time of usefulness has passing on. Paul predicts that most will not deal well with finding themselves so misplaced, and that all of them will find themselves even more lost and forgotten, as causalities of something so large but incomprehensible between soldiers, the only ones that could even begin to know its true nature (294).
A soldier has only one answer for the questions of “Who are you?”, “Who were you?” and “Who are you going to be?” He is a soldier, and that is his only answer, right there next to his name. This is what Paul takes away from the war, among all his losses.