Although it is best to try to avoid war at all costs, World War I was inevitable. Countries joined the effort in order to comply with existing alliances, or defend their nation from the fierce battles surrounding them. War also provided countries with an opportunity to establish their dominance, and gain territory. However, WWI proved to be the most ruinous event of the time, which Erich Remarque describes in his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque uses his past experience on the battlefield to vividly detail the harsh reality faced by the young soldiers fighting on the front lines. But while soldiers faced the immediate consequences of war, the countries involved endured the repercussions of their overspending and massive military …show more content…
A majority of the German army was made up of the youth of the nation, boys 18 to 21 years old. They were recruited from school, ripped from their adolescence, and given weapons of mass destruction with the instruction to kill for their country. Prior to the war, the boys had hobbies, passions, and a path in life that did not end with their premature death. As Paul lies in the trenches, filthy and mourning the loss of a comrade, he takes time to reflect on the events that brought him into the war and says, “We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces … We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress … We believe in such things no longer. We believe in the war” (88). His words make it clear that he realizes his youth’s potential, and understands it was wrongfully taken from him. He has been trained to shoot enemies, but in the process has harmed himself. No longer does he have unlimited opportunities, or a life of his own; instead he has the war, and the instinct for survival dictating his every movement. He has given up any possibility of a future, dedicating himself to the only constant in his life: shells, gunfire, and death. The loss of his future
All Quiet On the Western Front By 1929, the example of Remarque's altered text of All Quiet on the Western Front, as Hemingway pointed out, gave further proof of greater intolerance in America than in England. Aldington's experience with Death of a Hero, however, would prove the exception. This war novel is actually an anti-war novel, tracing the lives and losses of a young group of soldiers caught in the brutality of World War I. Gripping, realistic, and searing with a vision inconsistent with post-war German character, this book caused Remarque to receive death threats and to leave Germany to live and work in Hollywood. (All Quiet on the Western Front) The differences between the English and American versions of Remarque's novel are instructive. Remarque originally had trouble publishing Im Westen nichts Neues in Berlin. It was rejected by the prominent and conservative Fischer Verlag before being accepted by the liberal house of Ullstein Verlag. It was the grim reality of Paul Baumer's victimization in the war, the disillusioned antiwar sentiments and pacifism of the characters that proved problematic for German leftists and nationalists alike, not the matter-of-fact language of the soldiers. But A. W. Wheen's translation for Putnam's English edition, retaining such words as shit, fart, piss-a-bed, turd, and masturbate had to be converted for Little, Brown's American edition. Skit became swine, piss-a-bed became wet-a-bed, cow-skit became cow dung, and the comical simile like a fart on a curtain pole became like a wild boar. Masturbate and turd dropped out of the American edition completely. (Firda, Richard Arthur 1993) Paul Baumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I. Youthful, enthusiastic, they ...
In Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, characters such as Paul and his friends become indifferent to shocking elements of war through constant exposure to them. For example, the characters are unconcerned about the dangers of the front because they are accustomed to being on the front. In another instance, Paul’s friends show no emotions when they witness snipers killing enemy soldiers. Also, Kat finds the unusual effects of mortar shells amusing. These examples prove that through war, characters of the book have become indifferent to things that they would normally find shocking.
Because the men that return have lost their substance of life they feel disconnected to the people back home. This is shown in All Quiet on the Western Front when Paul returns to his hometown on leave and is met by unbearable war-enthusiasts, patriots, his oblivious parents and Kemmerich’s distraught mother – he can’t relate to any of them. His experiences distance him from his past, this is poignantly displayed when Paul states “I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear”.
Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front gives you detail and insight into the long, destructive “Great War”. Quickly, romantic illusions about combat are disintegrate. Enthusiastic teenage boys convinced to fight for their country by their patriotic teachers came back feeling part of a lost generation . This novel teaches us what a terrifying and painful experience World War I was for those fighting in the trenches on the front.
The story takes place through the eyes of a German infantryman named Paul Baumer. He is nineteen and just joined up with the German army after high school with the persuasion of one of his schoolteachers, Mr. Kantorek. Paul recalls how he would use all class period lecturing the students, peering through his spectacles and saying: "Won't you join up comrades?"(10). Here was a man who loved war. He loved the "glory" of war. He loved it so much as to persuade every boy in his class to join up with the army. He must have thought how proud they would be marching out onto that field in their military attire.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a historical novel written by Erich Maria Remarque. The novel focuses on a young German soldier and the predicaments he encounters during his life on the front. The novel displays a powerful image to all of its readers and tends to have a long lasting effect on the way that they interpret war. All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel that encourages nations to consider the horrible hostilities that war brings on humans before entering into global conflicts. From his graphic imagery and his detailed description of character relationships, Remarque depicts the brutality of the war at the front.
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel that takes you through the life of a soldier in World War I. Remarque is accurately able to portray the episodes soldiers go through. All Quiet on the Western Front shows the change in attitudes of the men before and during the war. This novel is able to show the great change war has evolved to be. From lining your men up and charging in the eighteenth century, to digging and “living” in the trenches with rapid-fire machine guns, bombs, and flame-throwers being exposed in your trench a short five meters away. Remarque makes one actually feel the fun and then the tragedy of warfare. At the beginning of the novel Remarque gives you nationalist feelings through pride of Paul and the rest of the boys. However at the end of the war Remarque shows how pointless war really is. This is felt when everyone starts to die as the war progresses.
In the book All Quiet on the Western Front, author Erich Maria Remarque reveals a dimmer sense of the cost of war. The main character in the book, German soldier, Paul Baumer, embodies the cost of war before he reaches his ultimate fate. The tactics and weapons used in World War 1 were more advanced compared to the past as a result of the industrial revolution. Germany was forced to fight a two-front war and this intensified the losses suffered by soldiers like Paul and the other men in the Second Company (Gomez 2016, German Strategy for a Two-Front War – Modern Weapons: War and the Industrial Revolution). Remarque’s observations that he shares with readers are not to World War 1 because it portrayed not only the physical but mental consequences of combat. Regardless of what era of war soldiers were involved in they were the ones who paid the price for facing so much death.
Erich Maria Remarque's classic war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, deals with the many ways in which World War I affected people's lives, both the lives of soldiers on the front lines and the lives of people on the homefront. One of the most profound effects the war had was the way it made the soldiers see human life. Constant killing and death became a part of a soldier's daily life, and soldiers fighting on all sides of the war became accustomed to it. The atrocities and frequent deaths that the soldiers dealt with desensitized them to the reality of the vast quantities of people dying daily. The title character of the novel, Paul Bäumer, and his friends experience the devaluation of human life firsthand, and from these experiences they become stronger and learn to live as if every day were their last.
People who have actually been through war know how horrible it is. Society on the other hand, while it believes it knows the horrors of war, can never understand or sympathize with a soldier’s situation. The only people who can understand war is those who have been through it so they can often feel alone if they are out of the military. Paul cannot even give a straight answer to his own father about his dad’s inquiries about war. Paul’s dad does not understand that people who have been in the war can in no way truly express the horrible things that that have seen and experienced. Nor can Paul fit in with the society who does not understand him. Paul and so many others were brought into the war so young that they know of nothing else other than war. Paul held these views on society as he said, “We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;-the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall in to ruin.
Many of Remarque’s ideas expressed in All Quiet on the Western Front were not completely new. Remarque emphasized things that portrayed the magnitude of issues soldiers face, and how the physical body and senses affects their emotional well-being. The ideas in All Quiet in the Western Front of not knowing the difference between sleep and death, seeing gruesome sights of people, and frustration towards people who cannot sympathize with soldiers, are also shown in Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Dug-Out”, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s “Vigil”, and Sassoon's’ “Suicide in the Trenches”.
Paul and his generation feel separated from the rest society. Paul feels as though “[he has] been crushed without knowing it” and “[does] not belong anymore, it is a foreign world” (168). Other men “talk to much for [him]. They have worries, aims, desires, that [he] cannot comprehend” (168). His generation of men who fought in the war is “pushed aside” (249) as unpleasant reminders of a war the civilian population would like to forget. After surviving such unspeakable experiences the soldiers feel separated from everyone. Paul says, “men will not understand us” (294). “The generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside” (294). After the war most soldiers “will be bewildered” (294) and “in the end [they] will fall into ruin” (294). The soldiers do not have concrete identities as the older generations do. “All the older men are linked up with their previous life” (19). Paul’s generation cannot even imagine any definite post-war plans. Their experiences are so shattering that they regard the prospect of functioning in a peacetime environment with vague anxiety. They have no experiences as adults that do not involve a day-to-day fight for survival and sanity. Paul has a “feeling if foreignness” and “cannot find [his] way back” (172).
What is war really like all together? What makes war so horrifying? The horror of war is throughout All Quiet on the Western Front. For example Albert says the war has ruined them as young people and Paul agrees. “Albert expresses it: "The war has ruined us for everything." He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.” (Remarque, Chapter 5). The way the war has affected each soldier has changed them forever. The boys who were once school boys will never be the same.
Oftentimes, mankind does not grasp that once an event is over, it may not in reality be over for some. How coincidental it is that the men doing the brunt of the fighting, most of which they know not what for, end up suffering the greatest. One would assume that, to a soldier, a return home would be a time of peace and reprieve, but in reality, the return home introduces. an entirely new set of problems to the mind of the soldier. In the timeless war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, author Erich Maria Remarque portrays through his character Paul Bäumer the inability of soldiers to integrate themselves back into regular society as a result of their impossible to forget experiences on the front.
Paul believed the older generation "...ought to be mediators and guides to the world... to the future. / The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in [their] minds with greater insight and a more humane wisdom." Paul, his classmates, and a majority of their vulnerable generation completely trusted their role models and because of that trust were influenced and pressured into joining the war. They believed the older generation understood the truth behind war and would never send them to a dangerous or inhumane situation, "...but the first death [they] saw shattered this belief." The death caused the soldiers to realize that the experiences of their generation were more in line with reality than those of the older generation and that created a gap between the two. "While [the older generation] continued to write and talk, [Paul's generation] saw the wounded and dying. / While [the older generation] taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, [Paul's] already knew that death-throes are stronger."