Dehumanization In All Quiet On The Western Front

Often, when people speak of war, they evoke images of pain, terror and deadening. Emotions are twisted, numbed and sometimes completely obliterated. In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baümer plays the essential role as narrator of the story, and ultimately turns out to be the pivotal figure in Remarque’s accurate debunking of the absolute horrors of the First World War and its brutal effects on the soldiers involved. One can speak of dehumanization, shell shock and animalization, but to what extent were soldiers, and in particular Paul Baümer, either desensitized or over-sensitized by war?

The very first thing that should be mentioned when talking about the effect of war on a soldier’s psyche is the notion

of survival. By realizing the brutalities of modern warfare Baümer fundamentally transforms from a “naïve school boy oblivious to the world outside his textbooks” to a “hardened soldier just trying to live another day”. This shows how in order to survive the harshness of war, the character must convert his romantic schoolboy self into a “human animal”. At the actual front, his experiences in battle are quite animalistic, as the soldiers are trained and drilled to trust their instincts and senses over their thoughts, and sniffing out safety and survival thusly. This aspect of animalism contributes to the larger theme of desensitization, in which war destroys the very essence and humanity of the soldier, stripping away his abilities to think, act and feel like a human being and turning him into a life-driven beast. We can witness this drive to survival in the way Baümer instinctively stabs a French soldier when out on an information gathering mission in No Man’s Land. Whilst laying in a shell-hole for cover, the French soldier jumps in with him and Baümer impulsively forces his bayonet in the soldier’s diaphragm. This shows how the main character has been turned into a mindless killing machine, conditioned by war and the orders commissioned by his superiors.

In stark contrast with this almost automatically induced killing reflex, comes the post-killing experience of pure mental agony.

Baümer realizes that he had just been the immediate cause of another, undoubtedly innocent, man’s life. He feels absolutely terrible for what he did, and therefore copies the address of the soldier whose name he discovers to be Duval, and he resolves to send money to his family anonymously. Here we see to what extent Baümer is over-sensitized by the effects of war, as he understands his own precarious situation is no different to the countless enemy soldiers he is forced to shoot at on a daily basis. He is over-sensitized because he is so deeply shocked by his killing of a single man, that he experiences mental pain infinitely worse than any possible physical pain. However, as dark falls and he is still trapped in the crater, his survival instincts reawaken. Somehow he knows he will not fulfill his promise to the dead soldier, and he realizes the utmost importance of distancing himself emotionally from what happened, therefore coldly referring to the French soldier as the “dead printer” (indeed the man was a printer in his ‘previous’

life).
Like Paul’s detachment from his family and from his own condition (which can be read about in Chapter 8), this emotional distancing is necessary, and we experience the triumph of pragmatism over sentimentalism. He cannot function as a soldier if he remains in the grip of grief and remorse that he experiences in the hours after killing Duval. Of course, this is where the reader experiences the intriguing parallel between the desensitization, characterized by his emotional detachment, and the over-sensitization, evoked by his contrition, of Paul Baümer.

To add to the discussion of war’s destructive properties, Remarque thought-provokingly comments in the epigraph that his novel is primarily a description of "a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped the shells, were destroyed by the war." This generation represents the German youth, pushed and encouraged by their nationalistic elders to fight a war they themselves had little stake in.

It epitomizes the transformation of this unlucky youth in a horde of desensitized zombies by a war to brutal to endure, and the numbness is emphasized by Paul Baümer’s often-flat tone in the novel; he frequently passes off the death of a friend as a common and expected occurrence, and his descriptions of “airplane dogfights” suggest a banality and truism conditioned by the horrors of war. Soldiers were unable to allow their feelings to prevail, and emotions were therefore discarded as soon as they popped

up.
This mental disconnection also emerges when Baümer is allowed to visit his family in Germany, but refuses to bond with his dying mother. His visit back results in the figurative reopening of old emotional wounds, and he soon regrets his decision to come back. Moreover, he completely lost his touch with the civilized world and is unable to imagine a future after the military. He feels completely useless and adjustment to civilian life seems utterly impossible. As evoked by Remarque, the German generation of young innocent men found itself caught in a cynical No Man’s Land between the irretrievable past and the unfathomable future.

In conclusion, the question of de- or over-sensitization is an extremely intriguing one with a very faceted array of arguments. Whereas on one side one could argue the animalistic and dehumanizing effects of war on young soldiers such as seen with Paul Baümer, one could also assert the over-sensitization of soldiers such as Baümer’s reaction to killing another man. What is safest to assume though is that when in full combat, it is indeed the notion of desensitization that triumphs, with all the aspects of “human animals”, but once in the trenches and in your fellow comrades’ intimate company, one must speak of human over-sensitization. The adrenaline of No Man’s Land and immediate battle, coupled with the endless drilling of pre-war training, deeply transforms the soldiers into automatic killing machines, whereas their shared predicament outside of the line of fire has created some of the strongest human bonds ever and deeply affected the common psyche.