All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
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Book Reviews of All Quiet on the Western Front
Book Review: Mr. Hill's English Class Book Review
Summary: 5 Stars
All Quiet on the Western Front, by German writer Eriq Maria Remarque, explores the horrors of World War I through the eyes of a German solider named Paul. Remarque transforms this tale of a young recruit who is thrown head first into a raging war into a lesson about life. Remarque attempts to teach the reader to understand the horror of war, the value of friendship and the absurdity of traditional values.Remarque includes discussions among Paul's group, and Paul's own thoughts while he observes Russian prisoners of war to show that no ordinary people benefit from a war. No matter what side a man is on, he is killing other men just like himself, people with whom he might even be friends at another time. But Remarque doesn't just tell us war is horrible: he vividly supports his point by assaulting all of the reader's senses. Remarque uses the sight of newly dead soldiers, unearthly screaming of the wounded horses, the smell of three layers of bodies to hammer home the atrocity of war. The crying of the horses is especially terrible. Horses are innocent bystanders, their bodies shining beautifully before being cut down by shellfire. To Paul, their dying cries represent all of nature accusing Man, the great destroyer.
Another message that Remarque attempts to convey to the reader is the value of enduring friendship. The theme of comradeship occurs often and gives the novel both lighthearted and sad moments. Away from battle, the soldiers formed deep bonds, showing not only the importance, but also the strength of the camaraderie between the men. Friendship emerges as an even more important theme at the front. Throughout the book, the reader sees men helping wounded comrades at great personal risk, often with tragic results. The reader can understand how hearing the voices of friends when one is lost or even just hearing their breathing during the night can keep a soldier going. The reader grieves with Paul and almost puts down the book when his dearest friend dies. Friendship was often the last thing keeping a soldier from giving up, and, when it was lost, life seemed to lose its meaning.
Remarque also preaches a rejection of traditional values. In his introductory note, Remarque said that his novel was "not an accusation". Rather, it is a rejection of traditional militaristic values of Western civilization. This denunciation is impressed on the reader through the young soldiers. Represented by Paul and his friends, these soldiers see military attitudes as stupid and accuse their elders of betraying them. Often the spit and polish mind-sets of their superiors put the front-liners in danger. The betrayal by elders can be seen in many instances, including during the Kaiser's visit to the front. This scene hints at some of Remarque's personal grievances with his country's government.
Like All Quiet On The Western Front, most of Remarque's other books were written with the intent of censuring war. This book does an especially good job of this, relying on the wonderful prose of the author to brand its ideas into the reader's mind. It also impresses upon the reader the author's belief in the merit of friendship and the triviality of traditional values. In the end, this book serves its purpose well: it makes the reader wonder why we still tolerate and advocate the atrocity that is war.
Book Review: When Will They Ever Learn?
Summary: 5 Stars
"War is hell", said Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. Well said. But with his towering semi-autobiographical masterpiece,"All Quiet on the Western Front", Erich Maria Remarque SHOWS us the all too harrowing truth of that famous quote. Set in the waning days of World War I, Remarque's hero, 20 year-old German soldier Paul Baumer, through his first-person narration, takes us on a guided tour of that hell that was the trench warfare in France. The novel is a brutally honest, unflinching depiction of the horrors, and degradations of that most deadly of all human enterprises, and the physical,spiritual and psychological toll it takes on its participants. Unlike other exemplars of the genre such as "War and Peace" and "The Red Badge of Courage", Remarque's novel pulls no punches in deference to his readers possibly refined sensibiities, but is determined to show the animal brutality,the torn and horrible human disfigurement, the dread, anxiety and soul-deadening ennui that is the result of modern mechanized warfare. If the reader harbors any illusions about the glamor, glory and romance of combat, Remarque brutally strips these away with his grimly poetic prose to reveal the beast in all its unspeakable brutality and wretchedness. As young Baumer and his comrades-in-arms, are rapidly ground up in the abatoir that was the Western front, they are increasingly reduced to insensate beasts whose only small joys come from having a modicum of decent food to eat, and the empty satisfaction of their sexual drivesin brothels, or by accomodating females in occupied territory. Before most of them meet their gruesome physical deaths on the barren,muddy barbed-wired landscapes of the battlefield, they have already died spiritually and emotionally to all of life's hopes and possibilties. Thus, when Baumer goes home on two weeks leave, he is overwhelmed by feelings of alienation from his family, neighborhood, and neighbors. All that was once familiar, enjoyable, warm and comforting has been irretrievably lost. The idea of returning to the "normal" pursuits of everyday peacetime existence seem absurd after the horrors he has experienced. Remarque strongly expresses his anti-war sentiments through the sensitive and circuspect Baumer, who sees the obscene ridiculousness of those adult "authority" figures who, in their patriotic fervor spurred the youths to don uniforms and led them, like unwitting sheepto the slaughterhouse. He also realizes that he has much more in common with his young enemies, who he must kill, or be killed by, than those authorities and commanding officers. Young Baumer, in conversations with his fellow soldiers comes to skeptically question notions of patriotism, nationalism and the very rationale for war itself: dangerous thoughts which no nation bent on military adventure can tolerate. Upon finishing this unforgettable tour de force, published in 1928, and read by millions around the world, this reader found it difficult to believe that, with this powerful condemnation of war, the human race could allow itself to ever again take up arms. Alas, barely ten years later the world was engulfed in even greaterhorrors. As Pete Seeger sang, "When will they ever learn?"Book Review: War in the trenches
Summary: 5 Stars
I believe that it was Clauswitz who said war is diplomacy by a different means. When wars break out, they often become tar babies, i.e., sticky situations easy to get into but hard to get out of. Two years ago a young woman in Japan asked why the United States used atomic bombs in 1945. I told her it was to end the war; the options for accomplishing that were limited; and all of them involved a large number of deaths. Regular diplomacy had failed.
The present novel is set during World War I, mainly on the Western Front somewhere in France. The war has become a stalemate and the armies are bogged down in trenchworks facing each other across No Mans Land. Most people have long since forgotten the original issues, but the war drags on endlessly. The politicians have not been able to bring it to an end. Poison gas has been used. The generals expend men by the tens of thousands in useless assaults against the enemy that accomplish nothing. The generals just ask for more men. Boys as young as 14 are drafted and sent to die at the front. An entire generation is decimated, with young men not living long enough to realize their potential.
This is the tragic tale of a group of German soldiers including Paul Baumer, the narrator, and several of his classmates who drop out of school and enlist in the Army after a teacher appeals to their patriotism. It covers the time period from his entry into the German Army at the age of 19 until his death on a quiet day in October 1918, just before the end of the war. The novel begins with the soldiers at the front the day after a heavy bombardment by British artillery. There are some flashbacks to their initial training.
The soldiers have developed a fatalistic, somewhat cold attitude. Deaths in the company mean more rations for the survivors. When a dying man says someone stole his watch, the attitude is that he is not going to need it anymore. One person maneuvers to get his boots when he dies. Individuals are concerned with their own survival, and acquiring whatever comforts they can get their hands on. Within the group in Katczinsky (Kat) who is a skilled forager, particularly for food.
The story has graphic descriptions of fighting in the trenches with sharpened spades and granades; green recruits dirtying their pants and going mad from the continual bombardment; and people blown apart by shells leaving splattered fragments. Death is random, depending on where an artillery shell may land. Every soldier has his dream of what he would like to be. One by one they are whittled away. They decline into an attitude of dispair. They know they can't win, but the war drags on seemingly without end.
Paul is the last survivor. He dies a meaningless death on a quiet day on the Western Front when not much is happening. A motion picture version I saw years ago had a poignant ending when he was shot by a sniper when he reached to pick a flower growing just outside the trench.
I would note that one of my young cousins was among the last U.S. military personnel to die in Vietnam, after the decision had been made to withdraw. It's not over 'til it's over. Someone will always take a last whack at the enemy.
Book Review: Anti-war novel for all time
Summary: 5 Stars
Erich Maria Remarque's timeless novel against war, All Quiet On The Western Front, tells the war from the private's point of view rather than from the general's point of view. The former point of view is grimmer, filled with the everyday terror of war. And this war was unlike any other fought before, as there were no major advances or retreats, and the war was fought on a limited sector of ground, between two lines of trenches, one French and British, the other German, with both sides giving no quarter, throwing thousands of young lives at each other and away. The new technology and weaponry didn't improve the situation. In that context, there were two possible outcomes for the private: death at the front, or the worse, psychological death.What kind of war was it where the survivors were better off dead, killed instantly by being annihilated by a shell, asphyxiated by mustard and chlorine gas, or slower and more painful, by gangrene? The "Great War" have transformed Paul and his company into semi-living blobs of fear on the front, and in the case of Paul, alienated him from civilian life, such as his books, family, and the older people who his father takes him to meet. And the older generation, completely disconnected with what Paul has undergone at the front, shallowly tells him to "shove ahead a bit out there with your everlasting trench warfare--Smash through the johnnies and then there will be peace." One can imagine Paul wanting to grab the old fool by the collar and shaking him silly.
They also become wild beasts defending themselves against Death, as Paul mentions in Chapter Six. When the French soldiers attack, the Germans do not think of them as men. They have had it with being attacked by faceless artillery and gas and can take their revenge by flinging grenades at them. Their fear, madness, and drive for life is multiplied in concert to the point that if their own father came in front of them, they wouldn't hesitate to lob a grenade at them.
To summarize the common denominator of the people the soldiers hate, it is people who are not in their world. What do the recruits, non-commissioned and commissioned officers, the older generation at home, or the sisters know of their life, their world?
During war, things take on multiple meanings that alienate the soldiers from humanity. Death is signified by an empty bed. All that remains of the poor fellow who died for his country is his effects, be they boots, clothes, or photographs, the things that had significance because they were owned by a soldier. These possessions, bereft of their owner, seem like another layer of skin that has been sloughed off following death.
In the end, World War I proved to be the worst area a soldier could ever have been stationed for the following reasons: a lengthy stalemate on both sides, new technology, and the bitter animosity of the opposing sides that extended to the battlefield.
Book Review: One of the great anti-war novels
Summary: 5 Stars
At one time or another, almost every high school student was assigned Erich Maria Remarque's seminal anti-war novel "All Quiet on the Western Front" to read as part of a school reading list or English assignment. While many of us have a vague recollection of this tale of German private Paul Baumer and his comrades in the midst of World War I (then called the Great War), it doesn't hurt to return to this novel years later and revisit one of the more haunting depictions of war.I personally picked up "All Quiet on the Western Front" again more than ten years after I last read it. I vaguely remembered, but as I started reading, it began to come back to me. Names like Himmelstoss and Kantorek came forth from my memory. Tjaden, Muller, and Kat also return to the forefront. I remembered the bond that these men had (though, not so much Kantorek, and certainly not Himmelstoss). Yet, I found it difficult to get energized by the story during its first 100 or so pages. Perhaps it was because the true horrors weren't being depicted yet, only the doldrums of daily life in the German Army on the front lines. It may also be because I know that the end result of this war was futility that ended up leading to an even greater and more devastating war 20 years later. Despite this, I was determined to push forward and slowly found my engrossed the journey of these young men from jovial, idealistic youths to battle-weary war veterans before they were even out of their teens. As I read further, the horror and depression of the midnight mortar attacks and repeated mustard gas assaults began their toll on me the reader. I began to empathize with the hopelessness and despair these men felt as more of their close friends began to die and the futility of their struggle became obvious. Reading about the deaths of the comrades was terribly excruciating, but necessary. Few were lucky enough to die instantly in battle. Most had to deal with horrific battle wounds which they survived. Perhaps a leg was amputated, or a portion of one's chest was missing, or one developed a terrible infection from the less than hygienic medical stations. One thing was for certain; the propaganda-laden `glory' of being a soldier had all but evaporated.
Remarque's skilled story telling brings the reader along this journey honestly. There are no out of place jolts designed to sensationalize this story. It is an accurate and gripping tale of the horrors of war that you don't get to see or read about on CNN or in the newspapers. People believing in the glory of war and aggression as the means to solve all problems would be well-served to read "All Quiet on the Western Front" many times over.