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: No glory here
Summary: 5 Stars
The events of this book are apparently fiction, yet it is reality. It is a reality which Remarque knew from experience, and which he urgently sought to impress on a world which piously said, "lest we forget", yet had never really known to begin with. Forged in this fire, Remarque emerged with a mission to warn the world of the Beast of War, resulting in this, possibly the most powerful of all novels of war. It does not preach of the wrongs of war. It simply describes life in the trenches, a war that the 19th-Century glory-seeking sensibilities of the politicians and the patriotic gullibility of the public at home never imagined.
Remarque, born Remark and later re-adopting the earlier, French spelling, was born in Osnabrück, a town where I spent some years, and lived his last years in Switzerland, a country where I am now spending some years. He fought in the trenches, knowing whereof he writes, and was wounded several times, in a country I also know fairly well and where every single village churchyard has a monument bearing lists of names of the fallen longer than today's telephone book. This book speaks from the first person of a young man who has enlisted before he was old enough to know any other trade, and learned to survive on the front. His core of friends, slowly whittled away, are the old lags of their section of the lines. With instincts that tell them when to duck an incoming shell and where to forage up a stolen goose, they live only for the day and for their few friends as the German army slowly starves and rusts, while the French and British and finally the Americans eat their plentiful corned beef, develop their tanks, and grow stronger.
Remarque's writing style is rivetting. Spare and clean, his sentences in the English translation light a fire in the mind. I went through this book in two days, a rate at which I have not read for a decade.
"Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life."
"...just think of those pamphlets the prisoners have on them, where it say that we eat Belgian children. The fellows who write those lies ought to go out and hang themselves. They are real culprits."
"We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial - I believe we are lost."
Harrowing reading, and an indispensable lesson for the budding patriot.
Book Review: Beautifully written, haunting and heartbreaking
Summary: 5 Stars
Previously I have been watching Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I developed an interest in WWI - a vicious war, and one most people criticize as an unjustifiable war. Tolkien served in WWI and much like Remarque, the horror and inhumanity he witnessed during service manifested itself in his writing. Both Tolkien and Remarque despised the vicious atrocities imposed upon the men expected to fight.
I was struck at how wrenching this novel is, and at times how hilarious. There is passage when the main character is at the front and enduring heavy shelling, and several horses are severely maimed. The agonizing screeching of these animals is a striking out-cry against the indiscriminating shells dropped by men. Another passage, when Paul is injured and in a Catholic hospital, he is just dozing off to sleep in the morning after enduring a disruptive night in the hospital and quite loses his composure when some nuns begin praying in the hall outside his room. In his anger he throws a bottle into the hallway and it shatters. The result is an interrogation, but the injured soldiers are bailed out by a commrade who falsely claims he tossed the glass bottle. The injured commrade has sustained a head injury and has a permit to not be held responsible for his actions for a period of time. This causes the injured soldiers to feel "overjoyed" because, it seems, they can afford to no longer be annoyed by others. However, when the time comes to have their bandages changes, the nuns find their little revenge against the soldiers. Ha ha.
Remarque characterizes the doctors are indifferent and interested in performing needless operations on the soldiers. He characterizes the certain authority firgures (such as teachers and commanding officers) as abusive and basically failures for the young soldiers who neededand relied upon their guiadance to protect them from the world, not to exploit them for it.
The kids suffer through much. Unclean conditions, disgusting food, psychological torment, alienation from the families and ideas that lead them through their school years.
This is a powerful book that succintly described the horrors of war - both in battle and when soldiers are on leave, trying to reassimilate into humanity. Poor Paul - one by one his supports are taken from him.
It's a misery that can only ultimately manifest itself in the needless death brought upon a young man thrown into a waste of a war.
Book Review: Haunting and Engaging
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book because of the fascination I first encountered when reading about Hemingway and the post-WW1 "Lost Generation." From history classes and other literature I knew that World War 1 was a horrible bloody war, the likes of which were previously unknown. I knew this was the case both on the front and for those suffering behind the lines too. But I was not prepared for such gritty, disturbing tales of the front as they are told first-hand by the narrator of this novel.
I am not going to summarize the plot in this review. Instead I will concentrate on why this book continues to be important, regardless that nearly a century has past since it was written. War nowadays is just as atrocious and horrible as it ever was. In some ways it has gotten better, and in others worse. Sure today's weaponry is more surgical and precise, but the bombs are also way bigger. We who sit behind the lines really have no idea what is is like to be that person who experiences battle first hand. If anything, all we civilians know is a body count, which is basically to say how our own side is doing. Sadly, barely anybody cares about the other guys.
This book is written from the German perspective, but it is not about a struggle belonging to any one group or nation. It is a universal tale of inhuman man-to-man carnage, and what that does to the soul of those involved in such a hopeless mess. It is sickening. Literally. At times I felt queasy from the atrocities described in gruesome detail. Soldiers on all sides could not help but be destroyed physically, mentally, and spiritually. Perhaps most disheartening is that the soldiers didn't even know what they are fighting for; they only understood the basic tenet that they must kill or be killed. As a result these men who fought were estranged from life, deflated and ruined. There are no heroes in this sad story; everyone looses.
With America currently involved in a war based on specious-at-best intelligence and half of the American population actually supporting such an endeavor, this book is at least as applicable now as it has ever been. Every war supporter, especially those who have never fought in a war themselves, should read this to understand what they are supporting on the micro-level. If after reading it anybody can continue to support war - except as an absolute last resort - then I will be very surprised.
Book Review: Timelessly relevant . . .
Summary: 5 Stars
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT should be required reading for all world leaders with the power to put their young in harm's way. ALL QUIET is set in World War I, but most of its principles are timelessly applicable to all war. Here are just a few:
(1.) Opposing soldiers in war often have more in common with each other than they do with their own political leaders. As Paul (the main character and narrator) says in ALL QUIET shortly after making his first hand-to-hand kill: "I did not want to kill you . . . . But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind . . . . It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. . . . . 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 . . . ."
(2.) Those who have never served their country in combat, and are now beyond the likely age of being called to do so, are often the most rabid "patriots," quick to support armed conflict. In ALL QUIET, Paul describes his teacher giving long lectures until the whole class went under his shepherding and volunteered. Only one youth openly hesitated, and he quickly reconsidered knowing he would otherwise be ostracized. Others thought as he did, but no one could very well stand out because even one's parents were ready with the word "coward."
(3.) The true war objectives of the various world leaders responsible for war are often withheld, misconstrued, or unclear. In ALL QUIET the soldiers have the following conversation: "What exactly is the war for?" "There must be some people to whom the war is useful." "Well, I'm not one of them." "Not you, nor anybody else here." "Who are they then? It isn't any use to the Kaiser. He has everything he can want already." "I'm not so sure about that. He has not had a war up till now. And every full-grown emperor requires at least one war, otherwise he wouldn't become famous."
There are still numerous other timeless principles of war described in ALL QUIET, but I will leave those for you to discover on your own. Suffice it to say that anyone truly interested in viewing war from the soldier's perspective must read this novel.
Book Review: The best and realistic war novel ever written
Summary: 5 Stars
"Erich M. Remarque sure has made many people world-wide know, imagine and feel the agony of war as a soldier, like Paul Bäumer and his friends, after being taught at school how countries grow with hard work, duty, culture and progress. In the story Paul and his close related friends are twenty years old who enlisted to the German army of World War I. They fought for their country, not knowing the reason of the war. In it, they feel all the pain of seeing friends being shot besides them in a trench, or inclusive being wounded and the next day are enlisted to fight in the front line. Later in the story, Remarque makes the main character face the return to home for fourteen days, making him see that his generation has no normal social life between civilization. Paul later realizes how war would take little by little his poor life. He looses his friends one by one, while starting to know a little of some others, but never he would have know how much he lost until all his true friends are gone. Never he will have the same bow of friendship with other people like he had with his friends, his "brothers" that gave him advice and where always there to help him. One of the best parts is almost at the end of the story, where Paul is sent to the front with his friends, and with new and very young, untrained recruits. In there, Remarque describes everything so perfectly and detailed that you feel you are Paul, seeing how the new recruits fall like flies and all you can do is try to teach them how to use the hand-grenades and when to take cover. Later, when they come back, you are badly hurt as well as a friend of yours and later you are taken to the hospital. Later in the hospital you see and feel the agony of the really bad injured. The screaming at night, the suffering of others. All you can do is wait and see if you are sent to the "Dead Room", home or...back to the front line. Remarque is a great war writer that can capture the attention of anyone easily and don't let you stop reading it until the end."