User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
There are already thousands of reviews for this deeply moving and heartbreaking book here on Goodreads, and I don't know that I could add anything new. It simply broke my heart. However I do feel really strongly that I should describe the vivid imagery that I'm left with.
Bright red poppies in bloodied fields
Where death stalked its victims.
It cared not for age, creed, or nationality
What would they have achieved in life,
These young men, with so much yet to experience,
So many dreams to fulfil
If duty hadn't called, and they hadn't answered
When the sun set for one final time
It set on the lives they never lived
Rating: really liked it
Man, I need a break. I've been reading about the First World War solidly since December and I've had enough now. There's only so many times you can go through the same shit, whether they're English, French, German, Russian – oh look, another group of pals from school, eagerly jogging down to the war office to sign up. Brilliant. Now it's just a matter of guessing which horrible death will be assigned to them: shrapnel to the stomach, bleeding to death in no-man's-land, drowning in mud, succumbing to dysentery, shot for deserting, bayonetted at close range, vaporised by a whizz-bang, victim of Spanish flu. It's like the most depressing drinking game ever.
I wish, after spending many months reading around this subject, that I could pick out some obscure classic to recommend (and perhaps I will still find some, because I intend to keep reading about 1914–18 throughout 2014–18), but I have to say that this novel, famously one of the greatest war novels, is in fact genuinely excellent and left quite an impression on me, despite my trench fatigue. Remarque has the same elements as everyone else – because pretty much everyone in this war went through the same godawful mind-numbingly exhausting terror – but he describes it all with such conviction and such clarity that I was sucker-punched by the full horror of it all over again.
The story is studded with remarkable incidents that linger in the mind: roasting a stolen goose in the middle of a barrage, for instance, or stabbing a Frenchman to death in a fit of panic while sheltering in the same shell-hole. The arrangements made to allow a hospital inmate to enjoy a marital visit with his wife, while the rest of the patients in the room concentrate on ‘a noisy game of cards’. I loved the moment where our narrator and his friends swim across a river to have a drink with some local French girls, arriving naked because they couldn't risk getting their uniforms wet. And back in the trenches, an infestation of huge rats, ‘with evil-looking, naked faces’, is described with more than Biblical loathing:
They seem to be really hungry. They have had a go at practically everybody's bread. Kropp has wrapped his in tarpaulin and put it under his head, but he can't sleep because they run across his face to try and get at it. Detering tried to outwit them; he fixed a thin wire to the ceiling and hooked the bundle with his bread on to it. During the night he puts on his flashlight and sees the wire swinging backwards and forwards. Riding on his bread there is a great fat rat.
There is also a fair bit of philosophising. While guarding a group of Russian prisoners-of-war, our narrator is overcome by the arbitrariness of the whole situation:
An order has turned these silent figures into our enemies; an order could turn them into friends again. On some table, a document is signed by some people that none of us knows, and for years our main aim in life is the one thing that usually draws the condemnation of the whole world and incurs its severest punishment in law. How can anyone make distinctions like that looking at these silent men, with their faces like children and their beards like apostles? Any drill-corporal is a worse enemy to the recruits, any schoolmaster a worse enemy to his pupils than they are to us. […] I don't want to lose those thoughts altogether, I'll preserve them, keep them locked away until the war is over. […] Is this the task we must dedicate ourselves to after the war, so that all the years of horror will have been worthwhile?
I found this quote and this resolution very moving, because Germany's post-war history rendered it so utterly futile. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 – just four years after this was published – they set about burning the book, which tended to be their first response to any problem. While Ernst Jünger's vision of a German people purified and hardened by the war was venerated (poor guy), Remarque's text was denounced as an ‘insult to the German soldier’. He took the hint, and sailed to the US in 1939. The German state, in what amounted to a fit of pique, cut his sister's head off instead and then billed what was left of his family for wear and tear to the blade.
So – as can't be said enough –
fuck them. The insights that Remarque and Barbusse and Sassoon and Genevoix and Manning found
in extremis – of the essential commonality of human beings – are, we like to think, now accepted by society over the alternatives, despite what we sometimes have to infer from the content of our newspapers.
With all of that said, this is a novel. It is not a memoir. Remarque only spent a month on the front lines (whereas Jünger, who apparently had the time of his life, was there for years).
This 1994 translation from Brian Murdoch is excellent and reads entirely naturally; he also contributes a thoughtful and unassuming essay which – finally, a publisher that gets it! – is helpfully placed as an Afterword so as not to spoil the novel itself. All in all a very powerful and moving piece of writing: if I had to recommend just one contemporary novel from the First World War, so far this is probably it.
Rating: really liked it
I don't know why it took me so long to get to "All Quiet on the Western Front," but I'm glad I finally read it and am grateful to my friend Rose for recommending it. The book, first published in the late 1920s, is an absolutely heartbreaking, wonderfully written novel about the permanent damage done to those who fight in wars. Few anti-war novels written since have matched Erich Maria Remarque's unsettling book, and I doubt any have surpassed it.
Given how famous "All Quiet" is, there's little need for me to say much about it here. (Plus, it's so much easier to write negative reviews than positive ones, and I have absolutely nothing bad to say about this book.) There are several heart-rending passages that I expect will stick with me for a long time, though, and that I feel the need to mention: Paul Bäumer's leave, during which he finds it nearly impossible to relate normally to his family after his experiences on the front; Paul's time in a shell hole with French soldier Gérard Duval; the brief interlude Paul and his comrades spend with a group of French girls, and how the gal with whom he'd been paired treats him in the end; and, of course, the scene near the book's end involving Stanislaus Katczinsky, easily "All Quiet"'s most interesting character. (I won't say anything about the scene with Kat so as not to spoil it for those who haven't read the book yet.)
One final thought, which I bring up because of Logan's comment that he didn't like "All Quiet," which he last read in high school. I've talked about this before, most recently in my review of "The Sea Wolf," and I feel the need to bring it up again: Many American readers, it seems, have bad memories of great works of literature they were made to read in school. That they were forced to read the books is, of course, part of the problem, but I also think schoolchildren often are assigned books they're not yet ready for. I don't mean that they're not smart enough to read and understand the books, but rather that they're not mature enough to have the books resonate properly with them. This would definitely be true of "All Quiet." It would be the most unusual of high school students -- one in a hundred, perhaps, if that many -- who could truly appreciate the issues raised in this book.
I would encourage anyone who hasn't read "All Quiet" yet to check it out. And for those who read it in school and were left with a bad taste in their mouths, it's probably time to revisit the book. That means you, Logan.
Rating: really liked it
The greatest war novel?
Maybe.
This was one of the first books that made me think that even though I wanted to be a writer someday, maybe I did not have what it takes.
This was a sharp, swift kick in the gut; a none too subtle reminder that there are somber, very real and poignant moments captured in literature that escape petty categorization and cynicism, there are real moments that cannot be trivialized and placed on a genre specific bookshelf.
Powerful.
** 2018 - This book, as a war novel, is cautionary. No doubt there are those novels that glorify and even romanticize battles, and there are others whose goal it is to revel in the martial experience. Remarque, though, has crafted a simple story that focuses instead on the individual and how this ugly time affects his life. In doing so Remarque declares the value of that individual life, in all life, and shines a discerning, damning light on war.
Rating: really liked it
They were young. They were twenty-year-old. The war has stolen their youth.
To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapable into itself.
From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us—mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.
The war has changed the values and priorities in man’s life – instead of learning the art of love and living one had to learn the skill of staying alive for however a short while longer.
Erich Maria Remarque was a humanist who could vividly portray the atrocity of war in all its terrors.
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?
The rich, for whom it’s
All Quiet on the Western Front, get filthily richer while the young and innocent and able pay with their lives for the riches of those who wield power.
Rating: really liked it
(Book 667 From 1001 Books) - Im Westen nichts Neues = A l'ouest rien de novreau = All Quiet on The Western Front = In the West Nothing New, Erich Maria RemarqueAll Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «در جبهه غرب خبری نیست»؛ «در غرب خبری نیست»؛ نویسنده: اریش ماریا ریمارک؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز دهم ماه آوریل سال 1972میلادی
عنوان: در غرب خبری نیست؛ نویسنده: اریش ماریا رمارک؛ مترجم: هادی سیاح سپانلو؛ تهران، کتابخانه ابن سینا؛ 1309؛ در 220ص؛ چاپ دیگر سال1334؛ در 192ص؛ موضوع: داستانهای و یادمانهای نویسندگان آلمان - خاطرات جنگ جهانگیر نخست - سده 20م
عنوان: در غرب خبری نیست؛ نویسنده: اریش ماریا رمارک؛ مترجم: سیروس تاجبخش؛ تهران، فخر رازی: موسسه انتشارات فرانکلین، 1346، در324ص؛
نیز با همین عنوان ترجمه جناب آقای پرویز شهدی، صدای معاصر، 1392؛
عنوان دیگر: در جبهه غرب خبری نیست؛ ترجمه از متن انگلیسی: رضا جولایی، 1385، در 254ص
در جبهه ی غرب خبری نیست؛ رمانی با موضوع جنگ، اثر «اریش ماریا رمارک»، نویسنده ی «آلمانی»، که در سال 1929میلادی منتشر شده، و یکی از آثار مشهور ادبی جهان است؛ داستان به صورت اول شخص، از زبان شخصیت اصلی داستان (سرباز) نقل میشود، به جز خط آخر کتاب که خبر از کشته شدن شخص راوی میدهد؛ در این کتاب سعی شده، تا به معنای واقعی جنگ، و پیامدهای بلند مدت آن، اشاره شود
نقل از متن: (سربازهای مسنتر به زندگیهای گذشتهشان وابستگی دارند؛ آنها زن دارند، بچه دارند، خانه و زندگی و کسب و کار دارند، دلبستگی و وابستگی آنها به زندگی گذشتهشان آنقدر قرص و محکم است، که جنگ هم نمیتواند آن را پاره کند؛ اما برعکس ما بیست سالهها جز پدر و مادر و احیانا یک رفیقه چیز دیگری نداریم که آن هم قابل نیست؛ چون در این دوره و زمانه نفوذ پدر و مادر روی بچهها تقریبا هیچ شده و دخترها هم که هنوز دستشان به ریش ما بند نیست؛ از این یکی دو چیز که بگذریم دیگر چیز چشمگیری پیدا نمیشود که به آن فکر کنیم جز چند خاطره خوش و چند تا سرگرمی و ...؛ محیط مدرسه؛ همین و بس؛ و امروز از همینها هم اثری نمانده است؛ «کانتورک» میگفت که ما به آستانه ی زندگی رسیده ایم؛ و انگار حرفش حسابی بود؛ هنوز نهال زندگی ما ریشه ندوانده بود، که سیل جنگ آن را از جا کند و برد؛ برای آنها که مسنترند جنگ حکم مرخصی را دارد؛ آنها برای زندگی بعد از جنگ نقشهها میکشند؛ در حالیکه ما با آنکه در گیرودارش هستیم، نمیدانیم کارمان به کجا خواهد کشید؛ فقط میدانیم که آدمهای بیخود و بیمصرفی شده ایم؛ دیگر حتی متاثر هم نمیشویم؛ دلمان به حال خودمان هم نمیسوزد، و این عجیب و غمانگیز است.)؛ پایان نقل
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 20/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 07/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Rating: really liked it
All Quiet on the Western Front is a book about a 20-year-old German boy named Paul. He is serving in World War I – this is hand-to-hand combat, trench warfare, barbed wire, bayonets, and gas.
All Quiet on the Western Front is about the devastation of war, and that no one survives even if the soldier returns from war.
Personally, this book is okay. It is very character driven (not plot driven), and I don’t usually enjoy character driven books. The narrator is a bit detached, but maybe that is supposed to show that to survive the soldier has to become desensitized.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a relatively short book, 160 pages, and it does raise some good points. Paul’s schoolteacher encouraged his classmates to enlist. While the schoolteacher is patting himself on the back, most of the new recruits have perished.
On his journey, Paul runs into someone while on leave. This is a person who has not served in the military (let alone the front lines); however, this person has big opinions and doesn’t mind sharing them (no matter how improbable or unrealistic his plans).
All Quiet on the Western Front reminded me a great deal of Nick by Michael Farris Smith where Nick also serves in World War I and has a very similar detached narrator vibe.
2022 Reading Schedule
Jan Animal Farm
Feb Lord of the Flies
Mar The Da Vinci Code
Apr Of Mice and Men
May Memoirs of a Geisha
Jun Little Women
Jul The Lovely Bones
Aug Charlotte's Web
Sep Life of Pi
Oct Dracula
Nov Gone with the Wind
Dec The Secret Garden
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Rating: really liked it
"It’s unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning."This slim novel about the horror of the World War I trenches and the senselessness of war was published in 1929. If you open this book up today, it is absolutely just as relevant now as it was decades ago. It is powerful and breathtaking. I finished my second reading of this last month and barely a day goes by without me thinking about it. I had read “All Quiet” for the first time ages ago and the haunting feeling I had then has stayed with me all these years. If you have not ever read this book, you must do so. It is that meaningful.
"Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks – shattering, corroding, death. Dysentery, influenza, typhus – scalding, choking, death. Trenches, hospitals, the common grave – there are no other possibilities."This is a story of a German soldier, Paul Bäumer, and his comrades. Since the book is so widely known and reviewed here on Goodreads, I won’t go into plot details. But I want to make note of some portions that affected me quite deeply. For instance, Remarque so clearly reflects the feeling of camaraderie that these men, most of them not even twenty years old, experienced in the field and on the front. These were some of the most moving passages of the novel.
"These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed. They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere; they are the voices of my comrades." I’ve never read such stirring words about the soldier’s intimacy with not a woman, but rather with the very earth itself. The writing is truly remarkable.
"To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often forever."When Paul goes home on leave, he finds that the life he once knew and loved no longer has the same meaning. His books, his case of butterflies and his piano no longer bring him the joy they once had. He cannot speak of what he has seen; he feels that those that have not been on the front and mired in the trenches can truly understand him. He feels alone. I was heartbroken when he cried out for his lost childhood.
"Ah! Mother, Mother! You still think I am a child – why can I not put my head in your lap and weep? Why have I always to be strong and self-controlled? I would like to weep and be comforted too, indeed I am little more than a child; in the wardrobe still hang short, boy’s trousers – it is such a little time ago, why is it over?"I don’t know if a book exists that so effectively conveys the meaninglessness of war. If there is another, I have yet to read it. I suspect that Remarque had a marked influence on many authors writing about the topic since, but I don’t think this one can be beat in its simple yet passionate and well-expressed message. There were moments of fleeting pleasures and true companionship that allowed me to intermittently rejoice along with Paul and dream of a future when the war would be ended. But I also keenly felt his moments of hopelessness and despair. I nodded my head when he recognized in the enemy a man much like himself. His sense of humanity truly shined at these times. Something as basic as the sharing of cigarettes with the Russian prisoners was very telling.
"I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians. They bow to me and then light the cigarettes. Now red points glow in every face. They comfort me; it looks as though there were little windows in dark village cottages saying that behind them are rooms full of peace."Ah, if only this book could be read everywhere by everyone. Perhaps then we could all see the reflection of ourselves, our mothers, our fathers, our brothers and sisters, and our lovers in the face of another human being. Could we then avoid the devastation of war? This book deserves a place on your bookshelf. Grab a copy if you haven’t already. Mine is sitting on my all-time favorites shelf.
"I think it is more of a kind of fever. No one in particular wants it, and then all at once there it is. We didn’t want the war, the others say the same thing – and yet half the world is in it all the same."
Rating: really liked it
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.” 
From its opening in the trenches with the German Army in WWI to an end replete with utter hopelessness, Erich Maria Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front presents a devastating picture of a soldier at war. What's clear is that our protagonist, Paul, could be a soldier of any country; his concerns and emotions could be those of a soldier of this century rather than the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, despite the images we associate with WWI (such as the gas attacks and brutal conditions in the trenches), there is something very modern about
All Quiet on the Western Front. It may well have to do with Remarque's attitude toward war. From the outset, we are warned that this is not an adventure; even those who manage to escape the war unscathed are damaged. In effect, a generation is destroyed by the war.
In trying to make sense of the war, Remarque explores the powerlessness of soldiers on the front lines. From a belief in their government's rationale in going to war, soldiers increasingly focus on their own deliverance. The end is utterly bleak. All the promise of youth is destroyed by disease, starvation and ultimately death. Those who come back from this war are still damaged; there is no way they can go through the horrors of war without the scars.
Rating: really liked it
This is the best war novel I've ever read! I'm not sure how much that's saying about me or the book, since I haven't exactly read a great many war novels.
I've been on a World War I jag lately, which should not be misinterpreted as READING a great many books about WW I. Rather, I have been BUYING a great many books about World War I. All Quiet on the Western Front is a book I've owned about 25 years and this was actually my second try at reading it. The only reason I know this is that I noticed upon reading that it had passages underlined ending on page 64. I remembered nothing of what I'd read couldn't recall ever trying to read the novel. Senescence is a cruel affliction!
Why was this the best war novel I've ever read? Well, the book told the truth. It was the truth of the author but, I suspect, it is a truth shared by many infantry soldiers who've been engaged in trench warfare or any close combat. There are exceptions to this. Ernst Junger fought in the trenches much longer than Erich Remarque and was wounded nine times--yet he wrote an account of The Great War very different, in some ways, than Remarque's. Remarque survived the war, but came away with a damaged psyche and horrific memories that, fortunately, he was able to rise above to become a successful novelist. I think his writing actually helped exorcise his demons from the war.
Junger saw the war as a patriotic struggle and a test of his mettle. That is, he saw (or created) a purpose for the war, with the ultimate purpose being victory for Germany and personal victory which required that he stay alive. Interestingly, Adolph Hitler was another who apparently enjoyed the perils of fighting in The Great War. This is not an indication, though, that Junger and Hitler were similar men. Junger despised Hitler from all accounts I have read.
Remarque has courage even while admitting to being scared, as anyone would be while being fired upon by artillery, shells, mustard gas and aerial bombardments. But his view of The Great War is far different. He views the war as pointless and futile and the work of a group of old men who won't have to fight who decide based on shaky or spurious pretexts that, suddenly, this nationality is our enemy, another is our friend. Remarque's thinking was more in line with the Bob Dylan song, "Only a Pawn in their Game." Soldiers were cannon fodder, and when they died, as they frequently did, other recruits were brought in as more cannon fodder--young boys of 19, many who enlisted at the urging of their schoolmasters--men who would not have to sleep standing up in a trench as bombs dropped around them and lice ate them and rats battled for their bread. When/if the war ended, it was because these same gray eminences met again in some far-off city and signed pieces of paper saying that, despite all the carnage, the nations were once again friends.
Human instinct propelled survival and experience in battle and taught one the skills to survive; though in Remarque's world, even survival skills were often trumped by sheer luck. Old heads could talk of duty to the "Fatherland" but all war really meant to the combatants was a fight for reasons they could not understand, created by powerful men in faraway rooms who signed documents allowing men to commit atrocities that under normal circumstances would have led them to the gallows or the firing squad.
I'm a bit torn over whether Remarque's war experiences are universal or whether they reflect his particular personality or the particular war he was fighting? WW I was a gruesome, protracted conflict. It probably could have been fought at the negotiation table, as internecine European squabbles are settled nowadays. No doubt it was easy for the common foot soldier on all sides to forget that the war started because an heir apparent to the throne of a dying empire was shot by a Bosnian youth who wanted his country free from the yoke of this decaying empire. Ironically, he killed a man and his wife who were sympathetic to his cause.
Perhaps, as General Sherman said, "War is hell" and is hell under any conditions but especially hell for a soldier on the front lines in a ground war. I have heard interviews with fighter pilots and Navy SEALS, among other elite forces, where the retired soldiers said they missed the war and there was never a time when they felt more alive than when fighting in battle. It appears that some revel in the conflicts and get a thrill from combat, though I'm guessing that a great many more, upon reflection, might hold a view closer to Remarque's, and a great many, if you got them under the hot lights, might allow that war has its downsides, too.
Perhaps in wars like WW II, where soldiers on the allied side had a real sense of purpose, such dissonance as Remarque felt was far less common? Perhaps if soldiers can be convinced of the necessity of the war then doubts a combatant might harbor can be dispelled. I suspect, though, that combatants in most wars are battling demons, with varying degrees of success, after experiencing the horrors of war.
Rating: really liked it
It has to be the defining novel of World War I, told from the point of view of a German soldier fighting in the trenches of France. This is not a novel of romance, intrigue, and adventure; it is a stark and frightingly realistic description of what it must have been like trying to survive from one day to the next, and almost always failing. Difficult and disturbing to read, it nevertheless is a narrative of how war is horrible, and hopefully why the telling of it may help deter future wars.
Rating: really liked it
Futile!
I was just beginning to reach the age when you become critical of the world around you, when I first read this book.
You know, a teenager on her high-horse.
But re-reading this book still makes me feel the same. The futility of war. The utter waste of life. What a shame.
Why can’t the generals go down into the trenches? Let them fight it out.
Wouldn’t be a lot of wars.
Rating: really liked it
I was finishing a phase of reading and teaching facets of the First World War, and it would not be complete without this fictitious, but realistic portrait of a soldier's life in the trenches on the Western front...
I was reading excerpts from "All Quiet On The Western Front" in class, with students staring at me, some of them understanding for the first time what it really meant to be a soldier in the trenches, sent out to die under the banner of nationalism - which was an entirely positive word back then. They had read the facts in their textbooks, and also checked additional sources, such as small parts of Churchill's brilliant The World Crisis, 1911-1918 or the highly informative The First World War: A Very Short Introduction. They had even familiarised themselves with quite graphic photographs and documentaries. But nothing prepared them for the voice of the young soldier in the novel that took them directly into the situation, and made the numbers from the history books become real people with feelings and worries.
All of a sudden, the information that 20,000 English soldiers died on the first day of a specific attack was no longer just statistical data to be memorised. It meant 20,000 letters sent home to parents, siblings, wives and girlfriends, all with the same sad news ...
"Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori", that old lie, which made soldiers die by the millions, or suffer life-altering mutilations, forever remembered through The Poems Of Wilfred Owen, is put into brutal contrast with the reality of a soldier on the German side. The soldier could just as well have been English or French, as the experience was the same on both sides of No Man's Land, with the exception that German soldiers recognised they were lucky to conduct the war outside their home country, seeing the destruction of the whole countryside around them:
"The feeling of nationalism that the ordinary soldier has are expressed in the fact that he is out here. But it doesn't go any further: all his other judgements are practical ones and made from his point of view."
The sense of idiocy, conspiracy, or irrationality behind the suffering is omnipresent. Soldiers discuss how they ended up in a situation that presumably nobody wanted but that everyone is now involved in. They read the papers, see the propaganda machines, know the lies. They are young, were recruited from school, and trained quickly to lose all previous ideals, to be prematurely old in their minds:
"We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks, it no longer struck us as odd that an ex-postman with a couple of stripes should have more power over us than our parents ever had, or our teachers, or the whole course of civilization, from Plato to Goethe. With our young, wide-open eyes we saw that the classical notion of patriotism we had heard from our teachers meant, in practical terms at that moment, surrendering our individual personalities more completely than we would ever have believed possible even in the most obsequious errand boy. Saluting, eyes front, marching, presenting arms, right and left about, snapping to attention, insults and a thousand varieties of bloody-mindedness - we had imagined that our task would be rather different from all this, but we discovered that we were being trained to be heroes the way they train circus horses, and we quickly got used to it."
The bitterness of the situation is expected by any reader familiar with the First World War. The hard conditions, the dying, mutilation and boredom are not new. What got under my skin rereading this novel for probably the fourth time now, were the details showing what was left of those individual characteristics the young men were asked to surrender to the cause. The compassion and understanding they are able to feel for Russian prisoners. The joy they experience on an adventure involving girls. The passionate happiness when they receive the slightest comfort, or the unspeakable sadness when they visit their families and realise they have lost touch with them and can't share their knowledge. The complete loneliness when a mother asks how it really is, and the teenage son has to protect her from a truth that she won't be able to digest.
"There is my mother, there is my sister, there is the glass case with my butterflies, there is the mahogany piano - but I am not quite there myself yet. There is a veil..."
The protagonist fell in October 1918, just before the armistice, during the very last weeks of the war, just like Wilfred Owen in real life. He fell on a day that was so unspectacular that the newspaper reported all was quiet, nothing new on the western front. That is the most heartbreaking part of the novel, that this individual, intelligent young man, forced out to die for an ideal he did not believe in, was not even considered noteworthy in the news. Heroism of the quiet death, which is neither sweet nor appropriate.
Reading a novel like this puts the big drama of the facts into perspective, turning the attention to the human beings and their lives again, away from the leadership on both sides fighting for causes the soldiers did not understand or benefit from in the least.
"All Quiet On The Western Front" is as important now as it was when it was written: it yells out in capital letters that we are playing with humans, not resources!
It yells out a warning against blind patriotism, nationalism and weak, egocentric leadership. It yells out against carelessness and pride, and the lopsidedness of the suffering.
My students read poetry along with the excerpt from this novel, and at one point the question came up how many of the decision makers were blinded, mutilated, amputated? How many of them died in the trenches? "None!" was the answer.
"Then how dare they force those young men out there!" yelled my students. And I was quiet.
In the hope that the hubris of power will never again rise to those monstrous proportions, I keep teaching, adding Remarque, Böll, Owen and others to Plato and Goethe and the rest of the course of civilisation.
Rating: really liked it
Five heartbreaking stars for this classic novel about World War I.
I first read
All Quiet on the Western Front my freshman year of college, thanks to Dr. K's humanities course. During this re-read, I paused not only in appreciation of what soldiers and their families suffer during war, but also for all the great teachers who spend their days trying to inspire students to have Perspective and Big Ideas and to Think Critically. I remember how meaningful it was to read this book when I was 19, and it helped shape how I think about history and conflict and war. I was reminded of this quote from Pat Conroy: "If there is more important work than teaching, I hope to learn about it before I die."
I've been thinking a lot about my freshman humanities course because
All Quiet on the Western Front was recently chosen as a Common Read for the college campus where I work, and I'm helping to plan the program that will hopefully inspire hundreds of other students to read this book. It's giving me a contented circle-of-life feeling.
Back to the novel itself, which follows German soldier Paul Bäumer and his fellow classmates who enlisted in the war. We see their stoicism and also their mental and physical stress. We suffer with them when they are hungry, and we rejoice when they are fed. We spend an anxious night with Paul when he is stuck in No Man's Land during an attack, and witness his anguish when he kills another man for the first time. We follow him as he goes home on leave to visit his sick mother, and we understand why he can't answer his family's questions about the front. He lies and says it's fine, the stories are exaggerated, the soldiers are treated well. But nothing will ever be fine again, and we all know it.
While reading this book, I used countless post-its to mark quotes. This is a classic that is both easy to read and astonishingly beautiful in its clarity of writing. Highly recommended.
And finally, three cheers to you, Dr. K. Thank you for everything you've done to inspire students.
Favorite Quotes"The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavor to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily. Our families and our teachers will be shocked when we go home, but here it is the universal language."
"For a moment we fall silent. There is in each of us a feeling of constraint. We are all sensible of it; it needs no words to communicate it. It might easily have happened that we should not be sitting here on our boxes to-day; it came damn near to that. And so everything is new and brave, red poppies and good food, cigarettes and summer breeze."
"While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger ... We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from the true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.
"The war has ruined us for everything."
"We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down..."
"Modern trench-warfare demands knowledge and experience; a man must have a feeling for the countours of the ground, an ear for the sound and character of the shells, must be able to decide beforehand where they will drop, how they will burst, and how to shelter from them."
"Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades — words, words, but they hold the horror of the world."
"Thus momentarily we have the two things a soldier needs for contentment: good food and rest. That's not much when one comes to think of it. A few years ago we would have despised ourselves terribly. But now we are almost happy. It is all a matter of habit — even the front-line."
"Terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; — but it kills, if a man thinks about it."
"But our comrades are dead, we cannot help them, they have their rest — and who knows what is waiting for us? We will make ourselves comfortable and sleep, and eat as much as we can stuff into our bellies, and drink and smoke so that hours are not wasted. Life is short."
"We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know. When my mother says to me 'dear boy,' it means much more than when another uses it."
"I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me."
"And men will not understand us — for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten — and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. 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 into ruin."
Rating: really liked it
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, at least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure for those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war." In
All Quiet on the Western Front, it is what Remarque has done exactly - to tell of a generation of men who were forever scarred by the war. This harrowing account of the Frist World War, written from the point of view of a soldier, brings to life the destruction that is caused to those who are the first-hand victims - the soldiers. Perhaps, some may disagree with my calling them "victims", but wouldn't it be the near truth? Aren't they the first people who have sacrificed their lives, ambitions, hopes, and above all, their youth? If they are not the victims of war, what are they?
"I'm young, I'm twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow." When they step on to the battlefield, all is lost to them forever. They may physically survive the war, but never emotionally. The scars, the ghosts will haunt them forever.
Remarque gives a nightmarish account of both the physical and mental traumas the soldiers go through. It is both horrifying and heartbreaking. I also had a very disturbing sleep overnight. Imagine, if a nearly truthful account of war can disturb one thus, how disturbing it might be to those who have faced it, every day? How hopeless they might feel life would be for them, even if they be lucky enough to live through it?
" 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 lives. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces." And for what have they sacrificed their lives, hopes, dreams, and youth? There lies the unanswerable question? The most likely answer to be given would be through patriotism. If both factions of the war act out of patriotism, who is in the right?
"We are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now who's in the right?" Who is in the right? The answer will always be subjective, but it can never be objective.
Remarque's account of the gruesomeness of war, written about the First World War nearly a century ago, speaks true for all subsequent wars, be it world war or civil wars. The horrors of it and the subsequent mental destruction they caused on those directly connected with it are all factual certainties. If we are to avoid history being repeated, these factual certainties must be accepted. I think this is what Remarque wanted to tell the world, especially its rulers. But did they listen to him? Is anyone listening even now?
