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Remarque even includes the physicians, as he and I would both say, a very slender minority, but nonetheless real, who see the war and their "captive audience" as a wonderful laboratory to experiment - in this book's case it was a surgeon who loved to break feet, in an always failing attempt to cure "flat feet."War can make a liar out of you. Remarque was a master, not only at depicting the horrors of trench warfare, which the First World War is most noted for, but also the power relations which accompany war, both within the military, and in society at large. For example, the manner is which Kat died in the book, and Paul's utter surprise that he was actually dead from such a small wound reflected the first casualty I treated, a Lieutenant who was just so unlucky to have gotten hit where he did. Even more so, it should be an essential curriculum item in any journalism school; the last two brief paragraphs explain the title to the book, and that aspiring journalist might hesitate in ever writing: "MACV reported that there was only light and scattered fighting in the Central Highlands." Or, on the Western Front, or in Helmand province. It shall never happen again." As we all know, not only again, but again and again it continues to happen.
Paul Baumer is home on leave. He has to say: Your son died a hero, and he died instantly. Remarque brilliantly depicted the immense emotional dissonance that Paul experienced on leave, with his fellow citizens of the home front who were always so willing to pat him on the back, and buy him a beer, and then pontificate in their excruciatingly clueless manner about what was needed to "really win this war." And then there are the hospitals, as Remarque says: "A hospital alone shows what war is." The author depicts the suffering of the soldiers, and the sometimes callousness of the staff that could be drawn from the recent news articles on the scandals at Walter Reed Hospital. He has to see his mother, who wants to hear the entire, honest truth.
At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world's condemnation and severest penalty fell, becomes our highest aim. But on this re-read, I was impressed with how many other portions were also relevant. From his papers he learns that he is Gerald Duval, a printer. It proved to be the best "orientation manual" possible for what the military would be like, despite the fact that Remarque depicted the German Army of World War I, and I was in the American Army in Vietnam. "All Quiet on the Western Front" remains the quintessential anti-war novel.
As to the truth: "I will never tell her, she can make mince-meat out of me first. But he is equally adept at addressing the larger issues of why wars occur, and in one scene, after they had been issued new clothes (which were later collected). After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe.We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies." Yes, "braided postman." I first read this work over 40 years ago, before I entered the Army. I console her." In another scene Paul is in a shell crater, a Frenchman also jumps in it, and Paul instinctively has to kill him. for the Kaiser's inspection, the infantrymen ask each other if he could have prevented the war.
The events depicted in the novel occurred almost a century ago. His prose burns. In his case, much time was spent scrounging for food, which was one of the real differences with the American Army in Vietnam. In the crater, Paul makes a promise to him: "I promise you, comrade. Paul realizes that he is just another poor slob who got caught up in the war, and didn't make it. It might have bland, but the food was always adequate for us.
Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil than they are to us."This book should be a requirement before any student can graduate from high school. Remarque has an excellent passage, worthy of Pascal's ruminations questioning the right to kill a man because "he lives on the other side of the river." Remarque says: "A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends.
The conclusion was, no, not him alone, but if only 30 people, those with the power, had said no, there would have been no war. Consider simply the issue of how new recruits are trained: "We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. Remarque brilliantly depicts the nitty-gritty of war, from the lice to the rats.
There is no way he can tell her; there is no way that he can say your son died for nothing at all. There were several passages that I remembered, and they proved to be astonishingly prescient. He knows the agonizing way that Kemmerich died.
By book's end, you are thoroughly invested. AQWF is an introspective story and a patient one, too. Erich Maria Remarque is highly effective at emotionally involving the reader. It is the utter confusion of innocent boys forced by faceless authority to kill and maim others.
All Quiet on the Western Front (AQWF) can be listed with The Red Badge of Courage and The Killer Angels as among the best in war fiction. And, all this, in under 200 pages. Seemingly by stealth, AQWF crawls into your gut and destroys any ability to remain aloof. Paul Baumer, a German soldier, gives his first-person account of life amidst death in the trenches of WWI.
It is the forlorn attempt to maintain some semblance of normalcy while surrounded by insanity. Strongly recommended, indeed, one of the finest pieces of fiction extant, All Quiet on the Western Front is a 5-star reading experience. Alternating between horror and stoicism, determination and despair, Baumer and his brother soldiers slog through existence until annihilation or injury separate them from the surrounding carnage. It is the gradual accumulation of war-time experience punctuated by slaughter and steeped in unquenchable sorrow.
Like all great art, we feel we are there, terrified when stuck in a trench as enemy bombs go off all around us, a little bored when off the front, letting the minutes and hours and days crawl by. He relates to us his experiences and those of a small band of his friends in the field of battle during World War I. Some may blanch at the graphic scenes, but it only adds to the effect, drawing us further in through its visceral pull, much as they do in, say, `Schindler's List'. The modern American reader, used to having moral rationales for going to war, will probably want to yell at them, to scream at them to run away as far as they can. The cover of `All Quiet on the Western Front' proclaims it to be the `Greatest War Novel of All Time'.
The book must be read, and the events must unfold as Remarque wrote them, for it to be felt to its fullest effect. Getting stuck in a trench behind enemy lines, calculating his chances of survival. I cannot do any of them justice by laying them out here. It is the most effective way to help one far removed from the actual events to feel them.
The narrator is a German soldier named Paul Baumer. And I think it has a good claim to the title. There are so many powerful scenes. But this book is also a lesson of the time when duty was not always something to be thought over. This is a heartbreaking dialogue, all the more for knowing that the odds are most of them won't get home alive anyway. In another, a visit from the Kaiser instigates a discussion over the senselessness of the war, which they seem to fully understand even as they fight.
Soldiers walking to the front and seeing brand new coffins waiting for them. They spend a lot of time talking - one feels this is almost as much a sort of therapy for them as it is a way to kill time- and in this way we come to see how the characters are different, yet the same.
His surreal visit home to his family where they have no clue what he has endured.
The emotional high the narrator receives by merely sharing a goose with a friend. Though I have read many a great war novel, the first person narrative and simple, descriptive prose gives this novel a powerful immediacy I have yet to experience in any other.
They know they are there because the Kaiser has said so, because, ".every full-grown emperor requires at least one war." The reader, like the soldiers, feels helpless. They discuss what they will do when the war is over, and though they each have different ideas about what they want to do, they all seem to understand that they will have nothing to go back to, that they will be going back to a blank slate.
It is not gratuitous. These are young men, fresh out of school, but the war alters them irrevocably.
The story enjoyable. (NB The version of this book I read was a translation from German to English by A.W. A book you can get through in a day or so of easy reading.Well worth reading. The style straightforward (and quite similar to George Orwell's style of writing). Wheen, so I can't vouch for any other translations). The prose is excellent.
I strongly recommend AQWF. Remarque makes it clear that, whether they survive the War or not, Paul and friends will never possess the potential that they had before the War. The graphic scene in which Paul spends time in a hospital is also revealing. The scene in which Paul attempts to escape shelling by clawing his way into a freshly-covered grave is devastating.
Roughly eighty years after its publication, All Quiet on the Western Front remains a towering anti-war novel. I wish that all of the world's leaders would read it and reflect on Remarque's message. Paul remarks "A hospital alone shows what war is" (page 160).The power of AQWF makes it easy to see why the Nazis banned the book and stripped Remarque of his German citizenship; Germans who read AQWF certainly would have questioned the militant path Hitler had chosen for their nation. Readers who are interested in what soldiers experience or in the ethical implications of war should read it.AQWF concerns Paul Baumer, a youthful volunteer in the German Army during World War I.
It is symbolic that Paul and his comrades escape the War by hiding in the graves; Remarque implies that their only release from the horrors of the war will come through death. We might have fewer wars. Remarque focuses his narrative on Paul's perceptions of the War and of his close friends in the German army. "The war has ruined us for everything" (page xiv).Remarque's writing is exceptionally strong, even in translation.
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