Okay, so I'm cheating here. I had to read this book for my History class and I had to write a paper for it. Instead of writing an original review here, I'm just going to let you all read my report on it. Enjoy.
Erich Maria Remarque's third, and by far most successful, novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, follows the life of Paul Baumer as a German soldier in the full throes of the First World War. He goes about his military life both in the barracks and on the front with his comrades and, because of the war, closest friends. Paul struggles with not only avoiding his own death, but also the agony, guilt, and grievance of dealing death to others.
Paul Baumer goes through the steps of the war almost mechanically; He smokes cigarettes, plays pranks, participates in sexual liaisons, and devours whatever meals are available to him while between visits to the front. He avoids bombs and gunfire, and watches as many Germans die while in the thick of the battle. He comforts his friends during difficult times, and he reassures his mother that, yes, he is okay but he will be going back. Nothing is new for him until he is put on guard duty watching over a bunch of Russian prisoners, noting how they cast their differences and animosities aside to band together when German soldiers often fight over the pettiest of things.
Remarque does a remarkable thing with this novel in that he not only portrays war in all its naked, raw, glory, but he does so from a German soldier's point of view and manages to get people who would have been on the other side of the conflict to be able to see that they dealt with a lot of the same issues. Young men being pressured into joining the army was always thought of, in the US, as a US stereotype. The Germans were hungry for world domination and therefore they all wanted to fight this war and they all knew how much it meant to them. As shown through the conversations amongst Baumer, Tjaden, Muller, Katczinsky, and Kropp, many of the very young soldiers didn't even know what they were fighting for, they just knew that people indoctrinated them with ideas of that's what good Germans do.
What was more was that Remarque did not try to make the force opposing the Germans out to be the evil entities that Americans have made Germans out to be. Baumer understands that most of the soldiers on the other side are just about as, if not more, clueless than he. It creates a feeling, not of sympathy as with most war novels that want readers to sympathize with the protagonists, but of empathy. This is not just empathy from the reader, although the bit of it that is from the reader is more targeted to the circumstances rather than the characters, but an empathic line is also created amongst the characters.
Most of this empathy between characters is Baumer empathizing with soldiers on the other side of the dispute. He empathizes with the dying Frenchman and he empathizes with the imprisoned Russians, although with the Russians, a bit of envy lies under the surface as Baumer is witness to their comradeship they are forced into. Empathy can be found between comrades as well. When Baumer is injured along with his last surviving friend, Katczinsky, Baumer makes well sure that they get on the same train together. While it is true that one reason for this is that Baumer does not want to be alone, it can also be argued that he wants to see to it that Katczinsky has someone with him who he can see understands the pain he is going through.
Remarque's most important accomplishment with this book is the way he dealt with the issue of war all together. There are many war novels and movies out there that, while they don't portray war as the best possible option, don't deter the idea of war as a good possible option. They have brave warriors, young and old, face each other in tests of strength, stealth, stamina, and strategy and, even though the story may not be told from the “good guys'” point of view, always has the reader rooting for somebody, usually the protagonist. The readers want the protagonist to destroy the antagonist and they know that, at all odds, that will eventually happen because the author wants to give readers what they want.
What Remarque does instead is to challenge the reader to not choose a side. He wants the reader to see what all anti-war novelists want readers to see, which is quite simply that war is bad. How is it that this author achieves this virtually flawlessly while others struggle to put out something mediocre at best? The answer is in how the authors personify the war itself. While most authors will have the main character's best friend killed off giving him just the motivation he needed to lop the head off of some unsuspecting high-ranking official, bringing the awful war to a halt, Remarque has his characters come right out to the reader and ponder what the motivation for this war really is. He then goes further and has his main character wonder about his own personal motivation, and he can find none. The catch: he has no motivation for not returning to the war.
The only sanctuary Baumer finds in all of this is the company of his comrades, whether sexing up some women across the river, on the front line facing death, or longing for the comrades while on leave, Baumer feels more whole with them than with his family at home. He even goes as far as to call these men his brothers, and unlike other war novels, Remarque actually goes out of his way to let the reader know that Baumer means this quite literally. By doing that, he makes the novel less about the war and more about the characters and their relationships with each other. This creates a cause and effect where, during the few scenes of the actual war, readers are even more disgusted with it, bringing Remarque that much closer to his goal of proving that war is bad.
What I expected to get out of this book was some sort of commentary on the political motivations behind the First World War. What I got instead was an insight to turn-of-the-century Germany and the struggles its residents dealt with while trying to fight a war nobody quite understood. I expected to get a clearer concept of the why's and the how's of the war. Instead, it all became even more blurred, not because the author didn't know what he was doing, but because there is no honest way to show what nobody knew. This book was truly about war at its finest hour, and that in itself should be enough to cause anyone to think two, three, four times before causing war, before declaring war, before signing up for war. Remarque finally drove home the point that we all knew all along but didn't quite understand: War. Is. Bad.
