I’ve carried around my beat-up copy of this classic since high school, but haven’t re-read it in 20 years. Until now. This is the grandfather of all war is hell
stories. Remarque tells the story of Paul Baumer, a soldier recruited directly from school. He’s known no other life other than soldiering and being a child. Remarque’s own experience during the Great War is the basis for Baumer’s tale. There’s no conclusion per sé, just experience after hellacious experience. We learn about the scrambling for food. We see Baumer sneak off to bed a French girl whose house is now behind the German lines. We see Baumer undergo multiple injuries. His comrades fall. He kills, from afar and up close.
There’s not a lot of real emotion in the book. Emotion is replaced with a soldier’s dead outlook on the future. This is pathos. Of particular interest to me were the scenes from Baumer’s leave and visit home. His home and family are foreign to him. Even there, the scenes of the only life he knows other than being a soldier, everything is still painted in shades of disinterested but painful gray. Even there, far away from the front, everything is a matter of survival and little else.
Title: All quiet on the western front (originally Im Westen Nichts Neues
)
Author: Erich Maria Remarque
Translator: A. W. Wheen
Imprint / publisher: Fawcett Crest / CBS Publications
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 256 p.
Publication date: July 1975
ISBN-10: 0-449-20249-6
Subject: World War, 1914-1918 — Fiction
