Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
The famous novel All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque relates the terrible experience of the First World War, its disasters and cruelty, from the perspective of a nineteen year old soldier, called Paul Baumer, who fights on the front accompanied by his former schoolmates. The war is described in all its absurdity, as a crashing experience for a human being and the very title of the novel speaks about the most terrible aspect of the war- human life itself is the target of the war and thus, it becomes meaningless. The death and the lives of the thousands of people that fight in the war are unimportant in the face of the political conflict. The war is seen as a trespassing against human condition itself because the experience is unendurable and devastating for all of its participants. Almost all the characters of novel whom we become acquainted with die, but death is not the only absurdity of the war. First of all, as the characters discuss it themselves the war is absurd as a strategy for resolving a political conflict, since the people that actually die on the front in the savage experience are, for their most part, ordinary people that do not have the chance to give their opinion or take part in the conf
As the terrible experiences of Paul and his comrades are presented, all the friends of Paul, and at the end he himself die, but this is not the only consequence. The only thing that still remains is their comradeship, their need to belong to a human community even if this is just a military company. But as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men" ( Remarque, 195) Thus, the single sentence "all quiet on the western front" , combines the seeming appearance of calm and peace with the disaster left by the war, and with its carelessness for human life, which is the only quietness that can be found on the front. I know nothing of them except that they are prisoners, and this is exactly what troubles me. The sufferings endured and the ones seen make Paul and his comrades into less than humans, who lose any hope of an end of the war and of a different life. The experience becomes even more ghastly for Paul when he has to murder one of the enemies in a one to one struggle. Both the body and the mind, and their very being is affected once they have confronted themselves with the all the possible forms of death and suffering. All four are nineteen years of age, and all four joined up from the same class as volunteers for the war. Thus, from the world of thought and learning, the symbol of human evolution and progress, he passes directly into this world of primary needs, and thus becomes a stranger to his own self before the war. The ceaseless bombardments make of the experience a continuous struggle to stay alive without being able to defend otherwise than by lying flat on the earth and hiding in the holes made by the shells. This is perhaps the most disturbing consequence of the war and the most disturbing effect it has on its participants: the fact that on the front people lose their identities and their importance as human beings.
Common topics in this essay:
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Life Youth-you,
Plato Goethe,
Albert Kropp,
World War,
Maria Remarque,
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,
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