Almost seventy years have passed since the publication of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. It was first published in German in 1929, and an English translation quickly followed the same year. Within eighteen months of its publication, 2.5 million copies had been sold - impressive sales, considering this was during the worst years of the Depression.
Told in a simple, first-person narrative, largely in the continuous present tense, it is the story of one young German soldier's experience of war. "This book," states the author is a brief foreword, "is intended neither as an accusation nor as a confession, but simply as an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war." Paul Baumer speaks for himself but also for his generation whose youth has been stolen. One by one he loses the friends who have become comrades, and the comrades who have become friends. While the bonds which develop between the men appear to be very intense, Remarque also exposes the artificiality of these relationships. "It is a great brotherhood, which has something . . . of the feeling of solidarity of convicts."
There are many reasons for the enduring appeal of Remarque's brave, brutally honest yet reserved novel. It is the first major work to present war neither in a romantic nor nostalgic context. No previous book, and certainly none by a German writer, had portrayed the German army as the losing side. Remarque's young men have been long enough at the front to have rejected the teachings of their boyhoods. By now they have learnt that a dying comrade means the chance of securing a fine pair of boots: "Once it was different." On first enlisting, the narrator recalls of his group that "we were still crammed full of vague ideas which gave to life, and to the war also an ideal and almost romantic character. We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school."
The classical conception of the Fatherland has become "a renunciation of personality". None of the men is concerned by patriotism - their love of home is far greater than their feeling for country. When the sight of a cherry blossom tree in full flower causes one of the men finally to desert, he does not flee to Holland, but is caught attempting to get back to Germany. Heroism does not feature in this work overshadowed by the absolute fear and terror of waiting for death. "The front is a cage," says the narrator, "in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. Over us Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall." Remarque was the first German novelist to write about the conflict in such a way. Ironically, the essential humanity of the book, which guarantees its enduring appeal, outraged the Nazis so much that by 1933 it was being officially denounced as "defeatist" and "anti-patriotic" and was publicly burned. Remarque sought exile in Switzerland. Five years later, he was stripped of his German citizenship. He knew what he was writing about; unlike Brecht, Remarque's senior by a few months, he had served at the Front. "The war to end all wars" was not an end, but the beginning of a new and increasingly terrifying approach to warfare, particularly with the introduction of poison gas. Although the novel is not campaigning, Remarque's characters have no illusions about the plight of the ordinary soldier. Nor do they revere their leaders. " `. . . what exactly is the war for?' asks Tjaden. Kat shrugs his shoulders. `There must be some people to whom the war is useful.' `Well, I'm not one of them,' grins Tjaden." Back in Germany, the factory owners are becoming richer, while the soldiers die.
Born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabruck in Northern Germany one hundred years ago, he later changed his name on the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front to that of his mother, and hence became Maria Remarque. He was 16 when the first World War began and was called up for military service in November 1916. Ten days short of his 19th birthday he was sent to a position behind the Arras front, and fought at Passchendaele.
Wounded by British shells, Remarque recuperated in a military hospital. During this period, his mother died. All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel not a memoir, but Remarque draws heavily on his life. His understated handling of the intense emotion which informs the novel is one of its abiding strengths.
When the narrator returns home on leave, he realises his mother is dying. Neither of them wants to speak about his experiences in the war, or her illness. On the night before Paul is due to return to the front, she comes to his room to speak to him. Unable to voice his feelings, he imagines the things he should say to her but can't. "I bite into my pillow. I grasp the iron rods of my bed with my fists. I ought never to have come here. Out there I was indifferent and often hopeless; - I will never be able to be so again. I was a soldier, and now I am nothing but an agony for myself, for my mother, for everything that is so comfortless and without end."
Of the many horrors described in the novel - the bloated corpse rats, the bodies torn apart, the last looks of terror in the faces of the dying - nothing shakes the reader as much as the narrator's awareness of the dehumanising process he and his comrades are undergoing. "We are burnt by hard facts . . . we are no longer untroubled - we are indifferent." Whereas the older men will, should they survive, return to their previous lives, their jobs, their families, the young schoolboys turned soldiers cannot return to boyhood. Nor have they any other life. For the narrator, his generation are destined to be lost.
By the close of the novel, Paul has endured many nightmares. The survival of others seems his only chance of surviving. An enemy soldier whom he has wounded in armed combat becomes his ward. Throughout a long night in the dark, Paul listens to the man's agonised breathing, and is determined to save him, but fails. Later, he carries a wounded comrade, willing him to live, long after the man has died. Ultimately, he is the only one left of his group. There is no joy in this for him, for he has entered a twilight world. Yet Remarque chooses not to leave his novel there. Almost as an afterthought, he introduces an unknown narrator who describes the almost calm face of Paul in death.
A century of wars around the world has created a war literature. All Quiet on the Western Front remains unique because of its meditative tone, sense of loss and stark simplicity. Remarque, who died in 1970, became part of the Hollywood and international European emigre set. He wrote about a dozen books but none of them approached the quality of this classic. But then, not many other books about war have, either.