A Book Everyone Should Read

When Erich Maria Remarque published All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929, a novel that details the horrors of the First World War, he knew from experience what he was writing about. That is because Remarque himself served as a soldier in the German army during the conflict, and witnessed first hand the senseless killing on the stagnant Western front. It is a writer’s mantra to write what you know, and maybe this is why Remarque was able to craft what many consider to be the ultimate anti-war novel.

Forced to flee from Germany to the United States when Hitler took power in 1933, Remarque was viewed by the Nazis as a traitor for portraying the Great War in all of its brutality. More than anything else, All Quiet on the Western Front is an honest and truthful depiction of not only what the war was like, but also the way it desensitized and even dehumanized those who fought it.

For many Americans, the film Saving Private Ryan was a watershed because of the way it openly showed how very brutal war really is. As that film opens, a very gory battle scene has men being maimed, decapitated, and horribly wounded; in one particularly grotesque event an unfortunate soldier is desperately trying to stuff his intestines back into a blown-open belly. This is exactly the kind of imagery that Remarque used more than 60 years earlier, not for any shock value but because this is what really happened.

All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of Paul Baumer, a 19 year old soldier serving in the German Imperial Army during World War I. Told in the first person, the book unfolds almost like a diary as we see the events of the war through Baumer’s eyes. And see them we do, straight from the trenches. Bombardments, infantry assaults, gas attacks, almost every aspect of the war is here.

Baumer and his comrades have become resigned to the war and the destruction all around them. How ironic indeed this is, since just at the age that they should be beginning their journey into adult life they instead are surrounded by nothing but death. So much so, in fact, that this becomes almost all they know. When Baumer receives leave for a few weeks to travel back to Germany to visit his family, he feels as if he no longer fits. What was once familiar now seems alien to him, and he actually longs to return to the front and his companions.

This does not mean that Baumer and his comrades have come to relish the war; far from it. They want it to end more than anything else, and they often question how it got started in the first place. In one particularly important scene they discuss how it is that countries can possibly have such differences that they must go to war in the first place.

”We are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now who’s in the right?”

“Perhaps both,” say I without believing it.



In another segment, Baumer looks straight into the faces of his enemies, only to realize they don’t seem all that much different from his own. Undoubtedly, notions like these are what got Remarque in so much trouble with the Nazis.

When confronted by such carnage on a daily business, it is a wonder that a man does not go mad. In fact, some do, as Remarque shows us. But most learn to take what solace they can in every day comforts like food, a cigarette, or perhaps the arms of a woman. As Baumer says, sometimes this is the only way to remain sane. In that respect, man has probably changed little in the many years since All Quiet on the Western Front was first published.

The power of All Quiet on the Western Front is truth. The novel is more than just an allegorical tale, rather it is a recounting of what the Great War, and in fact all wars, are really like. There is no glory or adventure here, just killing and destruction; the sacrifice of the young generation by the old; the fanning of the flames of hatred for the next round of violence.

Almost ninety years have passed since that fateful August in 1914 when World War I began. Little has changed since then. Wars still occur, and will certainly happen again. How unfortunate that we have failed to heed Remarque’s lessons.

You don’t have to have an interest in history to learn from this compelling book. Everyone should read it. It is as relevant today as it was in 1929. For the truth is always the truth, regardless of the passage of time.