All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

Written By: Erich Maria Remarque
Published By: Random House

Reading literature sucks. Not because literature is bad, or boring, or something only teachers do to torture students or anything. But because when I am NOT reading or writing about a literary piece under academic pretenses, my review is just a chip in the pile of millions of other chips that have come and gone before and after because other people are reading and wring about literature under academic pretenses. I’m late to the party, and any thought that I make today about anything has already been thought by someone thinkier than myself and that’s just disappointing.

This is because when I approach and digest a novel like All Quiet on the Western Front with wholly virgin eyes and talk about my experiences with it, I am compelled to divulge some clever insight about something new. Something no one else can see. Yet, no one else is surprised because they themselves have already thought things thoroughly through, and penned it down for the book report they must turn in to Mrs. Sedminik the 4th Grade teacher by 8 AM Monday morning. And then that review is tossed into the chip pile with millions of others, a signal lost in the ether of endless noise that is, in a word, “progress”.

All Quiet on the Western Front is billed as “The Greatest War Novel of All Time.” It is about a German guy, fresh out of high school, who enlists to fight in the trenches of World War I with his classbuddies. He begins as an eager young adventure seeker, kind of in it for the thrill, whose enthusiasm and spirit becomes quickly deflated as he is exposed to the incredible horror that is The Front. As he sits in various stinky, dirty holes, watching his friends and comrades get blown to pieces by enemy mortar shells, he copes with starvation, despair, and being blown to pieces himself by frequently suppressing or rationalizing his role in the war as that of ‘becoming a man.’

The story is driven primarily by the war that rages on within the guy’s mind. It is a clear struggle to stay sane in whatever way he can as the world is literally destroyed all around him. We get insight into the thoughts and feelings directly from this poor naive sod stuck in one of the most harrowing situations ever to beset humanity. This suffering and pain is interspersed with a lot of commentary and reflection about the war that is so powerfully poetic that this review could never do it justice. Remarque’s lamentations are just as apt today as they were during WWI–War isn’t glorious, or fun, or even very heroic; it should never be thought of as such. Countless lives are thrown away for the betterment of a select few who would never set foot on the battlefield on any day of the week even if you paid them double. Why do we, as a race, let this happen?

This novel is fantastically written, fantastically paced, and extravagantly detailed. Even if all you are doing is reading this for Lit 101 (actually that’s kind of what I’m doing), it shouldn’t be too hard to get sucked right in to the fascinating horror of early modern warfare. And if you’re an ignorant mongoloid warmonger that preaches to the glory of human domination through excessive violence, perhaps it will adjust your worldview a smidgen and give the rest of us hope that we won’t die under your terms or anyone else’s.

Remarque himself describes it best:

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.”

Choice Passages:

“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial–I believe we are lost.”

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades–words, words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”

“Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us. They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.”

A