'All Quiet on the Western Front' and the Fate of a War
Between 1928 and 1930 Germany and Great Britain especially, and France and America to a lesser extent, experienced a sudden and remarkable 'boom' in war books, plays, and films. For a decade after the end of the war, publishers, theatre directors, and film makers had treated war material gingerly, viewing it as a poor commercial proposition, on the assumption that the public wished, contrary to annual remembrance day exhortations, to forget the war…. What some felt to have been a 'conspiracy of silence' was shattered with a vengeance. (p. 345)
Interestingly, no one has … investigated the war boom. This article will do so, but from a particular vantage point; that of a novel which stood at the centre of the war boom, in popularity, in spirit, and as a source of controversy—Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues)….
While a number of war books had appeared immediately before it, All Quiet clearly triggered the explosion of war material in 1929 and unleashed a bitter and acrimonious debate on the essence of the war experience.
Why had relatively little war material, apart from official histories and the odd memoir and novel, appeared in the previous decade? Was this the doing solely of commercial interests? Explanations usually revolve around the state of nervous exhaustion from which nations suffered after the war…. In general, the memory of the war was too painful; moreover, the task after the war, it was felt, was not to wallow in the tragedy but to build a better future. (p. 346)
Yet, underlying this natural desire to forget and to look to the future was also a sense of confusion, confusion as to the meaning of the war. Already during the war this confusion had become increasingly noticeable. The war had been presented on one side as a struggle for civilized values against tyranny and aggression; and on the other side it had been seen as a war for Kultur against enslavement by materialism. But the total dehumanization of the conflict, as it became a gruesome war of attrition, cast a pall of irony over all ideals and all values…. A decade after the armistice, however, Remarque helped to unearth the whole question and sparked off an intense debate.
Prior to the publication of All Quiet Remarque had led a moderately successful, though unsettled, life as a dilettante intellectual and aspiring author. (p. 347)
Two of his novels were published, Die Traumbude in 1920 and Station am Horizont in 1928, but he appears to have derived little satisfaction from them. Trite sentimentality relegated the first work to the rank of pulp fiction. Remarque was to say of Die Traumbude later:
A truly terrible book. Two years after I had published it, I should have liked to have bought it up. Unfortunately I didn't have enough money for that. The Ullsteins did that for me later. If I had not written anything better later on, the book would have been reason for suicide.
In 1921 he sent a number of poems to Stefan Zweig for comment and attached a letter of near despair: 'remember that this is a matter of life and death for me!' An attempt to write a play left him in deep depression.
The leitmotiv of suicide here is, of course, striking. Together with the derivative romanticism and the itinerant existence it points to a deeply disconsolate man, searching for an explanation for his dissatisfaction. In this search Remarque eventually hit upon the Kriegserleben! The idea that the war experience was the source of all ills struck him, he admitted, suddenly. (pp. 348-49)
Remarque was … more interested in explaining away the emotional imbalance of a generation than in any kind of comprehensive or even accurate account of the experience and feelings of men in the trenches. (p. 349)
Having fixed upon the Kriegserleben, Remarque sat down in mid-1928 to write…. The suddenness of the inspiration, the speed of composition, and the simplicity of the theme, all indicate that Remarque's book was not the product of years of reflection and digestion but of impulse born of personal exasperation. (p. 350)
The simplicity and power of the theme—war as a demeaning and wholly destructive force—are reinforced effectively by a style which is basic and even brutal. Brief scenes and short crisp sentences, in the first person and in the present tense, evoke an inescapable and gripping immediacy. There is no delicacy. The language is frequently rough, the images often gruesome. The novel has a consistency of style and purpose which Remarque's earlier work had lacked and which little of his subsequent work would achieve again.
Very few contemporary reviewers noted, and even later critics have generally ignored, that All Quiet was not a book about the events of the war—it was not a memoir—but an angry postwar statement about the effects of the war on the young generation that lived through it. Scenes, incidents, and images were chosen with a purpose to illustrate how the war had destroyed the ties, psychological, moral, and real, between the front generation and society at home…. The war, said Remarque in 1928, had shattered the possibility of pursuing what society would consider a normal existence.
Hence, All Quiet is more a comment on the postwar mind, on the postwar view of the war, than an attempt to reconstruct the reality of the trench experience. (pp. 350-51)
All Quiet is in fact then a symptom, rather than an explanation, of the confusion and disorientation of the postwar world, particularly of the generation which reached maturity during the war. The novel was an emotive condemnation, an assertion of instinct, a cri d' angoisse from a malcontent, a man who could not find his niche in society or the professions. That the war contributed enormously to the shiftlessness of much of the postwar generation is undeniable; that the war was the root cause of this social derangement is debatable, but Remarque never took part in the debate directly. There are, moreover, sufficient indications … that his own agonie ennuyeuse had roots predating the war.
Despite the opening declaration by Remarque of impartiality—that his book was 'neither an accusation nor a confession'—it was in fact both. It was a confession of personal despair, but it was also an indignant denunciation of an insensate social and political order, inevitably of that order which had produced the horror and destruction of the war but particularly of the one which could not liquidate the war and deal with the aspirations of veterans. Through characters identifiable with the state—the schoolmaster with his unalterable fantasies about patriotism and valour, the former postman who functions in his new role as drill sergeant like an unfeeling robot, the hospital orderlies and doctors who do not deal with human suffering only bodies—Remarque accused. He accused a mechanistic civilization of destroying humane values, of negating charity, love, humour, beauty, and individuality. Yet Remarque offered no alternatives. The characters of his generazione bruciata do not act, they are merely victims. Of all the war books of the late twenties … Remarque's made its point, that his was a truly 'lost generation', most directly and emotionally, indeed even stridently, and this directness and passion lay at the heart of its popular appeal. (pp. 351-52)
Remarque's success came at what we now see to be a crossroads in the interwar era: the intersection of two moods, one of vague imploring hope and the other of coagulating fear; the Locarno 'honeymoon' and a fling with apparent prosperity intersecting with incipient economic crisis and mounting national introspection. (p. 357)
Remarque's book, written in the first person singular, personalized for everyone the fate of the 'unknown soldier'. Paul Bäumer became the individual everyman. In the tormented and degraded Frontsoldat—and he could just as easily be a tommy, poilu, or doughboy—the public saw its own shadow and sensed an evocation of its own anonymity and yearning for security…. All Quiet seemed to encapsulate, in popular form, the whole modern impulse: the amalgamation of prayer and desperation, dream and chaos, wish and desolation. (p. 358)
Remarque blamed the war for his personal disorientation; the German public, too, assumed that its suffering was a direct legacy of the war. Indeed, All Quiet actually raised the consciousness of Germans on the question of the war as the source of their difficulties. (p. 359)
The great discovery that foreign readers said they made through All Quiet was that the German soldier's experience of the war had been, in its essentials, no different from that of soldiers of other nations. The German soldier, it seemed, had not wanted to fight either, once the emotional decoration put on the war by the home front had been shattered. Remarque's novel did a great deal to undermine the view that Germans were 'peculiar' and not to be trusted. Furthermore, All Quiet promoted at a popular level what historical revisionism was achieving at an academic and political level: the erosion of the idea of a collective German war guilt. (p. 361)
Remarque's novel exuded a mood of dissatisfaction, confusion, and yearning. The events and the international temper of 1929 displayed a similar disorientation. The novel became enormously successful not because it was an accurate expression of the front-line soldier's war experience, but because it was a passionate evocation of current public feeling, not so much even about the war as about existence in general in 1929. It was a poignant cry of 'help' on behalf of a distraught generation. (p. 362)
Modris Eksteins, "'All Quiet on the Western Front' and the Fate of a War," in The Journal of Contemporary History (copyright © 1980 The Institute of Contemporary History), Vol. 15, No. 2, April, 1980, pp. 345-65.
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