I know I haven’t posted for awhile. To be honest, I need to recover from Anna Karenina.
This week, I read All Quiet on the Western Front, a classic World War I novel by Erich Maria Remarque. It’s based on Remarque’s own experiences in the trenches, after he was called up in 1917. This is the first book about World War I that I’ve read that was written about the German experience of the war. To be honest, I got chills every now and then–a lot like when I was reading Anna Karenina–because I know what happened to Germany after the war. This book was first published in 1929, five or so years after the Nazis had started to form. There are a lot of comments about how the boys were conditioned to follow authority that were just chilling. Small wonder that Remarque had to leave his county and the Nazis burned his books.
As I read this book, I felt like I was getting a distillation of the war experience. The narrator, Paul Bäumer, talks about his experience in the trenches, charging the enemy, being in a field hospital, losing the classmates he volunteered with, killing a man, trying to relax near the front, visiting home, and being in training camp. My copy was only 296 pages long, and Bäumer signed up near the beginning of the war at the urging of his schoolmaster.
Along with all the comments about authority, I think the hardest part for me to read was the part where Bäumer goes home on leave. After spending some time in Bäumer’s head, it was hard to see how he was treated by his father and by the men who hadn’t been called up. There’s a part where Bäumer encounters a middle-aged man who just goes on and on about how the war needs to be fought. It’s so obvious that this man has no clue about what it’s really like on the fronts that I got angry on Bäumer’s behalf. I wanted to yell at the man and tell him to stick a cork in it. This was followed by Bäumer describing his last night at home before he has to go the training camp. He talks about how all he wants to do is cry in his mother’s lap, but he can’t because he just can’t connect to his family any more. They don’t know what the front is like, and they still believe–to a certain extent–that the war is worth it and necessary and that to refuse to fight or to be reluctant about it is cowardice.
I also felt like I got a better understanding of the Lost Generation, though I think the term should apply to most WWI veterans. Here’s Bäumer’s explanation of what happened to his generation:
And men will not understand us–for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with use already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten–and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, will we grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;–the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin. (p. 294)