By Matt Hanson

Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of an ordinary soldier’s life in the trenches of WWI remains shocking and shattering today.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Translated from the German by Kurt Beals. Liveright, 24o pages, $26.99

In his searing “With God on Our Side”, Bob Dylan takes sharp aim at a number of historical tragedies. At one point, he sings that “the first World War/ it came and it went/ the reason for fightin’ I never did get.” Academics proffer a number of different explanations for why the world tore itself to shreds from 1914 to 1918. The reasons they come up with can be unconvincing, given that the purported motivations include positing that thousands of British lads patriotically marched off to their deaths to uphold Belgian neutrality. The Great War’s distinctive mix of brutality and horror (nerve gas, trench warfare), coupled with the political absurdity of its triggering (an Archduke is randomly shot and Europe’s diplomatic house of cards tumbles) understandably inspired a tremendous amount of shell-shocked eloquence, from both those who survived and those who didn’t.

All Quiet on The Western Front, recently reissued in a starkly effective new translation, is one of the most popular novels about the war, quickly selling over a million and a half copies in its native Germany when it was first published as a book in 1929. (It was first serialized under its more modest original title, Nothing New In The West). Of course, massive sales do not prove a novel’s literary merit, but it suggests its social relevance, and that might be just as useful. Erich Maria Remarque’s story of an ordinary soldier’s life in the trenches succeeds on both counts: this forceful story remains shocking and shattering today. And we need to listen to its compelling message. Countries around the world are increasingly armoring up — paranoid and nationalistic, they are itching for a fight, much as they were in the early 20th century.

Remarque’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer, is a relatively ordinary fellow, essentially a decent lad with a good head and heart, a guy who is “compelling in his ordinariness.” He’s not exactly an everyman, but it’s easy to imagine yourself in his position, as terrifying as it often is. His relative commonness underlines the author’s concern with spotlighting how war degrades human dignity. Marxist critics at the time complained that the narrative focused on an individual, a strategic swerve from dramatizing the world’s collective response to the trauma of war. It could be argued that, by focusing on one person’s experience of such a worldwide disaster, Remarque invites readers to sympathize with what happened to thousands of people just like Bäumer.

Bäumer’s too world-weary to be an innocent corrupted, and he’s too stoic to just be a naïve victim. “I’m young, I’m twenty years old” he soberly explains at one point, “but I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and the pairing of the most meaningless superficiality with an abyss of suffering.” Remarque cannily encourages readers to identify with the soldier while also keeping us at a certain distance. We can empathize with Bäumer, but we will never fully understand what he’s going through. After he stabs a French soldier to death, for example, we can share his agony at watching the man suffer as he slowly dies. But we never feel what it is like to be directly responsible for killing another person. Susan Sontag might have been right: war can’t be understood unless it’s experienced firsthand.

As the story proceeds, we get a sense of what an ordinary soldier might go through in war. The terror and confusion of battle, the camaraderie that develops with fellow soldiers, the alienation that comes when a combatant finally gets home leave, the near pointlessness of winning battles that ultimately gain little ground, the smug cluelessness of superior officers, and the desperate undercurrent of panic to survive. “It’s impossible to grasp that above such mutilated bodies there are still human faces, where life continues to run its daily course. And this is just a single military hospital, just a single station — there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that was ever written, done, or thought, if such a thing is possible!”

At one point, rather disturbingly late in the narrative, Bäumer and his friends casually discuss why they got into this mess in the first place. The episode is one of the book’s most powerful and subtly satiric. Remarque is generally more interested in telling one man’s story than he is trying to point fingers. That’s all well and good, but it is also important to supply an analysis of how Bäumer got tossed into this meat grinder. Given how much these soldiers have had to go through, it is inevitable that they would start talking about why it happened. “It’s funny when you think about it,’ a fighter named Kropp wonders, ‘we’re here to defend our fatherland, But the French are here to defend their fatherland, too. So, which of us is right?” Good question.

A scene featuring Lew Ayers in 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front.

Kropp goes on, discovering his line of attack as he warms to his theme: “…our professors and pastors and newspapers say that we’re the only ones who are right, and I hope that’s true; but the French professors and pastors and newspapers say that they’re the only ones who are right, so how about that? Isn’t it funny how that works? I’d never met a Frenchman before I came here, and most Frenchmen could say the same about us. They don’t have any more say in the matter than we do.” Interesting way to think about the world’s predicament, especially if all the social forces around you are pushing you to assume otherwise. One of the most chilling moments in All Quiet on the Western Front — a book filled with death, despair, and devastation — is their friend Albert’s response: “I think it’s more like a kind of fever…nobody really wants it, but all of a sudden, it’s there. We didn’t want the war, other people say the same thing — but half the world wholeheartedly supports it anyway… Albert lies down in the grass, exasperated. ‘It’s better not to talk about all that stuff.’”

War as a fever; a potent explanation rooted in an absurd fatalism. The gears of global impersonal machinery spin out of control. Sociopaths at the top make decisions that decree stupendous suffering at the bottom. Meanwhile, everyone who isn’t in the trenches stands and cheers. And the nagging question persists: is that all that propels the insanity of war? You really can’t blame the poor man for needing to lie down for a minute and try to forget how doomed they all are.

Remarque’s devastating critique of WWI’s needless suffering was part of the efforts of a generation to articulate what had happened. Writers, filmmakers, and painters from all sides of the conflict contributed devastating critiques of the conflict and their disgust at the fractured world around them. Thousands of irate activists marched in the streets to demand answers and justice. And yet all that furious dissent still couldn’t fend off the arguably even bigger tragedy that eventually grew out of WWI’s blood-soaked rubble. All that frustrated energy was channeled in exactly the wrong directions. We already know quite well what happened next. Which is why it would be a good idea to revisit Remarque’s Western Front and be reminded of who pays for the spread of the disease of war.

Matt Hanson is a contributing editor at the Arts Fuse whose work has also appeared in the American Interest, the Baffler, the Guardian, the Millions, the New Yorker, the Smart Set, and elsewhere. A longtime resident of Boston, he now lives in New Orleans.