“We are at rest five miles behind the front. Yesterday we were relieved, and now our bellies are full of beef and haricot beans. We are satisfied and at peace.” Thus begins Erich Maria Remarque’s great anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” ― “Im Westen nichts Neues” ― published in 1928, 10 years after World War I came to an end. The novel chronicles the war experiences of the German soldier Paul Baumer, a young school boy who joined the forces on the western front at the beginning of the war, 1914.
Two years of trench warfare have already passed when we meet him on the novel’s first page, “satisfied and at peace.” The cook has prepared meals for 150 soldiers, the total number of the Second Company. But only eighty have returned from the battlefield, which means that all receive double portions on that particular day ― as well as honey, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and rum.
It is a feast; enough to make Baumer and his friends feel satisfied and at peace. No one speaks about the fallen, the injured; and no one speaks about the war, let alone winning it. At this point, life at the front has been reduced to the bare essentials ― sleep, a full stomach, avoiding being killed.
The great theme that runs through Remarque’s novel is the discrepancy between the terrifying everyday life of the soldiers at the front, and the distant, abstract reasons for war. No previous war had ever reduced the individual soldier to such insignificance and anonymity. Unfolding a barrage of new technological weaponry ― including machine guns, vehicles, tanks, airplanes, and clouds of lethal, chemical gasses ― World War I truly marked the beginning of a new kind of warfare whose destructive force seemed to take everyone by surprise.
For example, the battle of the Somme claimed the lives of over one million soldiers, many of whom fell on the first day. When the battle ended, after approximately five months of meaningless slaughtering, the French-British front line had advanced six miles. Never before, it seems, has a centimeter of land been more expensive in terms of human lives. World War I was, in other words, a war fought with new technology employed by people who hardly grasped its devastating consequences; a people still inhabiting the 19th century.
In the essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin observes that at the end of World War I, “men returned from the battlefield grown silent ― not richer, but poorer in communicable experience.” For at no previous moment in history, Benjamin continues, “has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”
For Benjamin, World War I marks the end of the art of storytelling, the ability to exchange experiences. The storyteller, Benjamin argues, is someone “who has counsel for his readers,” that is, wisdom; a moral, a piece of advice. Storytelling recounts the epic moments of mankind, the eternal glory or damnation, the principles by which we live and die.
The finest hour of storytelling is no doubt Homer’s epic “The Iliad” which tells the story of the siege of Troy, and in particular the story of the great warrior Achilles, who chooses glory on the battlefield ― knowing that it will cost him his life. For as Horace teaches us, “Sweet and glorious is to die for our country” ― like Hector, the guardian of Troy, or the brave Spartans protecting their country against Xerxes’ mighty Persian army in the battle of Thermopylae. And from Herodotus, Plutarch, and Thucydides we learn about the Athenians’ heroic struggle for democracy and other noble ideals in Peloponnesian War.
In all these cases, the moral is clear; and it is one in which Paul Baumer and his classmates strongly believe at the outset of the First World War. For they have been taught well by their teacher, Herr Kantorek, who persuades them all to join the German army with his rhetoric and eloquent phrases about country and freedom.
But after years in the trenches, Baumer has come to the conclusion that Kantorek was wrong; and indeed, that the authorities, the politicians, the intellectuals ― who were supposed to represent “greater insight and a more humane wisdom” ― were wrong. “While they continued to write and talk,” Baumer at one point says, “we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger … we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left.”
In the trenches, Baumer learns that a button is worth more than four volumes of Schopenhauer; that knowing how to make fire with wet wood or light a cigarette in a storm is more important than knowing what Lycurgus considered the most important for the state of Sparta, or what the population of Melbourne might be. At the beginning of the war, Herr Kantorek’s class of 20, enthusiastic schoolboys go to the front; by the end of the war, only Baumer is left. During those four years, he has become an old, disillusioned man.
And with him, a whole generation ― “destroyed by the war,” as Remarque writes. This was a “generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar,” Benjamin reflects, and “now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.” Remarque’s novel is less a story in the traditional sense, a story with a clear moral; it is rather a testimony, one that bears witness to this tiny, fragile human body, reduced to the bare essentials ― sleep, food, the avoidance of death.
World War I seemed to exhaust language itself, the traditional art of storytelling. New forms of literature were required to capture the war experiences ― such as modernism and similar literary styles. The traditional art storytelling had lost its credibility. The aftermath of World War I saw the emergence of anti-war literature as a prominent genre.
Although there had been critical novels illustrating the horrors of war before ― for example Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” from 1895 ― it was First World War novels like Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Weapons” and Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” as well as the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, that would come to define the way in which we write and think about war today.
Wilfred Owen died a week before World War I ended on Nov. 11, 1918, almost around the same time as Remarque has his main character Paul Baumer pass away: “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front” ― Im Westen nichts Neues.
No epic battle, no heroic campaign to report ― nothing except the death of one more, anonymous soldier. Remarque’s novel is the unwritten report of the forgotten soldiers whose lives seemed so insignificant, and whose deaths were later to count for nothing as the world prepared itself for yet another war, a few decades later.
By Eli Park Sorensen
Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.
