All quiet on the western front: Betrayal is the Gateway to Understanding

All Quiet on the Western Front is the retelling of World War One through the eyes of twenty years old, Paul Baumer, a character created by a war veteran himself, Erich Maria Remarque. In this greatest war novel of all time, Remarque displays the emotions that a soldier from the lost generation would have felt. Among one of those emotions was betrayal. Betrayal is very important in understanding this novel, because it gives some answers to why this young generation of soldiers, becomes so lost, and distant. This lost generation could no longer trust that everything their government, parents, or teachers did for them was the right thing; they learned that from so much betrayal.

Paul and his friends were persuaded to join the war by their parents and teachers, but when they arrived at the war front they felt betrayed. They felt betrayed, because neither their parents nor teachers ever told them how terrible war would be. “For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress- to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them.” (Remarque 12) This generation, practically children, trusted the older generation to lead them in the right direction, if the older generation had told them to jump in front of a bus, they would have done it. Paul’s generation believed that their parents and teachers had their best interest in mind, but when they arrived at the frontier, they sew that they had been thrown into a place filled with bombs, hunger, and death, they no longer think of their parents and teachers as guides, because guides would never have sent them to such a terrible place.

For Paul and man...

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...ter find out to be false.

The betrayal that Paul felt along with the rest of his generation, caused for them to become even more lost than they already were. They no longer knew what or whom to believe. Their parents, teachers, and government, had in many cases left them to fend for themselves. This caused the lost generation to lose their youth, and become old folks, it probably also accounts for the animalistic nature they developed. The government, and media influencing how the soldiers of one country, viewed the soldiers of another, made the animalistic nature much worse. All of the betrayal most likely also took an emotional toll on all the soldiers; even the ones who survived would not be able to forget the betrayal. The one positive thing that all the betrayal from parents, teacher, governments, and media brought though, was the strong bound in comradeship.