Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel set in World War I, centers around the changes brought by the war onto one young German soldier. During his time in the war, Remarque’s protagonist, Paul Baumer, changes from a rather innocent romantic young man to a hardened and somewhat caustic veteran. The story also focuses on the lives of Baumer’s comrades. They all begin by patriotically marching off to join the army. However, their visions of the glories of war are soon swept away with horror as true friends die in the battlefield. The soldiers go in fresh from school, knowing nothing except the environment of hopeful youth. At nineteen and twenty, they come to a premature and distorted maturity with the war...their only home. Throughout the length of the novel, Paul learns of the hardship war brings. He learns the destructiveness of war.
During the course of his experience with war, Baumer disaffiliates himself from those societal icons--parents, elders, school, and religion--that had been the foundation of his pre-enlistment days, in order to mature. His new society, then, becomes the company, his fellow trench soldiers. They are a group who understands the truth as Baumer has experienced it. A period of leave when he visits his hometown is disastrous for Baumer because he realizes that he can not communicate with the people on the home front. His military experiences and the home front settlers’ limited, or nonexistent, understanding of the war do not allow for a discussion. When he arrives home and greetings are exchanged, he realizes immediately that he has nothing to say to his mother. “ We say very little and I am thankful that she asks nothing” (Ch. 7 P.141). The fact that he does not wish to speak with his parents shows Baumer’s movement away from the traditional institution of the family. His mother finally speaks to him and asks, “ was it very bad out there, Paul?” (Ch.7 P. 143) However, Baumer cannot respond to his mother’s question: he understands that the experiences he has had are so overwhelming that “ civilian language”, or any language at all, would be ineffective in describing them. Trying to replicate the experience and horrors of the war via words is impossible, Baumer realizes this and so he lies, and is able to restore his family’s faith in him. Any attempt at telling the truth would, in fact, trivialize its reality. However, ...
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...e body suddenly convulses, then becomes limp, and collapses” (page 216). He feels the responsibility to be the one to tell this man’s wife how he died and why he died. Paul realizes that it was completely wrong and that the government had played with his mind making him think that the idea of killing at war was good. He also sees that if the situation was different, that all of them could be friends instead of enemies. The soldiers realize that they are all alike and that they have nothing to gain from their killing.
The soldiers from this novel represent actual feelings about brotherhoods, misperceptions of war and the pointless fighting. They provide clear examples of these with their experiences from war. From sitting on their “boxes” and chatting, to the realization of a friend inside an enemy, these soldiers have been able to see the realities of war and have shared it with the rest of the world. People can now see how horrid it is to be in a war and now they try at all costs to prevent war. War is bad, that’s all there is to it. Not much more you can say about it except that. When viewing the death of innocent people, the question is asked once again, is it really worth it?
All Quiet on the Western Front is a book written by Erich Maria Remarque. It was a book written to reflect the human cost of war. It shows us how war has a hidden face that most people do not see until it is too late. In the novel, he describes a group of young men who at first think war is glorious. But as the war drags on, the group discovers how war is not all it is set out to be. As the war went on, they saw their friends either die or be permanently wounded. Then the end comes when there was only one person left.
In Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer paints a vivid picture of the horrors of war. Many of these horrors are purely physical, such as the constant bombardments and gunshots whizzing overhead. But along with these physical horrors come mental and emotional ones. Chief among these is the "war mindset" that the soldier must acquire in order to survive war. The essence of this mindset is the total disregard for human life, and with it, human beliefs and customs. War requires a suspension of these standard human beliefs and customs. Paul outwardly appears to have acquired this "war mindset," but he does not internalize it and thus eventually dies.
Before Bäumer gets leave to return to his family, he often discusses how the war has changed him and his comrades. However, he does not understand to the great extent in which he has changed until he returns to his old life. Seeing his family, his old home, his bedroom, his piano, and dressing in his old clothes is a direct confrontation with the distance the war has created between his old self and his new self. "A sense of strangeness will not leave me; I cannot feel at home amongst these things... I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us." (160) It is heartbreaking for Bäumer to see his family because he has learned to disconnect his emotions in the war. Once soldiers train themselves to be so disconnected, it is different to reverse the effect.
In Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer, a German soldier, along with his comrades, suffer through traumatic events and devastating losses as they struggle to survive the violent maelstrom of the Great War. As they fight, the grave circumstances and decimated landscapes they witness has a haunting effect on them. In order to cope with this drastic setting, they resort to dehumanization. By seeing their enemies as less than human, the war conditions them to kill, relying solely on instinct alone. They distance themselves from their comrades by dehumanizing them, making it easier to cope with their deaths. To maintain their sanity and face the horrors of the war, Paul and his company must suppress their humanity.
In the book All Quiet on the Western Front, author Erich Maria Remarque reveals a dimmer sense of the cost of war. The main character in the book, German soldier, Paul Baumer, embodies the cost of war before he reaches his ultimate fate. The tactics and weapons used in World War 1 were more advanced compared to the past as a result of the industrial revolution. Germany was forced to fight a two-front war and this intensified the losses suffered by soldiers like Paul and the other men in the Second Company (Gomez 2016, German Strategy for a Two-Front War – Modern Weapons: War and the Industrial Revolution). Remarque’s observations that he shares with readers are not to World War 1 because it portrayed not only the physical but mental consequences of combat. Regardless of what era of war soldiers were involved in they were the ones who paid the price for facing so much death.
Remarque demonstrates Baumer's disaffiliation from the traditional by emphasizing the language of Baumer's pre- and post-enlistment societies. Baumer either can not, or chooses not to, communicate truthfully with those representatives of his pre-enlistment and innocent days. Further, he is repulsed by the banal and meaningless language that is used by members of that society. As he becomes alienated from his former, traditional, society, Baumer simultaneously is able to communicate effectively only with his military comrades. Since the novel is told from the first person point of view, the reader can see how the words Baumer speaks are at variance with his true feelings. In his preface to the novel, Remarque maintains that "a generation of men ... were destroyed by the war" (Remarque, All Quiet Preface). Indeed, in All Quiet on the Western Front, the meaning of language itself is, to a great extent, destroyed.
Paul and his company were once aspiring youth just graduating school thinking about having a wonderful life. Sometimes things don’t always play out the way you want. The effects of war on a soldier is another big theme in the novel. Paul describes how they have changed and how death doesn’t affect them anymore. “We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defen...
In the book All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque illustrates the picture of World War I to the reader. This book is the story of Paul Baumer, who with his classmates recruits in the German Army of World War I. This anti-war novel is an excellent book because through the experiences of Paul Baumer, I am able to actually feel like I'm in the war. It is a very useful piece of literature, which increases the readers' knowledge on how the war affected the people at the time setting. By reading this book, one is drawn into the actual events of the war, and can feel the abyss of death. I believe this piece is very well written. It is entirely simple, lacking any bias remarks, or false patriotism. In this book, Remarque just gives the reader the impression of the war. His great details and way of wording things is incredible. In this book, Remarque is able to portray the nightmare on European battlefields.
Remarque displays the brutal effect war has on people’s minds. Paul Baumer suffers from several psychological disorders that the war
Creating a Culture of Safety. A culture of safety includes psychological safety, active leadership, transparency, and fairness. As a health care professional, I can create a culture of safety by having a positive attitude and creating an environment within the team that feeds off that optimistic and encouraging behavior. In addition, I can contribute to a culture of safety by using effective communication, the “Fairness Algorithm” to differentiate between system error and unsafe behaviors, and by being respectful and approachable to all my fellow coworkers and patients.
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel that takes you through the life of a soldier in World War I. Remarque is accurately able to portray the episodes soldiers go through. All Quiet on the Western Front shows the change in attitudes of the men before and during the war. This novel is able to show the great change war has evolved to be. From lining your men up and charging in the eighteenth century, to digging and “living” in the trenches with rapid-fire machine guns, bombs, and flame-throwers being exposed in your trench a short five meters away. Remarque makes one actually feel the fun and then the tragedy of warfare. At the beginning of the novel Remarque gives you nationalist feelings through pride of Paul and the rest of the boys. However at the end of the war Remarque shows how pointless war really is. This is felt when everyone starts to die as the war progresses.
People who have actually been through war know how horrible it is. Society on the other hand, while it believes it knows the horrors of war, can never understand or sympathize with a soldier’s situation. The only people who can understand war is those who have been through it so they can often feel alone if they are out of the military. Paul cannot even give a straight answer to his own father about his dad’s inquiries about war. Paul’s dad does not understand that people who have been in the war can in no way truly express the horrible things that that have seen and experienced. Nor can Paul fit in with the society who does not understand him. Paul and so many others were brought into the war so young that they know of nothing else other than war. Paul held these views on society as he said, “We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will 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 in to ruin.
The anti-diuretic hormone, for example, is in charge of increasing kidney’s water absorption into the blood. The corticotropin-releasing hormone sends a message to the adrenal glands to release corticosteroids. Corticosteroids help regulate the metabolism and immune response. The gonadotropin-releasing hormone causes the anterior pituitary to release FSH, follicle stimulating hormone, and LH, luteinizing hormone, the two hormones that work together to guarantee normal functioning in the ovaries and testes. The growth hormone-releasing hormone makes the anterior pituitary release the growth hormone. Another hormone, the growth hormone-inhibiting hormone, stops this release.
The anterior pituitary is an endocrine gland controlled by the hypothalamus in several different fashions. Releasing and release-inhibiting hormones are synthesized in the paraventricular, periventricular, and the supraoptic nuclei of the hypothalamus. They control anterior pituitary hormone secretion. Paravocellular neurons in these nuclei send their axons into the tuberoinfundibular tract and terminate on a capillary bed of the superior hypophyseal arteries located around the base of the median eminence. A given paravocellular neuron may release one or more releasing factor into the capillaries that coalesce in six to ten small straight veins that form the hypophyseal-portal blood circulation which descends along the infundibular stalk and forms a second capillary plexus around the anterior pituitary. The releasing-hormones gain access to the five distinct types of target cells in the anterior pituitary back into the capillary bed that then drains into the systemic circulation and transports the hormones to peripheral target tissues. The target tissues are stimulated to produce final mediator-hormones that induce the physiologic...
Though the book is a novel, it gives the reader insights into the realities of war. In this genre, the author is free to develop the characters in a way that brings the reader into the life of Paul Baumer and his comrades. The novel frees the author from recounting only cold, sterile facts. This approach allows the reader to experience what might have been irrelevant facts if presented in a textbook. This book is written from a perspective foreign to most Americans.