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All quiet on the western front. the greatest war book of the greatest anti-war book
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All quiet on the western front critical essay
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In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich creates the character of Paul Bäumer. Throughout his story, the story of a German soldier fighting, the readers are able to sense Paul’s decline into depression and hopelessness. The quote of “Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing anymore, I am so alone and so without hope that I can confront them without fear” (Remarque, 295). Many writings in the time during and after the war depicted many characters similar to Paul Bäumer. These characters lost hope and the will to fully live life. This essay will discuss the quote in reference to All Quiet on the Western Front, Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, McCrae’s In Flanders Field, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Drakulić’s short story How We Survived Communism to show how these writing emulated the feelings of many in Europe during the era. Paul Baumer emulates the voice of a generation, the voice of the lost generation. Through his story, and through his final moments alive, he shows what it truly f...
In the history of modern western civilization, there have been few incidents of war, famine, and other calamities that severely affected the modern European society. The First World War was one such incident which served as a reflection of modern European society in its industrial age, altering mankind’s perception of war into catastrophic levels of carnage and violence. As a transition to modern warfare, the experiences of the Great War were entirely new and unfamiliar. In this anomalous environment, a range of first hand accounts have emerged, detailing the events and experiences of the authors. For instance, both the works of Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque emphasize the frightening and inhumane nature of war to some degree – more explicit in Jünger’s than in Remarque’s – but the sense of glorification, heroism, and nationalism in Jünger’s The Storm of Steel is absent in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Instead, they are replaced by psychological damage caused by the war – the internalization of loss and pain, coupled with a sense of helplessness and disconnectedness with the past and the future. As such, the accounts of Jünger and Remarque reveal the similar experiences of extreme violence and danger of World War I shared by soldiers but draw from their experiences differing ideologies and perception of war.
As I enter my last week as a twenty-year-old, I find myself nostalgically looking back on the past two decades while wondering what life has in store for me over the next two. Where will I be in twenty years? What will I have accomplished? Where will I be living? Will I be married? Have chil… wait a minute, no, that one will have to wait a few more years. These questions have all passed through my mind at one point or another over the last few weeks, but I realize that they are really quite a luxury. Paul, the narrator of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, never had the opportunity to lean back from his desk and daydream about what the next twenty years of his life had in store for him. He was busy dodging bullets and artillery shells, trying to stay alive on Germany’s Western Front during World War I.
In “all quite on western front,” Erich Maria Remarque tells the a story of six young German men who volunteer in World War I, at the age of eighteen. This novel was published in 1929. Remarque himself fought in World War I, but he only endured one month after obtaining of several injuries. He spent rest of the war in the hospital where he had some realization about the nature of war. This novel is told from the point of view on one young soldier named, Paul Baumer. Baumer is an attentive soldier, discloses how life really was really on the war front. Through the character of Baumer, Remarque describes his fears, and experiences and what he went through as a soldier in the war. This novel gives, us a different observation of how World War I, was for most of the people.
Events are the basis on which the audience is given a comprehensive insight into a society. They highlight what the population’s perceptions are and contribute to displaying certain themes. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, written by the esteemed Erich Maria Remarque, an insight unlike other books, of the war genre, is given. This novel is an accurate representation of the actuality of war. How lives are seen as dispensable and how the soldiers are emotionally and physically destroyed by it. Through these events the theme of the hypocrisy of the elder generation arises, as a constituent of this society. Specifically in this novel Kantorek, a school master, is the epitome of hypocrisy. Paul recalls his words this from his current
Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel All Quiet on the Western Front is based on World War I; it portrays themes involving suffering, comradeship, chance and dehumanization. The novel is narrated by Paul, a young soldier in the German military, who fights on the western front during The Great War. Like many German soldiers, Paul and his fellow friends join the war after listening to the patriotic language of the older generation and particularly Kantorek, a high school history teacher. After being exposed to unbelievable scenes on the front, Paul and his fellow friends realize that war is not as glorifying and heroic as the older generation has made it sound. Paul and his co-soldiers continuously see horrors of war leading them to become hardened, robot-like objects with one goal: the will to survive.
...alize how little is accomplished politically by mass bloodshed. All Quiet on the Western Front also pokes holes into the common stereotype of World War I and II, often leading modern society to the impression that all german soldiers were black hearted and pitted against the allied forces with every bone in their body. Remarque dissolves this with his blunt candor, especially in Paul’s few days with corpse of Gérard Duval the French Printer. Paul soon sees that the two were comrades and could have easily been brothers if it weren’t for the war and their governments. Erich Remarque’s brilliant novel is one that educates the mind of the atrocities of war, and what political leaders often try to hide from their people. The classic work of literature teaches one of the horrors of war from a non-standard point of view, and shows the intimacy of a soldier and nature.
Many of Remarque’s ideas expressed in All Quiet on the Western Front were not completely new. Remarque emphasized things that portrayed the magnitude of issues soldiers face, and how the physical body and senses affects their emotional well-being. The ideas in All Quiet in the Western Front of not knowing the difference between sleep and death, seeing gruesome sights of people, and frustration towards people who cannot sympathize with soldiers, are also shown in Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Dug-Out”, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s “Vigil”, and Sassoon's’ “Suicide in the Trenches”.
From sunrise to sunset, day after day, war demolishes men, cities, and hope. War has an effect on soldiers like nothing else, and sticks with them for life. The damage to a generation of men on both sides of the war was inestimable. Both the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” by Alan Seeger, demonstrate the theme of a lost generation of men, mentally and physically, in war through diction, repetition, and personification.
While soldiers are often perceived as glorious heroes in romantic literature, this is not always true as the trauma of fighting in war has many detrimental side effects. In Erich Maria Remarque 's All Quiet On The Western Front, the story of a young German soldier is told as he adapts to the harsh life of a World War I soldier. Fighting along the Western Front, nineteen year old Paul Baumer and his comrades begin to experience some of the hardest things that war has to offer. Paul’s old self gradually begins to deteriorate as he is awakened to the harsh reality of World War 1, depriving him from his childhood, numbing all normal human emotions and distancing future, reducing the quality of his life.
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another (263).” Powerful changes result from horrifying experiences. Paul Baumer, the protagonists of Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front utters these words signifying the loss of his humanity and the reduction to a numbed creature, devoid of emotion. Paul’s character originates in the novel as a young adult, out for an adventure, and eager to serve his country. He never realizes the terrible pressures that war imposes on soldiers, and at the conclusion of the book the empty shell resembling Paul stands testament to this. Not only does Paul lose himself throughout the course of the war, but he loses each of his 20 classmates who volunteered with him, further emphasizing the terrible consequences of warfare. The heavy psychological demands of life in the trenches and the harsh reality of war strip Paul of his humanity and leave him with a body devoid of all sentiment and feeling.
For many soldiers and volunteers, life on the fronts during the war means danger, and there are few if any distractions from its horrors. Each comradeship serves as a divergence from the daily atrocities and makes life tolerable. Yet, the same bonds that most World War literature romantically portrays can be equally negative. James Hanley’s “The German Prisoner”, shows the horrifying results of such alliances, while “Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemmingway reveal that occasionally, some individuals like Lieutenant Henri seek solidarity outside the combat zone. Smithy of “Not So Quiet” and Paul Baumer in “All Quiet on the Western Front” demonstrate the importance and advantages of comradeship while giving credence to the romance of these connections. Pat Barker’s “Regeneration” depicts Siegfried Sassoon, as an officer who places comradeship and honor above his own personal anti war convictions. Regardless of the consequences, each demonstrates not only the different results of comradeship but also its power and level of importance to each character in the abovementioned writings.
The young soldiers depicted in Erich Maria Remarque's text All Quiet on the Western Front represent a generation without precedent, constancy, or forethought. The men, answering their elders' calls to become national heroes, have lost their innocence on the battlefield and remain forever altered in belief and spirit. Remarque contrasts the cold realities of war in the present to the tranquility of the past in order to illustrate the psychological transformation of the men stationed on the frontlines. The soldiers appear trapped in the present and alienated from their pasts; however, deconstruction of the text rejects the present and past as opposing states of time and identity, and reveals them as related conditions that are intimately and permanently intertwined.
Throughout their lives, people must deal with the horrific and violent side of humanity. The side of humanity is shown through the act of war. This is shown in Erich Remarque’s novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front”. War is by far the most horrible thing that the human race has to go through. The participants in the war suffer irreversible damage by the atrocities they witness and the things they go through.
World War I had a great effect on the lives of Paul Baumer and the young men of his generation. These boys’ lives were dramatically changed by the war, and “even though they may have escaped its shells, [they] were destroyed by the war” (preface). In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer and the rest of his generation feel separated from the other men, lose their innocence, and experience comradeship as a result of the war.
All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of Paul Baumer’s service as a soldier in the German army during World War I. Paul and his classmates enlist together, share experiences together, grow together, share disillusionment over the loss of their youth, and the friends even experience the horrors of death-- together. 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 only irrelevant facts if presented in a textbook.