Title: an Overview of All Quiet on the Western Front

Title: Erich Maria Remarque: Overview Author(s): Rex Last Source: Reference Guide to World Literature. Ed. Lesley Henderson. 2nd ed. New York: St. James Press, 1995. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Critical essay Bookmark: Bookmark this Document Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1995 St. James Press, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

Erich Maria Remarque was born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabrück in 1898 in reduced circumstances. The way in which he changed his name, in particular the addition of the French `tail', underlines a streak of sentimentality which intrudes in much of his work as well as pointing out his ambitions towards a flamboyant lifestyle, which the success of Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) and other works certainly brought him, and which he further enjoyed in his exile years in America and through his marriage to Paulette Goddard.

After working as a journalist in Weimar Germany, and a rather unfortunate Jugendstil sentimental venture into fiction, he gained instant fame and recognition with the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front (helped along by a clever advertising campaign on the part of the publishers).

In the late 1920s, the battle lines were clearly being drawn between those who regarded World War I as a disaster which destroyed a whole generation, and the growing forces of National Socialism, which perceived that conflict as a kind of platonic `foundation myth' for the coming of a new Reich, in which the spirit of the front line fighting forces with their blood and iron laid the foundations for the Darwinian struggle of the German nation to rise up again and be a power to be reckoned with.

All Quiet on the Western Front was published at the height of this debate and was an instant international bestseller. Written in autobiographical mode in the present tense, it depicts the lives and deaths of eight front-line soldiers in the trenches of World War I. It contains many of the themes which Remarque was to pursue with great consistency throughout the rest of his novels, with varying degrees of success.

The novel is based on a number of antitheses which underline the lack of organic growth and continuity in German society in the 20th century. The soldiers are depicted as the `lost generation', for whom the world of childhood, school, and parents now has no meaning. They have been cut off from their roots by the traumatic experiences of war, and have been stripped of their youth: `Iron youth? We are young old men'.

The experiences of war have created an unbridgeable gulf between the younger soldiers and their elders and supposedly betters: `While they were still writing and speechifying, we saw field hospitals and dying men ... And we saw that of their world, nothing remained.' More than that, though, the war has cut them off from the values of a cultured civilization, reducing them to animals with nothing to exist for but the present moment, and no philosophy save that of pure chance, which determines from one moment to the next whether or not they survive. They are fired with a directionless Bergsonian `life force' which in later novels shades into hope for the future, and which, like that hope, is ultimately brought down and destroyed.

The novel polarized German society. On the one hand, supporters claimed that `he has written for us all', but those opposed to it claimed that it constituted a massive libel against the spirit of the brave fighting forces in the trenches. The debate was exacerbated by one of the novel's great qualities, which characterizes most of Remarque's work: his ability to write about a situation as if he had personally experienced it and to draw the reader into that trompe l'oeil reality. Remarque had never himself seen front line fighting, and particular incidents which he describes in the novel were attacked for their factual deficiencies as much as for the way in which they deflated the National Socialist's glorification of front-line battle.

Apart from the strand of sucrose sentimentality, a more effective aspect of his writing was the strong element of irony which pervades not only the title of All Quiet on the Western Front (words culled from a general's report on the battle scene), but its sequel, Der Weg zurück (The Road Back). It becomes clear that there is no road back for those young soldiers who have physically survived the war, and the impossibility ever of returning to a past situation, particularly the idyll of childhood or lost love, constitutes another of the central themes of Remarque's work.

It finds its most poignant expression in the novels about emigration—one further disruption of the lives of Germans in the National Socialist years arising from political affiliations or race. Remarque himself was forced to emigrate (and was particularly bitter after the war at the attitude of the West German government to exiles like himself). To the sense of loss at being uprooted and separated from family, work, and the dignity of an independent existence was added the theme of revenge, which had always been present in his work, and which is most powerfully expressed in Arc de Triomphe (Arch of Triumph), perhaps his best novel, which tells of a painful love affair between an émigré doctor, Ravic, and Joan, whom he fears to lose and who ultimately dies. The life of the émigré is depicted as very similar to that of the World War I soldier: surviving by chance from one moment to the next, hanging grimly on to shreds of hope for the future.

Two novels of World War II are of particular note: Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (A Time to Love and a Time to Die) is a poignant account of war reaching into the lives of civilians and of the political corruption of National Socialism destroying the fabric of society. Once again, as in Remarque's other works, the decent individuals die while others prosper. Most bitter of all, though, is the searing and utterly credible account of concentration camp existence, Der Funke Leben (The Spark of Life), in which a man and a woman fix their hopes for the future on a white house they can see on a hillside outside the camp. When, finally, they are released, they go up to the house and find that `a bomb had fallen at the back of it ... Only the house front remained undamaged.'

Remarque's last novel, Schatten im Paradies (Shadows in Paradise), also speaks of shattered illusions, of the émigrés who arrive in the `paradise' of the United States, only to find that they cannot adjust to the new world. As one character, who could have come straight from the pages of All Quiet on the Western Front, expresses it: `We are spoilt for normal life ... We are ruined ... There is no way back, nothing stands still.'

Source Citation Last, Rex. "Erich Maria Remarque: Overview." Reference Guide to World Literature. Ed. Lesley Henderson. 2nd ed. New York: St. James Press, 1995. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 Mar. 2011.