IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES TWENTIETH CENTURY GERMAN TEXTS ANSICHTEN EINES CLOWNS by Heinrich Böll Edited by William Hanson UND SAGTE KEIN EINZIGES WORT by Heinrich Böll Edited by William Hanson DER GUTE MENSCH VON SEZUAN by Bertolt Brecht Edited by Bruce Thompson DER KAUKASISCHE KREIDEKREIS by Bertolt Brecht Edited by Bruce Thompson DER BESUCH DER ALTEN DAME by Friedrich Dürrenmatt Edited by Paul Ackermann ANDORRA by Max Frisch Edited by Peter Hutchinson BIEDERMANN UND DIE BRANDSTIFTER by Max Frisch Edited by Peter Hutchinson DER JÜNGSTE TAG by Odön von Horváth Edited by Ian Huish DIE VERWANDLUNG by Franz Kafka Edited by Peter Hutchinson and Michael Minden IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES by E.M.Remarque Edited by Brian O.Murdoch GANZ UNTEN by Günter Wallraff Edited by Arthur Nockels DER GETEILTE HIMMEL by Christa Wolf Edited by Agnes Cardinal DER HAUPTMANN VON KÖPENICK by Carl Zuckmayer Edited by H.F.Garten SCHACHNOVELLE by Stefan Zweig Edited by Brian O.Murdoch TWENTIETH CENTURY TEXTS
Erich Maria Remarque IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES Edited by
Brian Murdoch Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of German University of Stirling
London First published in this edition in 1984 by Methuen Educational Ltd This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Text © 1959 Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch Koln Introduction and notes © 1984 Brian Murdoch All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Remarque, Erich Maria Im Westen nichts Neues.— (Methuen’s twentieth century texts) I. Title II. Murdoch, Brian 833′.912 PT2635.E68
ISBN 0-203-97773-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-02791-8 (Print Edition) CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT vii
INTRODUCTION 1 A German best-seller 1 Erich Maria Remarque 2 The literary furore 4 The First World War and the trenches 6 Literature and the war 8 Im Westen nichts Neues 11 Composition and structure 11 Themes 15 Characters 19 Perspectives and style 21 Remarque’s picture of the war 22 The novel and its sequel 24 NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 26 BIBLIOGRAPHY 28 ILLUSTRATIONS 33 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES 36 vi
NOTES TO THE TEXT 219 SELECT VOCABULARY 239 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The editor and publishers are grateful to Verlag Kiepenheuer and Witsch for permission to reproduce the text of 1959 in this edition. INTRODUCTION
A GERMAN BEST-SELLER Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues has a distinction that may be claimed by few other major works of German literature: that of being an international best-seller. Having first appeared in book form early in 1929, it sold half a million copies within six months, and was translated almost immediately into a number of other languages. Banned by the Nazis in Germany between 1933 and 1945, its reputation internationally has maintained itself. The figure of ten million copies in forty-five different languages is quoted on the cover of the current German paperback, an edition which had itself sold over half a million copies by 1980, some fifty years after the original publication and still longer after the events it describes. The current English-language paperback claims for the work simply ‘the largest sale of any war novel’. That the English title—All Quiet on the Western Front—has become part of the currency of general speech is another rare distinction. The novel has been filmed twice (both times in the USA), and although a recent version in 1979 was not well received, the version distributed in 1930, not long after the beginning of the sound era, is a classic which is still often shown. The fact that Im Westen nichts Neues is a best-seller has, however, led to problems. Modern best-sellers are sometimes deliberately sensationalist, or are of inferior literary quality, and this has been assumed from time to time of Im Westen nichts Neues, an uncritical prejudice voiced without analysis of the text. A point that is often 2 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
missed, too, is that the novel has an aim: to make clear the evil of war. However worthy the aim of any literary work may be, it becomes irrelevant if the work is not read, but it is merely literary snobbery to equate writing that is accessible to the widest range of people with writing that is somehow of inferior quality. Some early critics, finally, struck by the vividness of the presentation of the war, felt indignation upon discovering that the work was not autobiographical, and condemned Remarque, in effect, for not having fallen on the Western Front in 1918.1
Erich Maria Remarque Remarque was born Erich Paul Remark on 22 June 1898 in Osnabrück. He adopted the middle name in honour of his mother (who died in 1917), and changed the spelling of his surname to an older family form (that he was really called Kramer is a myth), partly to dissociate himself from a novel called Die Traumbude, which he published in 1920, but came later to reject. He studied at Catholic schools and at a teacher-training college until he was conscripted, with the rest of his class, in November 1916. After basic training in Osnabrück he was sent to Flanders in 1917 and reached the front on June 26. Just over a month later he was wounded, however, and taken to a hospital in Duisburg, where he spent, effectively, the rest of the war in various capacities. After the war he worked at various jobs, including teaching and writing advertising copy, and in 1925 he married an actress and dancer, Jutta Ilse Zambona. 1927 saw the writing of Im Westen nichts Neues, and in 1928 the work was accepted for publication by the firm of Ullstein in Berlin. It was brought out first as a serial in Ullstein’s magazine, the Vossische Zeitung, at the end of 1928, and then in book form under Ullstein’s Propyläen imprint in January 1929. The sequel, Der Weg zurück (The Road Back) followed in 1931, but without the huge success of the earlier novel. The storm which Im Westen nichts Neues had provoked in literary circles continued to rage, however, until Remarque’s work was banned by the Nazis when they came to power in Germany in 1933. Early in the 1930s, Remarque took up residence in Switzerland, and although at this time his marriage INTRODUCTION 3
ended in divorce, the couple remarried in order that Remarque’s wife could keep a residence permit for Switzerland. The novel Drei Kameraden (Three Comrades) was published in 1937, the German version in Holland, but in 1938 the Nazi regime in Germany (who were to execute Remarque’s sister Elfriede in 1943) deprived him of his citizenship, and a year later he left for America. Remarque lived in Hollywood, becoming much involved with the world of films and its glamour. Finally divorced in 1951, he married the film actress Paulette Goddard in 1958. He had become an American citizen in 1947, and he alternated between America and Switzerland (and also Italy) until his death on 25 September 1970.2 His later novels, many of which were filmed, sometimes appeared in English first. Liebe deinen Nächsten appeared as Flotsam in 1941, in German only in 1953. Arc de Triomphe was published in Switzerland in 1946, but had come out as Arch of Triumph in the previous year. After the Second World War Remarque produced first a striking novel showing the struggle for life in a concentration camp, Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life, 1952), and then a work set on the Eastern Front in the Second World War, Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (A Time to Love and a Time to Die, 1954). Remarque himself appears in the 1957 film of this work. His final novels were Der schwarze Obelisk, 1956 (The Black Obelisk, 1957), Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge (Heaven has no Favourites, both 1961), Die Nacht von Lissabon, 1963 (The Night in Lisbon, 1964), and Schatten im Paradies, posthumously published in 1971, the translation, Shadows in Paradise appearing in 1972. Remarque also wrote one stage play, and screenplays based on shorter writings, but his novels remain his major achievement. They are characterized by a frequently astonishingly realistic portrayal of the darkest aspects of our century: of war, of concentration camps, of refugees. There is in them, it is true, a repeated ray of hope, a Funke Leben; but there is also a deep pessimism, manifest for example in the death of Paul Bäumer, or of the hero in Der Funke Leben. The spark of life is all too easily extinguished. Remarque drew frequently on his own experiences in his novels. Im Westen nichts Neues, for example, contains names (and sometimes character-traits) taken from people Remarque had 4 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
known. Paul Bäumer’s home town, too, is identifiably Osnabrück, even if it is not named. For this and for the other novels, however, it must be remembered that Remarque is merely using his experiences as background. His vivid writing (especially with a first-person narrator), makes autobiographical searching a temptation, but Bäumer is not Remarque, and the home town is only Osnabrück in so far as it gains thereby a firmer plausibility. It is not the ‘real’ Osnabrück.
The literary furore Im Westen nichts Neues appeared in several forms. The serialization in the Vossische Zeitung lacks some of the passages in the book version, perhaps because they might have offended the magazine readership—the Lewandowski episode, or the reference to Russian POWs masturbating. Some other changes were made, one being a shift in the chronology, the boys originally joining up in 1914. There are also a few small differences between the book text of 1929 and the post-1945 German version now available.3 The immediate reaction to the novel was a literary furore, cultivated to a small extent at least by the publishers, Ullstein, who had mounted a considerable campaign of publicity when the work appeared. Certain aspects of the novel, however, plainly struck chords, and one such aspect was the sardonic negative of the title. As soon as 1929 Carl Otto published Im Osten nichts Neues, a kind of expansion, making the point that other fronts were as bad. In 1930, however, E. Erbelding attacked Remarque’s pacifism with over four hundred pages on the heroism of the soldiers in Im Westen doch Neues, and Franz Klietmann did the same in 1931 with Im Westen wohl was Neues. These works tended to imitate the typeface of the original dust-jacket (four lines of bold Gothic), and Klietmann added an anti-Remarque foreword which summarized (hysterically and inaccurately) one kind of response:
Dieses Buch soll eine Anklage sein gegen einen Degenerierten, welcher versucht, deutschen Heldengeist zu besudeln, nur, weil sein ausgemergeltes Mark und sein mutwillig entnervter Leib, durch eigene Hand zerstört, nicht INTRODUCTION 5
fassen konnte, was das große Ringen dem deutschen Frontsoldaten gab.
Smaller, quasi-literary pamphlets sold well. Peter Kropp’s Endlich Klarheit über Remarque of 1930, by someone who had known Remarque in hospital, attacks him for misrepresentation of the facts, failing to notice that the work is not an autobiography, and a similar, though more general attack is that made by Wilhelm Müller Scheld in his 1929 booklet Im Westen nichts Neues—eine Täuschung. In the same year came the oddest publication of them all, that by Mynona (Dr Salomo Friedlaender), who devoted over 250 pages to the question Hat Erich Maria Remarque wirklich gelebt? Finally there was a close parody, comic in parts, but implying that Remarque had written a sensationalist novel in order to make a lot of money, published by M.J. Wolff under the name of Emil Marius Requark and describing life on the Trojan front, Von Troja nichts Neues.4 The reception varied enormously. At one end was the comment by Walter von Molo, often cited, that:
Dieses Buch ist unser Weltkriegsdenkmal, das Denkmal unseres unbekannten Soldaten. Gebt dieses Buch in jedes Haus, das Angehörige opfern mußte, es ist von allen Toten geschrieben….5
At the other end were those of the nationalists, who considered that the pacifism and unheroic attitudes ascribed to the soldiers was a betrayal of those who had fallen. Most extreme was a pamphlet by the Nazi Gottfried Nickl—Im Westen nichts Neues und sein wahrer Sinn (1930)—linking the work with Bolshevism, betrayal and (given that Ullstein was a Jewish firm) a Semitic plot to subjugate Germany. These views gained the upper hand. Nazis disrupted the showing of the American film in 1930, and then had it banned. The Nazi view of the war was rather different. Another erstwhile Frontsoldat had written in 1925:
Mögen Jahrtausende vergehen, so wird man nie von Heldentum reden und sagen dürfen, ohne des deutschen 6 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
Heeres des Weltkrieges zu gedenken. Dann wird aus dem Schleier der Vergangenheit heraus die eiserne Front des grauen Stahlhelms sichtbar werden, nicht wankend und nicht weichend, ein Mahnmal der Unsterblichkeit.6
The writer, Adolf Hitler, came to power in 1933. On 10 May of that year the Nazis choreographed public burnings of supposedly anti-German literature. There were nine groups, and the seventh of nine speakers declaimed:
Gegen literarischen Verrat am Soldaten des Weltkrieges, für Erziehung des Volkes im Geist der Wahrhaftigkeit! Ich übergebe der Flamme die Schriften von Erich Maria Remarque.7
THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE TRENCHES The reasons for the outbreak of war in 1914 have long been the subject of historical speculation. After a series of crises one incident, the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June, served as a spark. A combination of militarism at statesman level (particularly, perhaps, on the part of the German Kaiser), and the mechanics of transporting large bodies of troops, set in motion the first highly mechanized war of history. The comment that the soldiers were ‘lions led by donkeys’ might be applied to any of the armies, and the conduct of a new kind of war by generals whose experience was out of date made it the bloodiest conflict ever. Germany was determined to repeat in 1914 its victory over France in 1870, by operating the ‘Schlieffen plan’. German troops would invade Belgium and move down through France, seizing Paris from behind. The invasion of Belgium brought Britain into the war, and an unexpectedly swift mobilization by Russia presented the Kaiser with a war on two fronts. In spite of some near-disasters, Belgian resistance, the efforts of rapidly brought in French troops, and those of the British Expeditionary Force slowed the German advance, and they were stopped at the Marne late in INTRODUCTION 7
1914. The opposing armies at once began a ‘race to the sea’, digging in and facing each other in two lines that ran from the Belgian coast to Switzerland. This was the Western Front, and although it varied its position to an extent, the two opposing trench systems, from which countless soldiers attacked and were killed, were maintained for nearly four years. Trench warfare had developed, a war of emplacement (der Stellungskrieg), in which the generals held firm to a theory of attrition—that victory would depend upon wearing the other side down by sheer weight of numbers of troops poured in. The fighting was more or less constant, with offensives and counter-offensives such as the first battle of Ypres in 1915, the Somme (a sequence of offensives, with enormous loss of life, lasting for the latter half of 1916), Verdun, also in 1916, and the Flanders campaign of 1917, to which the name Passchendaele is usually attached, and of which the fighting in the first half of Remarque’s novel is presumably part. The war ended on 11 November 1918, with the lines not so very different after four years, and the German army still on foreign soil. The legend arose that the German troops had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by revolutionary politicians at home, but more decisive factors had been the influx of fresh American troops after the USA joined the war in 1917, and the effects of an allied naval blockade on German food supplies. It was a war of machinery, dominated not, as expected, by the bayonet, but by long-range heavy artillery, by the trench mortar, by the machine gun and by still newer weapons: gas, the flame- thrower, the aeroplane (for reconnaissance at least), and after 1917 the tank. The front itself, though, was dominated by the trenches, protected by barbed-wired entanglements (der Drahtverhau) and separated by a no-man’sland pitted with shell- holes. Sometimes the enemies faced each other across only a short distance. The systems consisted typically of three trenches: first a zig-zag front line or fire trench (der Schützengraben) with a parapet, from which ran forward small cuts or saps, used as listening posts (der Horchposten). Behind the fire trench would come a parallel support trench, and behind that a reserve trench, the three connected by communication trenches (der Laufgraben). At intervals came dugouts (der Unterstand), providing anything from 8 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
good to minimal shelter from shells or the elements. Troops would spend perhaps a week in the front line, followed by a period of relief, a pattern which the novel makes clear. The situation in the trenches, though, is barely imaginable: invariably wet, impossibly so in winter, with mud, rats, lice, inadequate food, the hazards of going over the top or being caught on the wire, plus the terror of bombardment from unseen artillery or snipers. The chance of survival was small: the statistics, which are only guesses, speak of ten million dead in all the combatant countries. Yet when war broke out it was received with popular acclaim on all sides. Young men joined up with enthusiasm (conscription came later), became disillusioned, and fell. In Germany the initial patriotic fervour is very clear in a letter sent home by a sixth-form volunteer in 1915:
Es war doch recht, was ich getan. Alles Einzelne, Persönliche muß jetzt hinter dem Großen, hinter dem alles in Anspruch nehmenden Wohle des Vaterlandes zurückstehen. Ich bin von hohem, freudigem Stolz erfüllt, jetzt mit hinausziehen zu dürfen.
Later that same year an eighteen-year old English officer, proud of his posting to France wrote to his brother how
it is rather fun making…entanglements and imagining the Germans coming along in the dark and falling over these things and starting to shout, whereupon you immediately send up a flare…and turn a machine gun on them as they struggle in the wire. It sounds cruel but it is War.8
Both were dead by 1916. Neither had yet faced the reality that Im Westen nichts Neues makes clear.
LITERATURE AND THE WAR Hurrahpatriotismus in Germany found immediate expression in a popular literature which adopted an adventure-story approach to the war. An example is provided by a Reclam booklet published in INTRODUCTION 9
1915 under the title Unsere feldgrauen Helden. It was cheap, and was presumably widely read. The central figure is enthusiastic about the mobilization, catches a spy (in Boy’s Own Paper fashion) almost at once, dreams about an Iron Cross and carries out his duties with vigour, including the killing of a sniper: ‘da habe ich mit dem Bajonett dem elenden Leben ein Ende gemacht.’ The work concludes with the pious note that ‘dieser Krieg hat uns wieder unserem deutschen Gott nahe gebracht’.9 On one level of literature the idea that war may be presented as an adventure survived two world wars. Another Ullstein best-seller in the 1920s, written in 1916 but with a 1927 edition selling over half a million copies, was Gunther Plüschow’s Die Abenteuer des Fliegers von Tsingtau. The title refers to a battle in the Far East, but the pilot eventually escaped from captivity in England. The use of Abenteuer in the title is significant of itself. It is instructive, too, to compare Remarque’s novel (which is, after all, still in print as a paperback) with more recent war-novels. Although writers like Heinrich Böll have made explicit the miseries of the Second World War, a more typical modern best-seller (in German and in English) is the 08/15 trilogy by H.H.Kirst, translated as the stories of Gunner Asch. These emphasize the heroic soldier, as do many English equivalents. Blanket references to ‘war-novels’ are clearly dangerous, and we must be sure that the term means no more than ‘novels set in the war’. Novels which emphasized the horrors of the fighting appeared even during the First World War. A French work, Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (Under Fire) was one of the earliest, in 1916. A flow of writings began after the war, however, which came to a head around 1929, long enough after the events for them to have been digested. Most made the miseries of the war plain. Not all of those produced in Germany, however, came to the same pacifist conclusion as Remarque. The literary responses took a variety of forms. Purely military memoirs from the exiled Kaiser down through the ranks continued to appear for decades, and there were also very many collections of letters or reminiscences about those who had fallen. More deliberately literary works were either presented as autobiographies (striking examples by Edmund Blunden and by 10 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
Robert Graves appeared in 1929) or as reconstructed diaries, an approach adopted by Ernst Jünger in Germany in 1920 with his celebrated In Stahlgewittern: Ein Kriegstagebuch (The Storm of Steel). Close to this is the novel as such, which is set, however, in a clearly identifiable historical and geographical framework, such as Ludwig Renn’s novel Krieg (War) of 1929. More clearly a novel is Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, again from 1929. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the genres, and indeed to fit in Im Westen nichts Neues. While the historical orientation of the work may more or less be established, there is no pinning down of the events to specific happenings. Most of the events described in the novelhowever far-fetched they might seem—can be matched from other writings about the war, and one has to apply to Remarque’s work the formula that is sometimes found in books of this period in particular: the book is a work of fiction, but the events actually happened. The writer remains, however, in control of the selection and of the presentation of events. Ernst Jünger, for example, can describe the horrors of a battle but can go on to say how
ein Schleier senkt sich über die Fülle der bunten, schrecklichen, und wunderbaren Bilder dieser Schlacht, die wie ein Traum aus blutig dunklen und feuerroten Farben das Herz den Prüfungen der Tiefe unterzog.10
Two quite different attitudes towards the war manifested themselves in the German literary response. On the one hand a complete rejection of it as misery and waste; on the other, the idea that if this were true, then the dead had died in vain, and this could not be so. The Fronterlebnis must at least have been of spiritual benefit. The latter approach, which is clear in writers such as Jünger, was an understandable one. The pessimism in Remarque’s work is not easy to come to terms with, although one of its virtues was doubtless its cathartic quality. The new nationalist movement took the second line, however, embracing works like Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern as they did so. They saw the Fronterlebnis as the forging of a national spirit. But Remarque’s novel is not isolated in its pacifism. Beside Im Westen nichts Neues we may refer to Ernst INTRODUCTION 11
Glaeser’s Jahrgang 1902 (Class of 1902), an exact contemporary; the slightly earlier and rather different work by Arnold Zweig showing the death of one man and the machine of militarism on the Eastern Front, Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (The Case of Sergeant Grischa, 1927); and a brief work by Ernst Johannssen, Vier von der Infanterie (Four Infantrymen, 1929). The last work was filmed at the same time as All Quiet on the Western Front, and makes a very interesting comparison with it.11 It appeared as Westfront 1918, made by the German Nerofilm. The pacifist novels and the anti-war theme were appropriate to the Weimar Republic, the unsettled, divided political state of Germany between 1919 and 1933. One critic links the stress on comradeship in Im Westen nichts Neues with the desire for unity in Weimar Germany.12 But the Weimar Republic did not last, and the forces that gained hegemony were those of National Socialism. Those war novels that were really anti-war novels had in a sense failed, their message of ‘no more war’ an illusion. ‘The year 1929 seemed to represent the peak of human achievement. It was in fact the watershed: ten years after the end of the First World War, ten years before the outbreak of the second.’13
IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
Composition and structure ‘Wären wir 1916 heimgekommen, wir hätten aus dem Schmerz und der Stärke unserer Erlebnisse einen Sturm entfesselt.’ This comment, from close to the end of the novel, explains the tone which prevails from its very beginning. Had the war ended in 1916, a forceful response might have been possible. It did not. Im Westen nichts Neues begins after that turning point, on the front in Flanders in 1917, with an army already heading for defeat. Any reference to the enthusiasms which greeted the fighting in 1914 may therefore be viewed only in the light of what has taken place to show how wrong they were. We are introduced to two groups of soldiers from the same Company which, we are told, has just returned from the front. Of 12 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
150 men, only 80 have survived. The narrative (with two significant exceptions) is placed in the mouth of one of these soldiers, Paul Bäumer, who is approaching twenty when the work begins. His sensitive, literary, but inexperienced character shapes the narrative. He speaks, however, not only in the first person singular, but as ‘wir’, referring either to the soldiers of his Company, to his own circle of friends, or to his immediate small group, himself and three classmates, Kropp, Müller and Leer, all of whom had volunteered, presumably in late 1915. A second group of four comrades are distinguished from the first group by the fact that they have not come straight from school. Tjaden, a locksmith, and the peat-cutter Westhus are their own age, but Detering, a farmer, and Katczinsky are older. Katczinsky, at 40, is the central and most important. He acts as a mentor for the others, teaching them how to survive. He himself is adept at finding food and comforts in unlikely situations. He has survived major offensives, like the Somme, and exemplifies throughout the will to live. The structure within each chapter is episodic, interest being maintained by frequent shifts of topic, some themes being developed across several chapters. Thus in Chapter I we see the soldiers’ concern, after returning with heavy losses from the front, with sheer physical needs: first with food, and then with the workings of their digestions as they sit together in the open on portable latrines. The easy comradeship of this is at the same time a manifestation of the complete breakdown of normal conventions, including privacy. They discuss how they had been bullied by their teacher, Kantorek, into volunteering, and Bäumer voices an indictment of the teachers, who were supposed to offer guidance, but who betrayed their trust by sending their charges into a war that they never come to understand. The chapter ends with a visit to Kemmerich, another classmate, wounded in a field hospital. Chapter II is similarly divided. There are recollections now of basic training under the martinet Corporal Himmelstoß, who replaced their school-learning with mindless drill. This chapter— which is presented almost exclusively as Bäumer’s thoughts—ends with a second visit to the hospital and the death of Kemmerich. The third chapter maintains the alternation of present happening INTRODUCTION 13
and recollection. Recruits (whom the 19 or 20 year-olds see as ‘Kinder’) are brought in, the resourcefulness of Katczinsky is demonstrated, and the narrator remembers how, at the end of the training period, revenge had been taken upon Himmelstoß by those he had brutalized. These first chapters are set behind the lines. Chapter IV, however, takes the men into action on a wiring detail. The troops come under fire, and various incidents remain in the mind: the terror and death of the inexperienced recruits; the wounding of several horses; the shelling of a fresh warcemetery, where the troop are forced into cover in opened graves; a gas attack. The final note is of exhausted monotony, however, and contrast is provided by the next chapter, set behind the lines. Here occasion is given for a (futile) discussion of the possibilities of life after the war, but the chapter is punctuated by two incidents: the arrival of Himmelstoß at the front, and the theft and eating of a goose by Katczinsky and Bäumer. In their turn, these incidents stand in contrast to Chapter VI, which is central in several respects. The group spend a period of duty at the front, and Bäumer comments on the effect of the war. The men become automata, fighting against annihilation itself, human animals, fighting or waiting in claustrophobic fear for the next onslaught. They are relieved after their tour of duty, but the attrition has continued: only 32 of the original 150 return this time. The alternation of experience and mood continues with a further passage behind the lines. Himmelstoß, who has now experienced the front, is conciliatory, and one strand of episodic narrative is concluded. After a scene in which the soldiers enjoy a brief tenderness with some French girls, however, Bäumer is sent on leave, the later part of Chapter VII and all of Chapter VIII being set at home. The leave, however, is characterized by the inability of those at home to grasp even remotely the reality of the front: his dying mother, a major who criticizes his ‘trench manners’. Some comic relief is provided by the revenge on Kantorek, now a territorial reservist, bullied by those he had sent to the front. A brief chapter in which Bäumer is detailed to guard Russian prisoners of war reminds us of the extent of the war, but soon he 14 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES is back at the front. Varying the pattern of action and relief, Bäumer is happier on this occasion to return. The front is his only world. The reality of war is soon brought home to him. After another aimless discussion of the nature of the war, occasioned by an inspection by the Kaiser, Bäumer volunteers for a patrol, becomes lost in no-man’s-land, and kills a French soldier—the only named enemy in the work. Bäumer’s mental anguish during his spell in a shell-hole with the dead poilu is contrasted immediately upon his return with the cold-blooded mechanism of a sniper’s rifle and, in the following chapter, by a period in which the group have access to a food-store. This spell of relief is brought to an end when Bäumer is wounded, and the last part of Chapter X shows us in great detail the other side of the fighting, the physical results in a military hospital, a theme already indicated with Kemmerich. The last two chapters of the work move faster, and we are now aware of time passing. Bäumer returns in winter 1917, and we move swiftly into 1918. Kropp has been wounded and Westhus is dead, and now Müller and Leer fall. Detering, preoccupied by his farm, deserts, and is presumably shot. Rumours of peace spread, but the miseries remain: Graben, Lazarett, Massengrab. Without supplies and facing fresher troops the army is not defeated, but worn down. Katczinsky is killed by a stray shell-fragment—a last illustration of the Zufall that has come to dominate their lives. Bäumer, in the brief last chapter, awaits the end of the war without hope, one of the few survivors. Of the group, only Tjaden is left (he appears in the sequel, and is categorized throughout as a survivor against all odds). Suddenly Bäumer’s narrative ends, and a different narrator voice reports his death, on a day when it was supposedly all quiet on the Western Front. His face had on it a look that was almost one of satisfaction. The structure of the whole work is episodic, with an overall alternation of direct action and relief. Scenes of front-line action are in fact relatively few in number, but the hospital scenes must be included with these, and the experience of leave varies the pattern. Within the chapters, too, present action and recollection or reflection alternate. A certain unity is given by the working- through of episodes such as those concerning Himmelstoß or INTRODUCTION 15
Kantorek, and there are thematic motifs which may be followed throughout the work. Linking all the chapters, however, is the pattern of attrition, the reduction of the Company, of Bäumer’s class, of his circle of comrades. The process has begun before the novel begins, and it accelerates in the last chapters, giving the sense that we are hurtling towards an end: of the war, of the novel, of Bäumer’s life. The final statement is not by Bäumer, of course. There is, however, another passage which is this time in a voice outside the fictionality of the novel. The prefatory statement stresses that Im Westen nichts Neues is a report on a generation destroyed by the war, but it includes in it those who escaped the shells. The novel is a requiem for Bäumer and the fallen, but it is not just a memorial. It is aimed at the survivors who had to come to terms with life after the war.
Themes The primary theme of the novel is, of course, the war itself: the fighting, the preparations, the waiting. Closely associated is the portrayal of the results of the war in the hospital scenes. The two aspects are summarized by the narrator:
Trommelfeuer, Sperrfeuer, Gardinenfeuer, Minen, Gas, Tanks, Maschinengewehre, Handgranaten—Worte, Worte, aber sie umfassen das Grauen der Welt. (p. 133) Im Stockwerk tiefer liegen Bauch- und Rückenmarkschüsse, Kopfschüsse und beiderseitig Amputierte. Rechts im Flügel Kieferschüsse, Gaskranke, Nasen-, Ohren- und Halsschüsse. Links im Flügel Blinde und Lungenschüsse, Beckenschüsse, Gelenkschüsse, Nierenschüsse, Hodenschüsse und Magenschüsse. Man sieht hier erst, wo ein Mensch überall getroffen werden kann. (p. 220)
Early on in the novel the reader is, as it were, taken past the bed of the dying Kemmerich, just as Bäumer wishes: ‘man sollte die ganze Welt an diesem Bette vorbeiführen’ (p. 61). We see, too, 16 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES the terrible weapons of a new kind of war: gas, flame-throwers and tanks, as well as machine guns, shells and rifles. To those who found the work sensationalist, the answer must be made that aspects of war are sensational, and that the picture of life in the trenches themselves is barely sensational enough. There is no overview of the war, nor could there be. Only a small part of one area of fighting is actually shown, and only rarely are we made aware of fighting on other fronts. Bäumer and his comrades, through whom the story is told, have no coherent view of the plan of the war, nor of its purpose. A discussion occasioned by the Kaiser’s visit founders first upon the impossibility of one country physically insulting another, and peters out with the shrug of ‘don’t talk about it, it can’t be changed’. Elsewhere we find recourse to the self-defeating cliché: ‘war is war’. The men did not mutiny, nor did they desert, and they were not cowards. Their presence at the front is a kind of patriotism, and the distorted logic of a war in which the officers are hated more and are more dangerous than the enemy could, if dwelt upon, only lead to madness. Some blame is apportioned. The production of propaganda pamphlets, for example, is criticized, and there were large numbers of these. They were a symptom, however, and not a cause. Katczinsky is dimly aware that ‘es muß Leute geben, denen der Krieg nützt’ (p. 181), but no one is able to say who they might be, at least in the early part of the novel. Towards the end, Bäumer becomes aware that while the troops suffer from lack of supplies, ‘die Fabrikbesitzer in Deutschland sind reiche Leute geworden—uns zerschrinnt die Ruhr die Därme’ (p. 232). Marxist critics of the novel have blamed Remarque for not having his soldiers rebel. But they are equipped neither temperamentally nor intellectually for revolt, and the storm that might have been unleashed had they returned in 1916 has no strength in 1918. ‘Wenn wir jetzt zurückkehren, sind wir müde, zerfallen, ausgebrannt, wurzellos und ohne Hoffnung’ (p. 240). A further development of the war theme is the effect upon the men. The front is both a cage and a vortex, a prison and a force of attraction. Men become automata or animals, fighting against death itself, and preoccupied when not at the front, with their digestive systems. Food is a recurrent theme, and the emphasis on INTRODUCTION 17
defecation perhaps a comment on the war itself. Pitted against the machinery of annihilation, normal time and a normal scale of values are lost. Army training, indeed, takes away their individuality and forces them into an unnatural communality which they come to accept, whether this means defecating together or allowing a man to take his wife to bed with him in a crowded ward. The reversal of moral values is best seen in the motif of killing, which is linked with the sustained motif of men as animals. Some political document, Bäumer speculates in Chapter VIII, has ensured that killing is their main aim, where normally it would be the greatest crime. Yet when the soldiers want to kill, they cannot. Lice and rats will not be killed. When attempts are made to kill a wounded messengerdog, the result is loss of human life. When the farmer Detering wishes to put the wounded horses out of their misery, he is prevented from doing so, or the shot will bring fire upon the men. Finally, Katczinsky is unable to put a dying recruit out of his misery. That failure makes clear the contrast between the approved killing of men where there is neither the desire nor the need, and what would be a mercy. This is developed in Der Weg zurück, when an ex-soldier kills a man he finds with his girl, pleading that he has actually been commanded to kill men he does not hate, but is to be tried when he kills a man he does hate. The soldiers become aware that Zufall, chance, dominates their existence. They have no plannable future, and death might depend upon their standing a few centimetres to the right or to the left at any point. This awareness makes them indifferent, and apparently callous, although they are not. They simply come to accept that only the practicalities of the moment have any relevance. This is illustrated with another recurrent motif, the boots of the dying Kemmerich. Müller covets them. He would not do so, were they any use to Kemmerich, but they are not, and good boots are rare. Other considerations are artificial, and are therefore of no value. The second major theme is that of betrayal. In spite of the preface, the work is an accusation, one aimed at the teachers and elder statesmen who betrayed a generation of young men with their misplaced patriotism and militarism, young men for whom they were supposed to be the mentors and guides into an adult world. Kantorek, it is true, receives symbolic punishment, but this 18 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
is not enough. The experience of home leave makes this clear to Bäumer, when the other representatives of that world tell him how the troops should act. The motif of the lost generation (which appears in other languages and writers) takes several forms. It is, as the prefatory note implies, of special relevance to those who survived the war. What these had taken from them was not their life, but their youth. The confusion in the soldiers of age and youth finds frequent expression in the novel. The central characters are in fact young, but they are made into old men by the experiences of war:
Wir sind alle nicht mehr als zwanzig Jahre. Aber jung? Jugend? Das ist lange her. Wir sind alte Leute. (p. 53)
To them, the recruits of 18 are children. Their own youth is a long way off, the school and its learning—their last experiences— useless and even ridiculous. A new knowledge has taken its place:
das können wir: Kartenspielen, fluchen und Krieg führen. Nicht viel für zwanzig Jahre—zuviel für zwanzig Jahre. (p- 103)
In contrast with older men like Katczinsky (whose tragedy is different), these young soldiers entered the war before they could form any definite plans of a career, before they could form relationships. Their sexual experience is limited by the war: a brief time with some French girls (in exchange for food), and hints of the official brothels. All they had was a few hobbies: Bäumer’s literary attempts, and his butterfly collection (which is made into a motif, and was featured at the end of Milestone’s film) are also remote. Particular light is thrown on the loss of their youth in the scenes with Bäumer’s mother, and we are often aware that beneath the uniforms, these men are still children. ‘Wir sind verlassen wie Kinder und erfahren wie alte Leute’, says Bäumer himself, under fire, in Chapter VI. He retains an urge to live, even to the last. But, caught between a generation that had already established itself, and a new one that did not know war, he is almost relieved to die. INTRODUCTION 19
The theme of comradeship is, finally, often stressed in comments upon the novel. Bäumer notes it himself in Chapter II, but the context in which he does so is significant. Comradeship, however worthwhile for its own sake, arose not as genuine friendship, but as a community spirit against a common adversary, an ‘us-against-them’ solidarity. This comradeship is in essence artificial, throwing together in any case widely differing types, who have only the war in common. Some friendships of a genuine nature could, of course, arise from this: that of Bäumer and Katczinsky is perhaps a case in point. But the comradeship of war is easily and necessarily breakable. The situation implies the constant possibility of parting. Bäumer finds it hard to part from Kropp at the end of Chapter X. ‘Aber man lernt das beim Kommiß mit der Zeit.’ It is important to realize the fragile basis of this comradeship, the one positive theme in the novel, and it must not be afforded too much weight. Once again, Remarque showed in Der Weg zurück just how much it depended upon a set of circumstances; when these change, it is quick to break down.
Characters The characters in the novel fall into distinct groups, the most important being, of course, Bäumer and his comrades. The four sixth-former volunteers are characterized, in fact, primarily by their ideas, and appearances barely play a part, save that Leer has a full beard, and that we are sometimes given glimpses of them without their uniforms, which makes them look much smaller and slighter: ‘Wir sind dann keine Soldaten mehr, sondern beinahe Knaben (p. 61). Bäumer himself, whom we come to know more fully through his narration of the work, is literary and musical; Müller learns theorems under fire; Kropp is cleverer than the rest. The characterizations are brief, and specific attributes are in any case pointless. Leer’s skills as a mathematician do not help him, we are told, when he bleeds to death in moments. So, too, their comrades are tagged rather than described. Westhus is drawn physically, because he functions as the working instrument for Katczinsky, whose forte is cunning. More fully drawn than the others, Katczinsky is typified by his survival skills, which are 20 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
demonstrated throughout, making his death that much more ironic. The picture of Detering depends upon his preoccupation with farming, a motif which is developed towards his eventual breakdown and desertion. Tjaden is simply ‘der größte Fresser’, but he is more of a survivor than Katczinsky, who once finds him hammering an unexploded shell. Katczinsky’s cunning does not save him at the last. But fate preserves Tjaden. A second group is made up of more or less stock types. Himmelstoß is short (and therefore, according to Bäumer, unpleasant), has a gingery moustache, and wears striped underpants, these sketched-in details being enough for the portrait of a taskmaster drill-corporal. He, however, is one of the few to develop in the novel. He comes eventually to join the somewhat artificial comradeship that his methods have forced upon the others, when he, with them, is faced with a greater oppressor, life at the front. Kantorek, however, is more completely a stock figure, who is actually caricatured in the soldiers’ own discussions, and made actually comic by them at the end. His attributes, again small details that allow us to supply the rest, are the pince-nez and the frock-coat of the standard schoolmaster picture. A third stock type (the technique is applied primarily to the characters of which the author is critical) is the surgeon, for whom Remarque conjures up with a few touchstone points the unappealing image of a medical-student-turned-doctor, complete with the duelling scars of his university fraternity, gold-rimmed spectacles, and blond hair. The echoes of the duel are still there for us in Remarque’s use of the word ‘säbeln’, as the doctor operates. Slighter examples of stock types are the ginger cook-sergeant at the beginning, referred to only as ‘die Tomate’, and (a rare positive type) the brave and respected commander Bertinck, who has risen from the ranks. The ultimate reduction comes in simple designations for characters: ‘ein wehender Vollbart’. Away from the army, the portraits of Bäumer’s circle at home tend to the typical. His mother is stoical about her illness and her son, where Kemmerich’s mother shows a different attitude. Bäumer’s father is indicated through his incessant labours to make ends meet. The brevity of these and of the soldiers’ characterizations make reader-empathy easier; the caricature INTRODUCTION 21
nature of the others make for a simple identification and response. What matters is the portrayal of the war itself.
Perspectives and style The story is presented by a first-person narrator largely in the present tense. This lends immediacy and a diary-like sense of reality to the work. But it must not be overlooked that the narrator is Paul Bäumer, the narrative voice neither that of Remarque himself nor of an objective author. Bäumer is a consistent created character, who is also at the centre of the events. He is nineteen, nearly twenty at the opening of the work, he has come straight from school, and the army and his experiences at the front have already shaped him. They continue to do so. Frequently he narrates events and thoughts as pertaining to himself: ‘für mich…’ ‘ich liege…’ Sometimes he is totally objective: ‘Die Front ist…’ Often, however, he employs a ‘wir’ voice, which may imply the entire army, or all ordinary soldiers, but which more often refers either to his own small group, or to his whole generation. His presentation varies, and the style does so too. The straightforward present-tense narratives, especially those of action, can be horrifying in their detail. These alternate with more philosophical opinions or impressions. Bäumer reports, too, his conversations with the other soldiers. He would not, perhaps, necessarily voice all his own ideas in that company, but he is aware, for example, of Tjaden’s use of a citation from Goethe’s Götz (even if Tjaden is not), and he is amused by it. Some views are entirely his: the strength he draws from the earth and from nature is a case in point. So too are some of the incidents: his relationship to his mother, for example, or the experience of the Russian violinist. Here, a more poetic voice—we are told of his literary aspirations early on—is allowed to take over. Sometimes, of course, his thoughts break down, as in the incident with the French girls. Much of the narrative, however, reflects his military experiences in style and slang. This is a major contributor towards the immediate appeal of the work, and may be exemplified by a brief extract in which Bäumer is ‘requisitioning’ a goose: 22 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
Da geht auch schon der Lärm los; einer der Hälse hat Luft geschnappt und schnarrt wie eine Weckuhr. Ehe ich mich versehe, tappt es draußen heran, ich bekomme einen Stoß, liege am Boden und höre wütendes Knurren. Ein Hund. Ich blicke zur Seite; da schnappt er schon nach meinem Halse…. (p. 105)
Bäumer changes. Beside the stylistic variation in active and reflective passages earlier in the work, we may note how, towards the end of the novel (and of the war), the style becomes more succinct, more elliptic. A striking illustration is the anaphoric sequence in the penultimate chapter describing the final summer: ‘Sommer 1918.’ Later in the novel, too, Bäumer makes judgements about the war that he has not ventured earlier—about the nature of the defeat, or about the profiteering. His awareness has grown. Behind Bäumer stands, nevertheless, an author, shaping the experiences through which the reader is to be taken. The alternation of periods of immediate contact with the war and of times of rest has been commented upon in structural terms, and the variations in Bäumer’s narrative style cut across this. There are, however, motifs introduced which, while not obtrusive, nevertheless draw the story together. A much-noted and memorable example is provided by Kemmerich’s boots, passed on his death to Müller, and then, by now linked to death, to Bäumer himself. Tjaden, the survivor, will get them next, but by then the war will be over.
Remarque’s picture of the war Im Westen nichts Neues can provide only a glimpse of the First World War. An impression of breadth is conveyed by the episodic variation in the text, but it remains of some interest to note what is not present in Remarque’s picture of the war. There is no historical or geographical definition. We may deduce from the fact that Bäumer’s Company is stationed near Langemarck, and from references to the passing of time, that the fighting at the beginning of the novel is part of the 1917 campaigns INTRODUCTION 23
in Flanders. External knowledge of the author, too, leads us to suspect that Bäumer’s home is in Osnabrück, and indeed the topography bears this out, but the town is not named. The aim, of course, is to ensure that the narrative becomes generally applicable anywhere from Flanders to the Vosges. Nor is there any indication of strategy. We see (as the soldiers did, of course) only one small sector of the front. On a wider scale, there is little speculation on the outcome of or reasons for the war. Bäumer indicates that the army is not defeated in battle, but discussions of the reasons for the war descend quickly into cliché: war is war. Survival from shells and the next meal are the primary inter—ests of the men. There are few officers. Amongst the NCOs the foremost in terms of real participation is Himmelstoß, a corporal. Such others as there are, are nearly always unpleasant. The only officers are Bertinck, a second lieutenant who has risen from the ranks, an unpleasant major at home, and, briefly, the Kaiser himself. We are offered a worm’s-eye-view, very much in contrast with many of the contemporary English writings (especially the play Journey’s End, by R.C.Sherriff, which can be compared with our novel from several points of view). There is no political discussion in Im Westen nichts Neues to speak of, and no hint of real desertion (Detering’s arises from breakdown), mutiny (the closest is the insulting of Himmelstoß) or cowardice—although the reality of gunshyness is portrayed. Nor is there any overt nationalism, although the men show their patriotism (which is not the same thing) by simply being at the front. There is no heroism and there are no medals (although the Kaiser presents a few Iron Crosses). The closest to an heroic deed presented as such is perhaps the attack by Bertinck on a flame-thrower at the end of the book. Bravery is shown, but this is again not the same as overt heroism. Remarque has been accused by some critics of introducing notes of adventure into the narrative, making the war look like a kind of school-story romp: the passage most often cited is the feasting in Chapter X. It is worth noting the fact that Bäumer and Kropp are wounded immediately after this, and the ultimate death of Bäumer takes away any sense of ‘the good times’. There is very little reference to matters sexual. Even the expletives employed are scatological rather than anything else. The 24 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
visit to the French girls is a brief, and for Bäumer primarily disturbing, interlude. Nor is there the slightest hint of a religious response. According to the respective army chaplains, God was on both sides. The closest to a religious note is Bäumer’s almost pantheistic feelings about the earth as a refuge. Most important of all, there is no enemy. There are passing references to Tommies, or the French, but the enemy against which they fight is death itself, a death brought to them by objects, by shells, bullets, gas and tanks. We learn about the different types of shell, but we see almost no human beings, apart from some Russian prisoners of war and the unfortunate, but vitally important Duval. Only Duval stops the war from being one exclusively of machines and reminds Bäumer and us that there are men on both sides. There is, finally, no overt moral, no message. The pessimism of the work is, of course, clear, ‘and Bäumer is in a sense lucky to die. But the whole is designed as a report. Bäumer’s subjective impressions (and Bäumer himself) are presented objectively to the reader, who may draw conclusions about the war and who may say, as Bäumer does to Duval, ‘es darf nie wieder geschehen’ (p. 196), or perhaps more importantly, as Bäumer says of the sniper: ‘ich würde es nicht machen’ (p. 198). The work was written for the survivors, and it doubtless helped them come to terms with their experience, with what Remarque saw as having been the most colossal waste of human life. For the later reader it remains an indictment of the modern mechanized war, even if we shall not fight again in the trenches. Its message, though not overtly stated, is perfectly clear, that war is evil, and it gains force from being made by the men at the bottom, who were the most involved, the Muschkoten, the ‘Poor Bloody Infantry’, aware that they are the majority: ‘das sind doch die meisten hier’ (p. 71).
The novel and its sequel Der Weg zurück (1931) is less well-known than Im Westen nichts Neues, though it continues to enjoy some success. It is worth reading, however, as a commentary upon and a sequel to Im Westen nichts INTRODUCTION 25
Neues. It points, indeed, to a new war, and to the new horrors that Remarque was to document in Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben, and Der Funke Leben. The central character and narrator is Ernst Birkholz, but he is so like Paul Bäumer as to be virtually indistinguishable. There are incidental and actual connections with the earlier work. Tjaden continues to survive, and adjusts to peace- time. Comradeship breaks down. Several times the narrator draws attention to the artificiality of comradeship in war-time. The trial of an ex-soldier who kills a man he does hate has already been noted, but we meet, too, an erstwhile sniper, much like Oellrich, who is as proud of his wartime list of kills as of his new shooting club medals. He rejects even the idea of possible remorse, resorting to another cliché: I was following orders. Most cannot adjust, however, and there are even suicides. Most important of all, however, is an incident related in an epilogue to the work, a separate Ausgang. Some of the ‘old soldiers’, now in their early twenties, are relaxing in a field when they are disturbed by a group of Wandervögel, a youth group, which first reminds them of their own pre-war days. But these are nationalists, 16-year-olds playing a war-game under the direction of an older man. The ex-soldiers remonstrate, and are called cowards, pacifists and Bolsheviks by the boys. They get rid of them, but the boys march away chanting Front Heil! ‘Hurrah for the Front!’
‘Front Heil….’ Willy greift sich in die Haare. ‘Wenn man das einem Muskoten im Felde gesagt hätte!’ ‘Ja,’ sagt Kosole ärgerlich, ‘so geht es wieder los.’14 BIBLIOGRAPHY
This annotated bibliography is fuller than usual in a text-edition. Its aim is to encourage the placing of Remarque’s novel in a literary and historical context. The historical works could have been added to indefinitely, the list focusing upon the digestible and more easily accessible, and omitting such massive studies as the Times History, the Reichsarchiv Weltkrieg and Churchill’s World Crisis. The literary list is equally selective, with no poems and only one play.
WORKS BY REMARQUE
Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Propyläen, 1929; Cologne: Kiepenheuer u.Witsch, 1971; Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1980). Der Weg zurück (Berlin: Propyläen, 1931; Cologne: Kiepenheuer u. Witsch, 1971; Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1980). The extremely important sequel. Der Funke Leben (Cologne: Kiepenheuer u. Witsch, 1952; Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1980). Survival in a concentration camp in the Second World War. Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (Cologne: Kiepenheuer u. Witsch, 1954; Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein Taschenbücher, 1980). An interesting Second World War parallel novel. ‘The End of War? A Correspondence between Remarque and General Sir Ian Hamilton’, Life and Letters 3 (1929), 399–411.
GENERAL STUDIES OF REMARQUE
Barker, Christine R. and Last, R.W., Erich Maria Remarque (London: Wolff, 1979). A readable and full study in English. Bäumer, Franz, E.M.Remarque (Berlin: Colloquium, 1976). A fairly short study in German. Last, R.W., ‘The “Castration” of Erich Maria Remarque’, Quinquereme 2 (1979), 10–22. On the novel’s reception. Toper, Pavel and Antkowiak, Alfred, Ludwig Renn. Erich Maria Remarque (Berlin: Volk u. Wissen, 1965; reprint 1983 of Antkowiak’s section BIBLIOGRAPHY 29
only, with the title Erich Maria Remarque. Sein Leben und Werk). The second part, by Antkowiak, stresses the unpolitical (and petit- bourgeois) aspects of the novel. A Marxist view.
STUDIES OF IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
Bance, A.F., ‘Im Westen nichts Neues. A bestseller in context’, Modern Language Review 72 (1977), 359–73. The work as a product of Weimar Germany and its problems. Klein, Holger M., ‘Dazwischen Niemandsland: Im Westen nichts Neues und Her Privates We’, in: Großbritannien und Deutschland. Festschrift für John W. Bourke, ed. Ortwin Kuhn (Munich: Goldmann, 1974), pp. 487–512. Kuxdorf, Manfred, ‘Mynona versus Remarque… Not so quiet on the literary front’, in: The First World War in German Narrative Prose. Essays in Honor of George Wallis Field, ed. Charles N. Genno and Heinz Wetzel (Toronto: University Press, 1980), pp. 71–92. Concentrates on the reception. Liedloff, Helmut, ‘Two war novels. A critical comparison’, Revue de la littérature comparée 42 (1968), 390–406. Remarque and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Read, Herbert, ‘The failure of the war books’, in his: A Coat of Many Colours (London: Routledge, 1945), pp. 72–6. Some brief but thought- provoking comments on the effect. Rowley, Brian A., ‘Journalism into fiction: Im Westen nichts Neues’, in: The First World War in Fiction, ed. Holger Klein (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 101–11. The volume contains other useful essays. Rüter, Hubert, Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980). A history and analysis of the novel.
GENERAL STUDIES OF THE LITERATURE OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes’ Twilight (London: Macmillan, 2. edn 1980). Mainly on English works. Bostock, J. Knight, Some Well-Known German War-Novels 1914–1918 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1931). Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London: OUP, 1975). Wide-ranging and important. Gollbach, Michael, Die Wiederkehr des Weltkrieges in der Literatur (Kronberg/T.: Scriptor, 1978). Detailed study of several major writers, including Remarque. 30 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
Gruber, Helmut, ‘“Neue Sachlichkeit” and the World War,’ German Life and Letters NS 20 (1966/7), 138–49. Literary style in the Weimar period, including Remarque’s work. Panichas, George A. (ed.), Promise of Greatness. The War of 1914–1918 (London: Cassell, 1968). Historical and literary essays on a wide range of topics. Pfeiler, William K., War and the German Mind. The Testimony of Men of Fiction who Fought at the Front (New York: Columbia UP, 1941; reprint AMS, 1966). Idiosyncratic, but interesting if obtainable. Large primary bibliography. Rutherford, Andrew, The Literature of War (London: Macmillan, 1978). Has a chapter on the common man in war novels. Schwarz, Wilhelm J., War and the Mind of Germany, I. (Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1975). Remarque and Jünger. Travers, Martin, German Novels of the First World War and their Ideological Implications, 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1982).
SOME HISTORICAL STUDIES OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Ashworth, Tony, Trench Warfare 1914–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1980). Barnett, Corelli, The Great War (London: Peerage, 1979). One of many well- illustrated overviews. Carey, G.V. and Scott, H.S., An Outline History of the Great War (Cambridge: CUP, 1928). A readable history roughly contemporary with Remarque’s novel. Ellis, John, Eye-Deep in Hell (London: Croom Helm, 1976). One of the best pictorial introductions, making day-to-day life in the trenches very clear (all armies). Hart, B.H.Liddell, A History of the World War 1914–1918 (London: Cassell, 1970; also Pan, 1972). Two versions of a good history which first appeared in 1930. Houlihan, Michael, World War I. Trench Warfare (London: Ward Lock, 1974). Messenger, C., Trench Fighting 1914–1918 (London: Pan, 1973). Sellman, R.R., The First World War (London: Methuen, 1961, reprint 1973). A clear and brief school-text. Taylor, A.J.P., The First World War. An Illustrated History (London: Hamish Hamilton, and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). Terraine, John, The Great War 1914–1918 (London: Hutchinson, 1965). Wolff, Leon, In Flanders Fields. The 1917 Campaign (London: Longmans, Green, 1959 and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY 31
MEMOIRS AND LITERARY WORKS
Barbusse, Henri, Le Feu (Paris: Flammarion, 1916). Trans. by W.F. Wray, Under Fire (London: Dent, 1926, reprint 1965). Blunden, Edmund, Undertones of War [1928] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Dorgelès, Roland, Les croix de bois (Paris: Albin Michel, 1919). Trans. anon., Wooden Crosses (London: Heinemann, 1920). Glaeser, Ernst, Jahrgang 1902 (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1928). Trans. by W. and E. Muir, Class of 1902 (London: Secker, 1929). Graves, Robert, Goodbye to All That [1929] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961 and reprints). Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms [1929] (London: Granada, 1977). Johannssen, Ernst, Vier von der Infanterie (Bergedorf: Fackelreiter, 1929). Trans. by A.W. Wheen, Four Infantrymen (London: Methuen, 1930). The film Westfront 1918 (Nerofilm, 1930) bears comparison with Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (see below). Jünger, Ernst, In Stahlgewittern [1920] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981). Trans. by B. Creighton, The Storm of Steel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929). A more patriotic view. Manning, Frederic, The Middle Parts of Fortune [=full text of Her Privates We, 1929], ed. Michael Howard (London: Peter Davies, 1977). Mottram, R.H., The Spanish Farm Trilogy [1924–6] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Renn, Ludwig, Krieg [1928], ed. H. Kipphardt and D. Pinkeneil (Königsstein/ T., Athenäum, 1979). Trans. by W. and E. Muir, War (London: Secker, 1929). Richard, Frank, Old Soldiers Never Die (London: Faber, 1933, reprint 1970). One of the relatively few works in English recording the experiences of a private rather than of an officer. Sherriff, R.C., Journey’s End [1928] in: Modern Plays, introduced by John Hadfield (London: Dent, 1937 and later Everyman reprints), pp. 205– 90. A play (again focusing on officers), performed in Germany in 1929 as Die andere Seite. Sulzbach, Herbert, Zwei lebende Mauern (Berlin: Bernhard u. Graefe, 1935). Trans. by Richard Thonger, With the German Guns (London: Warne, 1981). Vansittart, Peter (ed.), Voices from the Great War (London: Cape, 1981; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). A very wide-ranging anthology of impressions and quotations. 32 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
Witkop, Philipp (ed.), Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten (Munich: Müller, 5. edn, 1928). The work sold very well in Germany, and was translated as German Students’ War Diaries (London: Methuen, 1929). Zweig, Arnold, Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa [1928] (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1972). Trans. by Eric Sutton, The Case of Sergeant Grischa (London: Secker, 1928). Another much-read work, set on the Eastern Front, although Zweig wrote other novels set on the Western Front.
TRANSLATIONS OF NOVELS BY REMARQUE
All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. by A.W. Wheen (London: Putnam, 1929; also in Heinemann’s New Windmill Series, 1970 and as a Granada paperback, 1977). Wheen’s translation is uneven. The Road Back, trans. by A.W.Wheen (London: Putnam, 1936; Granada paperback, 1979). Also not without errors. The Spark of Life, trans. by James Stern (London: Hutchinson, 1952). A Time to Love and a Time to Die, trans. by Denver Lindley (London: Hutchinson, 1954). Note the title variant.
FILMS OF IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
All Quiet on the Western Front. Universal Pictures Corporation 1929/30, directed by Lewis Milestone. The work has long been acclaimed as a classic of the early sound cinema. All Quiet on the Western Front. Norman Rosemont Productions, 1979, directed by Delbert Mann. A remake originally for television which received poor reviews. IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES33
Plate I The map of the Western Front is intended to convey a general impression only of the position towards the end of the war. The line changed at different times and places, sometimes only a little, sometimes a lot (to the Somme, to Verdun, to Champagne and back) throughout. 34 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES
Plate II Three contemporary views. The first is a German card showing Langemarck, near Ypres, with a soldier posing before a church destroyed ‘by enemy action’. Little of Langemarck survived the war; but it is one of the few geographical fixes provided by the novel. The second card shows the effects on another Belgian town, this time Westende. The third card is one of a very large set of virtually identical views: the cemetery shown is not far from Langemarck.
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