Reflections on Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front

I recently revisited Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. The book is not a sprawling epic in the manner of War and Peace but a compact (175 pages in my paperback edition) chronicle of the experiences of its narrator, a young enlistee in the German army, by the start of the story already in the field a good while, through the remainder of the conflict.

As might be expected given the book's reputation, to say nothing of the stuff of the more serious war literature generally, it depicts the gruesome destruction of bodies and minds, the narrowing of horizons amid it all, the sharpening of the little pleasures they steal (often literally) in the quieter moments--a fine meal, a few hours in the company of a woman. The alienation of the foot soldier trying to hold onto life and limb and sanity from talk of the "big picture," and from the civilians they are (often justly) sure cannot understand what they have been through. The baggage and the scars they bear forever after. The martinet sergeants and medical corp quacks and corrupt officers and, just off-stage, businessmen thriving financially far behind the lines. Still, familiar as it all is, Remarque's crisp treatment expresses it all with great clarity and force.

Naturally the Nazis hated it, and not solely because it tells the truth about war rather than glorifying it, but because it gave the lie to their "stab in the back" propaganda. (As the novel proceeds one sees the German army ground down, and in the concluding chapters, finally overwhelmed by superior Allied resources and manpower.)

The Nazis' hatred of Remarque's book, in fact, started a long-running conflict between the German government and Universal over it in which Hollywood, frankly, disgraced itself, subordinating even what artistic freedom the Hays Code left to foreign profits. (Ben Urwand tells that story in some detail in his very worthwhile The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler.)

Today one might imagine the book to be no more popular than that with their heirs, of whom we now see and hear so much more than we did just a short while before, in Germany and everywhere else. Any reader of recent historiography (for instance, neocon court historian Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War) quickly sees the evidence that the right-wingers seeking to rehabilitate that war, and war more generally, have been getting the upper hand.

That seems to me all the more reason to take a look at this deserved classic if you haven't seen it, and reason for a second look if you already have.