The Book Tower

I feel agitated; but I don’t want to be, because it isn’t right. I want to get that quiet rapture back, feel again, just as before, that fierce and unnamed passion I used to feel when I looked at my books. Please let the wind of desire that rose from the multi-coloured spines of those books catch me up again, let it melt the heavy, lifeless lead weight that is there somewhere inside me, and awaken in me once again the impatience of the future, the soaring delight in the world of the intellect – let it carry me back into the ready-for-anything lost world of my youth.
I sit and wait.

For a reader weaned on Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong and Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, I’ve put off All Quiet on the Western Front until now. Erich Remarque’s 1929 anti-war novel has escaped me for only the foolish belief that I didn’t need to read another First World War novel. I was wrong.

All Quiet on the Western Front is particularly potent for being a German anti-war novel, suggesting why many are drawn towards joining the army for the rewards of superiority it can give, personified in the story by Remarque’s bullying drill sergeant. The novel hints that dominant behaviour is an ugly and contagious part of human nature, one of the reasons why the Nazis were probably intent on burning the book; actions which then led to the author’s subsequent exile. As a young German soldier drawn to enlist with his fellow classmates mainly at the insistence of their schoolteacher, the fictional character Paul Bäumer narrates this absorbing, harrowing and thought provoking book. His nationality and the side he fights for matters not; as Bäumer quickly realises, there is no clearly defined enemy in the insanity of trench warfare. But that a German writer has produced such a powerful work makes it all the more poignant.

Remarque served in the First World War, although this novel is only partly autobiographical. He spent some time in a military hospital, and the scenes where Bäumer is treated are particularly convincing. The bloodshed of the battlefield is as upsetting as you might expect, and I found the realism of these scenes particularly disturbing for a novel written in 1929. Not because this is little more than a decade after the events took place, but because the writing is fresh, modern and full of grim insight. Bäumer and his friends discuss the reasons for the conflict they are trapped in but come to no conclusions. They don’t really understand the reasons why they were fighting that war. I certainly don’t really grasp why the First World War was fought either. Do you?

All Quiet on the Western Front goes much further than just graphically depicting the horrors of war. The quotation I’ve opened with is from Bäumer’s spell of leave, where he visits his family home. Sitting in his room, he realises how the war has removed him from the true, free living individual he once was. He has no interest in picking up the books that once absorbed him. It’s a very moving and sad scene. There’s also several passages where Remarque dwells on the unkindness between supposedly fellow comrades. Returning to the character of the bullying drill sergeant, he follows Bäumer and his friends as they lie in wait for and subsequently beat up the man who has made thier lives a misery. They feel refreshed and vindicated; Remarque leaves it up to the reader to decide if their actions are justifiable. Similarly, another friend of Bäumer’s is placed in charge of a Home Guard platoon to discover the very teacher who urged his pupils to go to war amongst his ranks. More ritual humiliation follows, and again Bäumer and his peers see it as fitting treatment.

Although this is a novel that fiercely opposes war, it is knowing enough to question the contradictions of human nature and ends on a sour note when Bäumer concedes that the generation following his will quickly forget the 1914-1918 war, or at least find its imprortance muted. There is a particularly telling episode where, seperated from his allies and taking refuge in a shell hole in no-man’s-land, he stabs to death a French soldier to save himself. He’s mortified by his actions, attempts to save the dying soldier, eventually mulling over the contents of the corpse’s wallet. This doesn’t last long; self-preservation takes over and Bäumer realises he must forget the identity of the dead soldier and return himself safely to his trench. Life goes on. The impatience of the future.