I first read Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" in my late teens right after I started college. It was stunning to me. At the time, I was studying World War I in one of my history classes. A book entitled "Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age" was part of our curriculum that semester and it, too, was stunning to me. I'll reread that book soon...
I wanted to reread "All Quiet on the Western Front" in part because it is one of the best war books ever written...an accolade that the cover of the book notes. To be fair, at least of the war books I've read, this is second best (second only to "Battle Cry" by Leon Uris). But the ranking there is as much subjective as anything...I'm not sure which book is truly better, but "Battle Cry" was slightly more moving to me. Just barely. I separately learned that "All Quiet on the Western Front" has a sequel, which was all the nudge I needed to reread it. I wanted to experience the sequel, but also wanted the original to be fresher in my mind. I'll get to that sequel soon as well.
I read "All Quiet on the Western Front" this time on my Kindle. When I originally read it, I had checked it out from the library I worked at due to the recommendation of a professor to his class. At the time, I had a voracious appetite for learning and was eager to learn more about the world around me and how it came to be what it is. This book was a pivotal rung in that ladder for me.
"All Quiet on the Western Front" is an intense story about life on the front line during World War I. There is a lot of death and despair and fear and suffering. The intangible wounds to the protagonist's soul and psyche are just as devastating as some of the mortal injuries his comrades receive in the war. He comes to resent being on leave not because he doesn't want to go home, but because life is too difficult for him. It had become so. I wanted to share a few quotes from this remarkable book.
First, the longer one: "I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me." This is the lament of a broken and breaking human. He has been used by the war and is not the same person he was before it became a fundamental part of his life. How could he be?
There are glimpses of hope throughout the book, though, as the protagonist vacillates between survival and despair. "And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death." It doesn't sound particularly hopeful, but I would submit that it is. He has a premise that there will be an end to the war and that, after that, disentanglement of life and death will begin....perhaps they cannot be disentangled completely, but it will begin. Things will get better. At times, one has to believe that they must.
This book is moving and powerful throughout. I was having a particularly rough day and ended up reading the second half of it in just one evening. It is as fantastic as I remembered it being. Perhaps even more so. I'll get to its sequel soon...I understand it addresses the post-war life of the protagonist, but I say that without knowing for sure as I haven't read it. If it does, or even if it is just a postwar tale from a different perspective, I am confident it will be similarly stunning.
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