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Analysis of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 8, 2022

All Quiet on the Western Front depicts the disillusionment of Paul Baumer, a young foot soldier fighting in World War I. Written by Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), this depiction of the horrors of war is one of the most renowned German works of the 20th century. Drawing on his own experience as a young man conscripted into military service for Germany, Remarque not only uses the character of Paul as his own mouthpiece but also makes his protagonist symbolic of the situation of all the soldiers who fought on either side of the western front. Stretching 440 miles from the Swiss border to the North Sea, the line of trenches and barbed wire fences moved little between 1914 and 1918, despite incessant attempts on both sides to break through. This infamous front became a symbol of the most futile and meaningless aspects of World War I.

Of particular importance in All Quiet on the Western Front is the novel’s style. The down-to-earth and unassuming narrative voice of Paul Baumer avoids anything in the way of high or polished rhetoric. The style is clean and reportorial, working deliberately against an idiom of heroic adventure or romantic patriotism. Although the young Paul is shown to possess a lyrical and sensitive side, nothing in his narrative is inflated or elevated; indeed, even his death is deliberately made to seem anticlimactic.

Erich Maria Remarque / New Statesman

The setting of this novel is also of utmost importance. The Western Front of the title is the name for the most important sequence of battlefields in the war. It was here that such modern weapons as poison gas, powerful explosives, and machine guns were first deployed, making the scale of injury and death catastrophic. In addition, individual soldiers were considered disposable in a military strategy of attrition; battles continued for months while corpses and casualties mounted. To Paul, who is thrown into this world with little preparation, the battles on the front are mad, meaningless, and frightening; when ordinary days with his comrades are interrupted by chaotic periods of battle, it is as if he has been plunged into a waking nightmare.

While most of the vivid narrative episodes take place on the front lines, a section of the book depicts Paul’s return to his home, which serves as a contrast to his horrific experience on the front lines. Paul’s books, his butterfly collection, and all personal mementoes of his previous life now seem part of a world he has left behind forever. While suffering deprivation, the people back home have no idea of the dimension and depth of the suffering on the battlefields of the western front. In fact, Paul feels that he must lie to his family and the others in the town because they would not be able to handle or understand the truth. This trip home consolidates Paul’s sense that he is part of a generational shift involving a dramatic break with the past.

A prominent demonstration of this alienation occurs when Corporal Himmelstoss, who had sadistically hazed the boys when they were undergoing basic training, is posted to the front. Instead of viewing him as a member of their unit, the comrades attack him at an opportune moment, beating him severely. The reader comes to understand that for the young soldiers, the war is against not only the enemy, but also against the elders of the former generation who are responsible for its carnage and for stealing the youth of the men who had to fi ght in it. These father figures, once assumed to be guides to the adult world, are now perceived as having no insight or wisdom—indeed as having betrayed the younger generation. Paul and his skeptical, mocking comrades see the authorities to whom they had previously deferred as impervious to the realities of loss and suffering they have caused. In addition, contrary to the official patriotic optimism of the higher-ranked soldiers, the younger comrades suspect that, in reality, their country will not emerge victorious at the end of the day.

With the exception of the resourceful Stanislaus Katczinsky, a fortyish man known as Kat, Paul and the other soldiers are all very young men who have gone straight from the schoolroom to the battlefield. As a result, a generation of young men comes of age in a crisis environment. For Paul and his generation, initiation into adulthood is unusually brutal and traumatic— even those who survive will be psychologically scarred for life. One incident that fills Paul with rage and remorse, for instance, is the way in which his former classmate Kemmerich receives a wound which, because it is poorly cared for by medical officials, turns fatal. By the time Kemmerich dies, however, both Paul and his fellow soldier Muller are more concerned about the fate of Kemmerich’s boots. This is a result of the failure on the part of the authorities to supply the troops with necessary clothing and equipment; it is also a sign of a general dehumanizing set of values in which the dying man’s boots become more important than the dying man himself.

Another traumatic episode concerns Paul’s killing of a French soldier, Gerard Duval. Horrified and conscience- stricken, Paul looks through the soldier’s personal belongings and realizes that this Duval, although not German, was not his enemy but a fellow victim of a war machine that destroyed their generation and its aspirations. Episodes such as this remind the reader that this is a universal story depicting not simply the German point of view but the experience of all of the young men on the battlefields of Europe at the time. Not long after this event, Paul falls in battle. The last survivor of the group of comrades we have been following throughout the novel, Paul is shot by random enemy fire on a quiet, ordinary day not long before the war officially ends. The cold impersonality and absurdity of Paul’s death is described in a very short paragraph which abruptly and shockingly concludes the novel, reinforcing the novel’s basic purpose: to foreground the individual victim of a conflict fought with advanced, lethal weapons for inexplicable reasons. At the same time, Paul’s death represents the experience of a generation of young men sacrificed to a senseless, devastating war that emphasized how an entire civilization teetered on the verge of self-destruction.

A literary sensation when first published, All Quiet on the Western Front has remained among the most read and most memorable of all antiwar novels. Banned in the 1930s by the Nazis, who subjected all Remarque’s work to public burnings, the novel has survived as one of the most indispensable literary documents of the 20th century.

Still from the motion picture All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), directed by Lewis Milestone and featuring Lew Ayres (left).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barker, Christine R., and R. W. Last. Erich Maria Remarque. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979. Firda, Richard Arthur. All Quiet on the Western Front: Literary Analysis and Cultural Context. New York: Twayne Publishing, 1993. Tims, Hilton. Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003. Wagener, Hans. Understanding Erich Maria Remarque. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.

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All Quiet on the Western Front

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According to the novel, poor people accounted for the bulk of the combat soldiers. Meanwhile, the ones who were advocating for the war to be fought were of higher socio-economic classes and by contrast saw very little front-line action. What larger significance does this hypocrisy have?

In what ways does this novel intersect with the writer Gertrude Stein’s “The Lost Generation”?

In your estimation, is this novel a work of literary modernism? If no, then what is your refutation? If yes, then in what ways does the novel fit the classification of modernism?

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All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Remarque

All quiet on the western front study guide.

Although All Quiet on the Western Front goes a long way in educating readers about the brutality--and, occasionally, banality--of daily war life, it helps to have an understanding of the political climate that precipitated World War I, known at the time as "The Great War."

WWI officially began in 1914 with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but the seeds of conflict were sown in 19th-century conflicts between European imperial powers. After 1914, complicated alliances and treaties enlisted more and more countries into the battle. Two major unions squared off against each other at the start of the war: the Triple Alliance of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Italy, and the Triple Entente of Great Britain, France, Russia.

Supporting the unprecedented global involvement was the ideology of nationalism, or the unswerving dedication to and promotion of one's country. Remarque harshly critiques nationalism through the Paul and the other soldiers, who recognize that their real enemies are not across the trenches, but in high offices in their own country.

WWI ushered in a new form of battle, and this is where Remarque dwells longest. He serves up long, brutally realistic sections describing the new horrific weaponry--tanks, airplanes, machine-guns, poisonous gas--and the new oppressive strategies and settings--notably trench warfare and the chaos of no-man's-land, the small, bitterly contested area between enemy trenches.

The reader may be shocked by the offhand manner in which Paul describes casualties, but he has reason to do so. Death was hardly a rare occurrence; approximately nine million men were killed (not including those from Russia, which is estimated to have lost six million soldiers), and Germany accounted for nearly two million of these casualties. Roughly half of the 70 million men and women serving in the war were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.

All Quiet on the Western Front was published to great critical and commercial acclaim in 1929. It soon earned the wrath of the Nazi party for its anti-war and anti-nationalistic sentiments. Though burned and banned there, it has since sold over 50 million copies in dozens of languages, and is still considered by many the greatest anti-war novel of all time.

All Quiet on the Western Front Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for All Quiet on the Western Front is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Provide reasons that Paul compares war to cancer and tuberculosis, influenza and dysentery.

Paul likens war to cancer, tuberculosis,influenza and dysentery because they all cause death. He sees the death in war as if it's a terrible disease.

We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is a cause of death like cancer and...

Kemmerich's boots hold a great deal of symbolism. Boots are in high demand: a symbol of how poorly the German army is outfitted by the country. Boots get passed around from soldier to soldier after one dies: another symbol of frequent mortality in...

What does Paul’s sympathy and concern for the dying enemy soldier demonstrate?

Do you mean the French soldier he kills in the trench? Paul finds that he has more in common with him than the politicians who have sent him into war. Paul shows great empathy for him. He wants to help the French soldier's family after the war.

Study Guide for All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front study guide contains a biography of Erich Remarque, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About All Quiet on the Western Front
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Essays for All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of All Quiet on the Western Front.

• The Glory of War is the Realization That There is No Glory
• The Lost Generation
• Ordinary Men and Women: What We Can Learn from Non-Traditional Sources
• Dehumanisation, Death, Destruction
• A Universal Loss of Innocence: Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”

Lesson Plan for All Quiet on the Western Front

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to All Quiet on the Western Front
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• All Quiet on the Western Front Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for All Quiet on the Western Front

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — All Quiet on The Western Front — “All Quiet on the Western Front”: The Cost of Sacrifice and the Effects of War

"All Quiet on The Western Front": The Cost of Sacrifice and The Effects of War

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‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: The Spectacle of War

Edward Berger’s German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel aims to rattle you with its relentless brutality.

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By Ben Kenigsberg

In his auteurist film history “The American Cinema” (1968), the critic Andrew Sarris compared similar scenes in two World War I films, King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), the first screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel. Vidor, Sarris felt, had a more satisfying approach to showing two soldiers from opposite sides in a shell hole, one dying. Vidor emphasized the faces of his characters, Sarris wrote, rather than pictorialism and spectacle.

The first sequence of Edward Berger’s new German-language adaptation of Remarque’s novel announces about as loudly as possible that it’s on the side of pictorialism and spectacle. It opens with a landscape: a quiet wood and mountains, seemingly at sunrise. A fox sucks from its mother’s teat. A Terrence Malick-like shot looks upward at impossibly high and peaceful treetops.

Berger then cuts to an aerial view of drifting smoke, which clears to reveal an array of corpses. A barrage of bullets suddenly pierces the near-still composition, and the camera turns to show the full extent of the carnage and the muck. This is war as a violation of nature. And that’s even before Berger trails a scared soldier named Heinrich (Jakob Schmidt), who charges ahead in a pair of unbroken shots — take that, “1917” — only to die offscreen. In a device that owes something to the red coat in “Schindler’s List,” Heinrich’s uniform will be stripped from his body, cleansed, stitched up, shipped to Northern Germany and eventually reused by Remarque’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who notices someone else’s name on the label.

Does this version of a literary classic go hard or what? In truth, opting for pure bombast — a pounding, repeated three-note riff by Volker Bertelmann, who did the score, never fails to quicken the pulse — isn’t necessarily an ineffective way of translating Remarque’s plain-spoken prose. Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.

This “Western Front” places its faith in big set pieces and powerful images. Even the scope has been widened. Berger cuts between Paul’s experiences in the trenches and cease-fire talks between Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), who chaired Germany’s armistice commission, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France (Thibault De Montalembert). The 72-hour deadline that Foch gives Erzberger to sign adds an element of ticking-clock suspense to the overall narrative, albeit by departing from Remarque’s first-person point of view.

The fates of the author’s soldiers are also tweaked. But there are moments here that resonate. When Paul trudges through the trench and collects dog tags from his fallen comrades, he finds a friend’s distinctive eyeglasses in the mud. Rats scurry to avoid the earthquake of approaching tanks. Paul, his face caked in dirt, tries to silence the dying gulps of the French soldier he has stabbed, in this movie’s counterpart to the Vidor-Milestone scene. Tjaden (Edin Hasanovic) jabs at his neck after realizing he’ll have to live as an amputee.

The closest thing the movie has to affecting character work comes in the relationship between Paul and Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch), who enjoy one last mission to steal food from a farm during the final hours of the war — when neither the violence nor Berger plans to relent.

All Quiet on the Western Front Rated R. Extreme war violence. In German and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 27 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

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