When is a war story not

      an antiwar story?

Book review:

All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970)

He was a German veteran of World War I, wounded in July 1917 and invalided out of combat

Remarque made a modest attempt to claim that this is not an antiwar story.

In plain words: it is too full of truth about the nature of war, its origins, its conduct, its outcome, its reality, its terrifying probability…

Nominally, of course, the protagonist is Paul Bäumer, a student who is goaded by his teacher to enlist in the German Army to serve the Fatherland.

The enormity of the war and the soldiers’ suffering are the main things. There is so much of the Universal Soldier, and so much of the Masters of War, that individual personal experiences seem less significant than the milieu, and the barely shared experiences of all.

All Quiet displays the ugliness of war.

End of story…

For further consideration:

For my taste, the 1930 film version (with Lew Ayres as Paul) is the best. It’s black-and-white, sombre, with grisly realism.

Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote “Universal Soldier” with the line “He’s been a soldier for a thousand years.” Paul Bäumer’s experience may have seemed like a thousand years to him, but his portrayal is a denunciation of Buffy’s poetic fantasy about the Universal Soldier being the ultimate cause of war (“…without him all this killing can’t go on…”)

Bob Dylan wrote “Masters of War” (I like Odetta’s version) and peeled away the layers covering the ugliest truth: the politicians, the statesmen, the chiefs, the generals are the ones who make war—“…you fasten the triggers/for the others to fire…”

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

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