All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (Classics Group Read October/November '14)

[Greg]

I agree Pink!

I get the feeling he used his writing to process all that happened to him in the war, to psychologically survive it.

[Leslie]

J.J. Co wrote: "Hi, I'm new to the group. Hi everyone. I find this book, and other works of the era, inimitably haunting. I read it (different translation) a few years ago, but the story is still clear in my mind ..."

Well said J.J.!

[LauraT]

David wrote: "I don't know how he would have written what he wrote if he had not been in the trenches. The description of how he felt when he went home on liberty tells it all."

There is a really good museum on the first WW in Gorizia. It gives you a great idea also of the trenches...

[David]

The descriptions of life at the front are so real I can smell the fear and taste the mud. But the description of how he feels when he goes home on leave are what are most real to me. Perhaps the worst thing about going to war and coming home unscathed is the sense of no longer belonging and the black night of loneliness that engulfs your soul when you realize that you will never be able to tell the people who love you what you have experienced. You desperately want to open your soul to these people but you cannot because no one will understand....ever. You know that to your loved ones you look the same as you looked when you left, but you know that you are changed forever in ways that they cannot see.

He can no longer relate to the people he knew as a child or reclaim his lost innocence. He takes off his uniform and tries to put on the clothes he wore before but his body no longer fits the clothes and his father wants him to put his uniform back on.

And at the end of two weeks he is overwhelmed with longing as he packs his bags to go back: and yet he feels relief.

Having your feet in two conflicting worlds is unendurable.

[Greg]

David, very well said!

[Leslie]

David, I found those sections about how alienated he felt from the people in his home town very moving as well.

[Evelyn]

David, I can tell by reading your post that you too have had your feet in conflicting worlds.

I think in your example he knows he belongs in the war, but he wants to belong at pre-war home. He is coming to the realization that he can never go back to the home he knew. In a much less traumatizing way, I think we have likely all experienced a semblance of that emotion, when we left home to go to college or university or just to embark on our adult lives, or if we have ever moved towns or countries, or even jobs. When we go back to visit, there is a feeling that everything has changed and we can't quite get back to the place we once knew.

[David]

Hey! My youngest granddaughter (15 months) is named Evelyn. What a great name!

But I have to disagree with you in that the alienation we see in the central character of "All Quiet ..." Is nothing like the things you are trying to compare it with. The things in your example (going to college, getting married and moving out) are growth experiences. When you read "All Quiet..." closely, you should realize that he is not talking about growth so much as death. He describes himself and his fellow soldiers as "dead" in several passages. Dead to the people and the lives they left behind. Dead to any future they might have beyond the war and the trenches. One of the soldiers keeps asking his comrades what their plans are for when the war ends. But beyond taking a bath, getting drunk and lying with the first girl they find, none of them can think about the end of the war. When he sits in the beer garden back home, the people he has known all his life try to buy him beer but he cannot answer their questions or understand the advice they offer. He only wants silence: to be left alone in silence. Their words and gestures no longer have meaning to him. And his family? He loves them still, but they cannot discuss what he has been through and he knows that they will never be able to discuss it.

[Evelyn]

Ah good point about being dead to the future. I was just thinking about the "you can never go back" aspect.

[David]

Just finished. I wonder if Tjaden got the boots at last?

[Ezequiel]

"He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front."

I had to re read that single line at least 20 times, I could not believe what I was reading.
When I diggested it a hurricane of feelings hit me. Rage, anger, melancholy, sadness, indignation. Everything bundled together; Later I realised that that closure was kind of a master piece, and I felt euphory and I began laughing like a mad man having an epiphany.

To think that countless boys suffered the same and some worse, during that pointless war its completely heart breaking.

[Greg]

It is heartbreaking Ezequiel, and I felt many of those same emotions reading it. An amazingly powerful book!

[Ezequiel]

Indeed, Greg, Lamarque's hability to recreate the crudeness and cruelties of the war is admirable. I have yet to read a book that impacts me so much as this one while translating the reality of war.

I felt that the fear and tension, so abundant in the trenches were scaping through the pages of the book.

[Leslie]

@Ezequiel -- The book has such a powerful ending that rereading the sentence you quoted caused my eyes to tear up.