Quiet on the Western Front

¶ … Quiet on the Western Front speaks for a generation of lost men. They have lost their humanity and connections with society in the trenches. However, even more than this, Erich Maria Remarque's biopic presentation of life in the trenches speaks across time to all soldiers in every conflict who can not return home because they have lost something in their experiences with death. For them, life can never return to normal. As we shall see, even those who had lives before the war are affected for all time by their war time memories.

In All Quiet on the Western Front, the most poignant passage comes from chapter five were Albert expresses the nihilism of a generation lost who lost their innocence at the front. Here, he says "The war has ruined us for everything (Remarque 42)."

This statement says just about it all about a generation of young men that lost all of their innocence during the war. Even if they came out with their bodies intact, they still lost something whether they minds or their souls. It was impossible for them to come back looking at the world in the same way when they had lost their best friends. The childlike faith that they had possessed before enlistment was blown away quite literally in the nightmare landscape of the trenches, artillery barrages, gas attacks and interminable boredom between battles where they had time to reflect on the horror surrounding them.

Essentially, what Erich Maria Remarque is doing here is exploring the long-term effects of war upon soldiers (in particular young soldiers). Almost all the soldiers to a man were very fatalistic about their lives outside of the war. Paul describes it with as much cynicism as Albert when he remarks that "We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress.

We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war (ibid)." Their past lives no not represent anything to them any more. It alls seems useless to them now. Education, wealth, or any other civilian factor has no significance at the front. They have no reference point to imagine a future outside the military or how to assimilate back into society.

The younger soldiers have different experiences from the older ones. The older men usually had prewar families and jobs. They thought of the war as an interruption in the normal cycle of life and that therefore thought that it eventually would end and they would return back to normal. In their past lives, they had real identities and roles to play within society. The younger men such as Paul and his mates were blank slates with no such real identities. They came into the war and the army when they were at the beginning of their adult lives. Still, they have none among their number have any definite answers to Muller's questions (ibid). Even for them, they do not have any concept of themselves outside of the and the army. In this way, Remarque emphasizes the war's ravaging effect on the real humanity of the soldiers. They live outdoors in conditions like animals, apart from real human contact where death is all to possible. In such a context, it is hard to imagine anything else but the danger around them.