Allied tears, German tears
The 'truth' about All Quiet on the Western Front
Gregor Dallas
We
all wept at the end of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western
Front. We were scandalised by young Paul Bäumer's death: just
weeks before the Armistice, he sank under a sniper's bullet. Yes, we all
wept. But were all those tears shed for the same reason?
International understanding?
Paul and his comrades were German. For British, French and American readers, Remarque had made the absurdity of war universal. Surely, they thought when the book was published in 1929, this was proof that an international understanding was possible?
There were those poignant scenes between enemies, as when Paul lay in a shell crater with a Frenchman he had killed with his own hands. 'Forgive me, camarade! We always realise too late,' he cries out from his muddy hole. 'Why don't they keep on reminding us that you are all miserable wretches just like us?' Or, again, the sight of the Russian prisoners of war; Paul finds them more brotherly than his own people. Or the human wrecks in a military hospital: 'There are hundreds of thousands of them in Germany, hundreds of thousands of them in France, hundreds of thousands of them in Russia.'
Who had caused all this? The older generation, said Paul and his comrades. 'While they went on writing and making speeches, we saw field hospitals and men dying.'
The gulf that the war opened between the generations seemed to be the experience of all countries. It was most graphically represented by the barrier that separated older civilians at 'home' from young soldiers on the war front – there was no communication between them. When Paul travelled home on leave, he crossed 'the boundaries of my youth'. At home, he could not talk about the front; he had to lie to his own dying mother. Even one year's distance in age could make a difference. Paul and his comrades, on encountering fresh young recruits, felt old, as if they had been 'in the army for a thousand years'.
Relevant to the West
Pacifism, disillusionment and the derangement of the 'lost generation' have often been taken as the central themes of Remarque's novel. That was what moved a whole new generation in the 1960s – for Western youth then also considered themselves a pacifist, 'lost' generation. As the 'generation gap' widened, the novel seemed increasingly relevant. Remarque came to be seen not only as the spokesman of peace in his time, but also a prophet.
Remarque had certainly earned the sympathy of the West. Copies of All Quiet on the Western Front fed the same bonfire in Berlin as the books of Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Its author was forced into exile; his sister was beheaded during the Second World War. But All Quiet on the Western Front had, before all this happened, been a bestseller in Germany, and the Germans had also wept – but their tears sprang from a different source than those of the British and the French.
A different kind of belligerent
Germany was different. Little details in the novel suggest that the Kaiser's Reich was not the same kind of belligerent as the Western Allies.
For example, Paul and his company are 'sent out to evacuate a district' – the Allies did not forcibly evacuate whole districts as the Germans did in occupied Belgium and northern France. On their way out, the company meets the 'escaping' locals: 'their figures are bowed, their faces full of misery, despair, haste and resignation'. Under the Hindenburg Programme of 1916-17, tens of thousands of Belgian and French civilians were shipped by cattle trains to labour in German factories.
There is the discussion in Paul's hometown about Germany's planned annexations – no other belligerent had such vast territorial ambitions as the German Reich. There are the Russian prisoners-of-war: 'their backs and their heads are bowed, their knees bent, they look up at you with their heads on one side when they stick their hands out and beg ...' – Remarque is describing inmates of a concentration camp.
Isolation and violence
Most notably, however, Remarque's account of a 'generation that was destroyed by the war' differs in several important ways from Western depictions of the 'lost generation'.
In the first place, the German generation completely cuts itself from its roots. This is not the case in English or French war literature. Siegfried Sassoon and his soldiers, for instance, still guard strong memories and images of England, and Henri Barbusse's troops are merely French peasants on the front. Paul and his German comrades, on the other hand, have made a total break with their earlier lives.
Second, Paul and his comrades are unsparing in their violence against the older generation and civilians. Corporal Himmelstoss is tied up in a quilt cover and beaten into a gutter – he gave 'a wonderful, high-pitched shriek that soon got cut off'. Paul's former schoolmaster is forced to compete in drill with the old school janitor; the schoolmaster scurries back and forth 'like a stuck pig', his panting 'music to our ears'. Glass bottles are thrown at the hospital nuns who are chanting a prayer.
Third, earlier education is abandoned. All 'the rubbish, the stuff they fill your head with' is cast aside. The 'first shell to land went straight for our hearts ... we believe in the war.'
Finally, a specific kind of isolation is described in Remarque's novel, such as the young, raving recruit who 'collapsed in on himself like a tree that is rotten inside'. And there is the case of Paul's own isolation towards the end of the novel.
Blood sacrifice
It was violence and fanaticism that made Paul Bäumer's generation so special. In the two decades before the First World War, there developed in Germany radical youth movements – such as the Wandervögel – that had no parallel in the West. During the war, they merged with a cult of the soldier that, again, was never witnessed in France, Britain or the United States.
Understandably, after 1918, Westerners, having experienced the horror of the war, called for world peace and reconciliation – they wept when they recognised this message in All Quiet on the Western Front. It was not the same in Germany.
'Haie, what would you do if the war ended?' asks Müller, who before the war had been a star pupil of physics. Paul interrupts and tells Haie to kick Müller's 'arse from here to kingdom come for talking about that sort of thing here'. But the question of the war's end never goes away.
Later Paul reflects that 'we shall march forward' with 'our dead comrades beside us ... but against whom?' Here, in a pure and unadulterated form, is the German cult of the soldier. Germans and Westerners indeed wept together, but they were not weeping for the same reason. Paul's death was a blood sacrifice. 'I stand up. I am very calm. Let the months come, and the years, they'll take nothing more from me ... As long as life is there, it will make its own way.'
The unending war
There is a hint, towards the end of the novel, that the war would never end. And, indeed, the war did not end for Germany on 11 November 1918; it simply marched east. Germans were still fighting Poles in Silesia in 1921. Volunteer corps were fighting the Bolsheviks in the Baltic states. Within Germany, the war, like Remarque's new recruit, 'collapsed in on itself'. Soldiers fought soldiers. In Berlin, the new civil war was fought between soldiers from the trenches and sailors from the rear (the Etappe) – Germany's own peculiar version of tension between the front and home. Hitler's storm troopers were born out of this.
'Summer, 1918,' exclaims Paul as he nears his own end. 'A wind of hope sweeping over the burnt-out fields ...' Perhaps, he reflects, the British and the Americans have the greater forces, but 'we haven't been defeated, because as soldiers we are better and more experienced.' That is why Germans wept on reading All Quiet on the Western Front: the fight, and the sacrifice, had not yet been concluded.
Warning to our times
The failure of the West's hopeful statesmen to detect the difference between Western and German tears was one of the main causes of a Second World War. The warning to our times is obvious: some 'universal truths' are not as universal as we would like.
Historian Gregor Dallas's books concern human frontiers: The Imperfect Peasant Economy: The Loire country 1800-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1982); At the Heart of a Tiger: Clemenceau and his world 1841-1929 (Macmillan, 1993) on the man who became French premier at the end of the First World War; and a trilogy on European transitions from war to peace: 1815: The roads to Waterloo (Pimlico, 2001), 1918: War and peace (Pimlico, 2002), and 1945: Poisoned Peace: 1945 - the war that never ended (John Murray, 2005).
