All Quiet on the Western Front

Technological and military innovations such as poison gas, the machine gun, and trench warfare revolutionized combat during World War I, and Remarque effectively dramatizes how these innovations made the war bloodier, longer, and more costly. In almost every case, military innovations make the soldiers’ lives more dangerous, while medical innovations lag increasingly far behind. Kemmerich, for instance, dies from complications from a relatively light wound. Glory and patriotism cease to be rational ideals in the conflict because advanced technology limits the effect that an individual soldier can have on the conflict and alienates him from the consequences of his actions. Life and death thus become meaningless. Whether or not a soldier dies in a bombardment is determined by chance or animal instinct and has nothing to do with the soldier’s attitude toward the conflict.

When Paul and his friends talk about enemies, they do not speak of the soldiers on the other side. Instead, they concentrate their hostility on Kantorek and Himmelstoss, their superiors and fellow countrymen. Paul and his classmates view Kantorek and other formerly trusted authority figures like him as the origin of their pointless suffering. These authority figures have sent them to war with the tragically false illusion that they were embarking on an exciting journey to fight for honor and glory. They view all common soldiers who are forced to fight in the trenches, regardless of their national origin, as victims. When Paul meets the Russian prisoners, he can hardly believe that they are his enemies—it is only the word of their respective leaders that has made them enemies. Because of the conflicts between more powerful men, Paul and the Russians are forced to kill and maim one another, even though they have more in common with one another than they do with their respective leaders.

When Müller persistently questions his friends about their postwar plans, the younger men can give only vague answers. Older men mention their jobs and their families; they had concrete identities and social functions before the war. Younger men like Paul and his classmates had no such concrete identities. They entered the war when they were on the threshold of their adult lives and thus gained their identities as soldiers. Paul cannot even imagine any definite postwar goals. Many young men like him cannot view the war as a temporary interruption in their lives. Their experiences of the war are so shattering that they regard the prospect of functioning in a peacetime environment with a vague anxiety. For them, peace represents the unknown; the war, on the other hand, as terrible as it is, offers them some minimal comfort by virtue of their intimate familiarity with it. Whereas they know how to function as soldiers, Paul and the other young comrades cannot imagine functioning in civilian jobs. They have no experiences as adults that do not involve a day-to-day fight for survival and sanity.