Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Horror of War
The overriding theme of All Quiet on the Western
Front is the terrible brutality of war, which informs every
scene in the novel. Whereas war novels before All Quiet
on the Western Front tended to romanticize what war was
like, emphasizing ideas such as glory, honor, patriotic duty, and
adventure, All Quiet on the Western Front sets
out to portray war as it was actually experienced, replacing the
romantic picture of glory and heroism with a decidedly unromantic
vision of fear, meaninglessness, and butchery. In many ways, World
War I demanded this depiction more than any war before it—it completely
altered mankind’s conception of military conflict with its catastrophic
levels of carnage and violence, its battles that lasted for months,
and its gruesome new technological advancements (e.g., machine guns,
poison gas, trenches) that made killing easier and more
impersonal than ever before. Remarque’s novel dramatizes these aspects
of World War I and portrays the mind-numbing terror and savagery
of war with a relentless focus on the physical and psychological
damage that it occasions. At the end of the novel, almost every major
character is dead, epitomizing the war’s devastating effect on the generation
of young men who were forced to fight it.
The Effect of War on the Soldier
Because All Quiet on the Western Front is
set among soldiers fighting on the front, one of its main focuses
is the ruinous effect that war has on the soldiers who fight it.
These men are subject to constant physical danger, as they could
literally be blown to pieces at any moment. This intense physical
threat also serves as an unceasing attack on the nerves, forcing
soldiers to cope with primal, instinctive fear during every waking
moment. Additionally, the soldiers are forced to live in appalling
conditions—in filthy, waterlogged ditches full of rats and decaying
corpses and infested with lice. They frequently go without food
and sleep, adequate clothing, or sufficient medical care. They are
forced, moreover, to deal with the frequent, sudden deaths of their
close friends and comrades, often in close proximity and in extremely
violent fashion. Remarque portrays the overall effect of these conditions
as a crippling overload of panic and despair. The only way for soldiers
to survive is to disconnect themselves from their feelings, suppressing
their emotions and accepting the conditions of their lives.
In Remarque’s view, this emotional disconnection has a
hugely destructive impact on a soldier’s humanity; Paul, for instance, becomes
unable to imagine a future without the war and unable to remember
how he felt in the past. He also loses his ability to speak to his
family. Soldiers no longer pause to mourn fallen friends and comrades;
when Kemmerich is on his deathbed, at the beginning of the novel,
the most pressing question among his friends is who will inherit
his boots. Among the living soldiers, however, Remarque portrays
intense bonds of loyalty and friendship that spring up as a result
of the shared experience of war. These feelings are the only romanticized
element of the novel and are virtually the only emotions that preserve
the soldiers’ fundamental humanity.
Nationalism and Political Power
In many ways, the precipitating cause of World War I was
the ethic of nationalism, the idea that competing nation-states
were a fundamental part of existence, that one owed one’s first
loyalty to one’s nation, and that one’s national identity was the
primary component of one’s overall identity. The ethic of nationalism
was not new, but it had reached new heights of intensity in the
nineteenth century, and this fervor generally carried over into
the start of World War I.
In its depiction of the horror of war, All Quiet
on the Western Front presents a scathing critique of the
idea of nationalism, showing it to be a hollow, hypocritical ideology,
a tool used by those in power to control a nation’s populace. Paul
and his friends are seduced into joining the army by nationalist
ideas, but the experience of fighting quickly schools them in nationalism’s
irrelevance in the face of the war’s horrors. The relative
worthlessness on the battlefield of the patriots Kantorek and Himmelstoss
accentuates the inappropriateness of outmoded ideals in modern warfare.
Remarque illustrates that soldiers on the front fight not for the
glory of their nation but rather for their own survival; they kill
to keep from being killed. Additionally, Paul and his friends do
not consider the opposing armies to be their real enemies; in their
view, their real enemies are the men in power in their own nation,
who they believe have sacrificed them to the war simply to increase
their own power and glory.
