The Immersion Library

This book is to be niether an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. I will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.

This epithet unveils the brilliance of this book. Remarque, like all great writers, tells a human story, not a war story. The hero navigates the labyrinth, faces the Minotaur, but loses himself as opposed to finding himself.

The book reads like a memoir. It lacks a real plot, so to speak. A soldier, Paul Baumer, narrates his experience as a World War I soldier. This creates relatablility and hope but also serves to plunge the tragic dagger deep into the reader’s eviscerated body.

As young adults, fresh from school with no frame of reference for life, Paul and his peers leap head-long into death. Rather than coming-of-age, they have a coming-0f-destruction. Their bildungsroman a story of regression to base animal ferocity rather than an evolution to humane gentility.

We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

This happens first through the breaking of their world constructed by authority during their childhood and adolescence. All moral and ethical pillars balancing their world’s construction crumble as the war system bludgeons them. Not only does that system thrust them into an adulthood contrary to the promises of their youth, it drains them of their humanity, transforming the next generation into animalistic killing fodder. They send youth to war because of their physical fitness but that youth had no opportunity to build a life to which they can return. They do not simply adapt to a hellish, unnatural anti-life but form themselves to it! Once formed, adapting to a heavenly, natural life proves nearly impossible. Conversely, a person formed through natural life could not adapt to war.

We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.

Remarque, with fluid and sometimes poetic language, identifies the apparent hypocricies and nonsense of the war system. He chooses not to preach but simply names the sensible reality that the war system so successfully masks with propoganda and manipulation. In his accounts of battles at the front, he describes the perversion of nature through his redefined kinship with the Earth, screaming horses, and mutilated corpses now providing cover. Imagine a graveyard as a sanctuary! No amount of sentiment can justify this perversion. They fail to distract Paul Baumer from the truth but they destroy his world nevertheless and disect him from himself.

During his leave, Paul speaks of his inability to connect with memory and nostalgia. The war breaks continuity of a developing identity and creates a No Man’s Land between the soldier and the human. They see the divide and yearn for a reconnection. But if the soldier attempts to reconnect, they lose their ability to survive the front.

It is strage that all the memories that come have these two qualities. They are always completely calm, that is predominant in them; and even if they are not really calm, they become so. They are soundless apparitions that speak to me, with looks and gestures, silently, without any word – and it is the alarm of their silence that forces me to lay hold of my sleeve and my rifle lest I should abandon myself to the liberation and allurement in which my body would dilate and gently pass away into the still forces that lie behind these things.

The system forces the dissection and the soldier willingly maintains it out of adaptive necesity. Any connection to youth and promise, though desperately missed, impairs the ability to endure. Crush a man so inhumanely that they adapt and willingly avoid blissful reprieve.

All other expressions lie in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch againt the menace of death; – it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct – it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought – it has wakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that in spite of all we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a rescue against the onslaught of nothingness.

This is how you destroy a man. Shatter his world. Cleave him from himself. Leave him no alternative life. “The front is a cage”