I’ve read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front several times in my life. The first time, I recall, I was a boy, living in an isolated fishing village in the Washington Puget-Sound area. There was a tiny library in the village and, for the time my family lived there, I think I read every book in the place, starting with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and then onward to eventually include Remarque’s tome to European group suicide. I can’t recall exactly what I thought then, but I do remember I kept a Favorite Books list, and All Quiet was on it.
I recall my high school reading of it better. I remember we read it for an English class and discussed it afterward. I’m sure we all wrote much-labored essays about the book’s technique and content, with our young minds reaching out to try and grasp the ungraspable But I do believe that’s where I began to understand the beautiful, heartbreaking wonder of his prose. I was also reading a lot of Hemingway then, which I loved, but I was starting to develop a writer’s instinct for the intricacies of the art, and I detected a practiced mannerism in Ernest’s stuff that was missing from Erich’s. Remarque’s prose seemed entirely effortless to me, stripped bare of any artifice, and revealing a scoured honesty to the point of mental anguish. The sentences rolling out, one after the other, like so many precise, jeweler’s-cut diamonds.
As a soldier stationed in Germany in the 70’s, I found a tattered paperback copy of the work in a Frankfurt bookstall, and took it back to my little apartment “on the economy,” as we called it. It was winter and my old German landlady came into the apartment to build a fire in the tiny stove that was my only source of heat, other than the occasional shot of lemon schnapps to quell the shivers. She saw me reading the book and clasped her hands together.
“So—wunderbar! Ein guter Dichter, nicht wahr?”
She told me she had read Im Westen Nichts Neues (Nothing New in the West) when she was a girl and the book had just been published. She said it made her cry, because both her father and brother had died in that war and everyone felt that was the beginning of the end for Germany. They all felt that then, she repeated. And Remarque, unfortunately or no, had substantiated their feelings with his story of the ordeal they had all just been through.
Talking with the old woman had been a revelation for me then. It was one thing to long-admire something simply for its self, its own innate value. But it was a different experience to have someone, in a near literal sense, step out of the pages of the book, had actually lived the days and nights and experiences the book contained, and was there to look you in the eyes and say, “Yes, it’s true. It’s all true, just like he wrote.”
There is an accumulative effect to the work that was dangerously undetectable when I read it as a boy and in high school. But—when I first arrived in Germany and slept in barracks beneath the bunkered shadows of seven nuclear missiles (we referred to as the Seven Dwarfs) entombed within the fair hillside above; and then I went on war-game maneuvers where I saw entire cities—nations—disappear in an instant on the enormous, glowing, thermoplastic plotting-board of Europe; and the days and nights we were on high alert after the latest round of terrorists bombings; and on and on with the rest of it—I finally understood.
What Remarque was saying was that obviously war made no sense, to anything, anybody, but we went ahead and did it anyway. And that mankind, left to its determined self, would always sooner or later find its way back to war’s doorstep and the resultant annihilation. And, faced with such an unimaginable deceit, all he could do was find a way to process that and speak to it in the only way left him. And the rest of it be damned.