Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front

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During the time that the Frist World War broke out, many were affected. However, a whole generation experienced a loss like no other. Having little to no idea the challenges they would soon face, many eighteen and nineteen year olds got ready to fight honorably for their country. The young men entered the traumatic war zone, leaving their home as an adolescent having had no time to build a life for themselves. Hence, leaving home as an adolescent produced a lost generation and left the young men lost emotionally, in their maturity, and in their relationships, when the war came to an end. Young men just out of school departed from their comfortable and secure homes and headed towards the battlefield, with little to no maturity or perception …show more content…

The author wrote, “Terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;- but it kills, if a man thinks about it” (Remarque 138). The horrific time that the soldiers underwent resulted in their emotions being shut off and ignored for the sake of their mental and physical survival. As the soldiers flipped the switch that controlled their emotions, they separated war and peace, so much so that they could not comprehend their life without war. Paul’s friend Albert said, “There won’t be any peacetime” (Remarque 76), this mindset occurred because of the daunting and gruesome occurrences in war. Furthermore, Paul mentioned memories of his home life and said, “…they belong to another world that is gone from us” (Remarque 121), showing again how a soldiers live emotionally disconnected from their home life, leaving them unprepared for life after war. Clearly, when the soldiers turned off their emotions because of the abundant trauma, their connection to life without war disappeared. They were left lost and confused, when peacetime occurred, trying to rejoin their two worlds together. They are now living with the very emotions they taught themselves to ignore on the battle field to

Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front
766 Words | 4 Pages
Imagine a world where trees are lying everywhere; there are craters in the earth as larges as busses and corpses of men lying everywhere. This is a world the past generation experienced. This is World War I. Remarque portrays the technological and military innovations in All Quiet on the Western Front as horrific, in the ways of creating mass casualties, causing psychological problems in the soldiers, and destroying nature. The technological and military innovations that remarque portrays creates mass casualties.
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Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front
182 Words | 1 Pages
Like the concept of survival of the fittest, it is essential for the soldiers to have an animal instinct to survive on the battlefield. Many moments are shown in which the soldiers become two faced, changing from good-mannered and soft soldier to animal - like characteristics. Paul informs us that they only way to survive in battle, is to block away all your emotions, if not, it would drive you insane. Another aspect as to the book’s anti-war sentiment, is how Remarque describes the consequences of war, the loss of the young life. Paul's generation was known as the "Iron Youth", which was a group of young boys who enlisted and fought in the war as a way of showing gratitude for their country, Germany, but his age group is lost because
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1618 Words | 7 Pages
Paul Baumer represents the soldiers as the “Lost Generation” (Remarque 105). World War I turned a generation of young men, ready to attack life with full force into a generation of war-torn, and greatly aged, men. The war has aged them, both physically and especially mentally. The soldiers constantly discuss how they are no longer “youth” anymore, but actually old men of nineteen.
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Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front
1820 Words | 8 Pages
All Quiet on the Western Front Essay World War I is one of the most influential and bloody wars in history. Soldiers did not always receive fair treatment, and often encountered harsh conditions, especially those men who were fighting on the front line. World War I took place between 1914-1919 (pbs), during which millions of lives were lost, and nearly everyone’s life was touched by the war in some way.
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The Effect Of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front
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Remarque displays in All Quiet on the Western Front the toll this takes on the youthful soldiers that have partaken in the war. For since the beginning of time, war has always revolved around killing and destroying. The illustrious novel All Quiet on the Western Front exposes the drastic effects it has on the soldiers. War forces civil good men into doing acts they would never even imagine in their wildest dreams. At one point, Remarque artfully depicts a scene in which Paul is forced to kill another soldier in hand to hand combat.
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Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front
348 Words | 2 Pages
All Quiet on the Western Front was written to show the horrors and intensity war has and that it is inevitably hell. Author Erich Maria Remarque was an intryman during the first World War and that was his inspiration for writing this novel. The book is written in a way to impact the reader with intense emotions and confused thoughts to really understand what the soldiers were experiencing on the war field. Remarque mentions many war technologies in the novel such as explosives, rifles, and toxic gases that show how deadly the war field can be. In chapter 6, Paul Baumer mentions the “[b]ombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, machine-guns, [and] hand-grenades” that lie in the war field, which are things to frighten the reader and therefore
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All Quiet On The Western Front By Erich Maria Remarque
844 Words | 4 Pages
The Struggles of a Soldier The brutalities of war are shown through a soldiers experience through a war. In the book All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque tells the story of a group of friends in World War 1. Remarque uses the protagonist, Paul, to display the brutalities of war by experiencing some of them himself. Brutalities of war are expressed through Paul’s experience of the war harming soldiers by negatively impacting their physical bodies, making it hard for soldiers to reintegrate themselves into society and, damaging their psychological health.
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All Quiet On The Western Front By Erich Maria Remarque
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The author of this anti-war novel set out to portray war as a meaningless and brutal way of life that ruined the life of many of the soldiers. Paul observes the gory and butchered bodies scattered everywhere around the battlefield and “cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round” (Remarque 263). The war has completely altered Baumer’s conception of military conflict with its disastrous extent of violence and slaughter. His description of the dead men who even Paul is left an utterly broken and destroyed man after the war. Furthermore, the horror of war and the animalistic nature it brings out in people is thoroughly addressed in Baumer’s description of the impoverished Russian soldiers, who like them were forced to “unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another” (Remarque 263).
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All Quiet On The Western Front Impact Of War Essay
776 Words | 4 Pages
The trauma of being in the war has set Paul’s tone frail and afraid “Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more”. Conveys his loneliness of confronting death “I can confront them without fear.” foreshadowing that soon his end will come. Remarque has emphasized death as a subject of time in the novel, provides a foreshadowing effect on the reader to understand that each friend Paul losses has a new psychological impact on Paul, nearing him to his
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All Quiet On The Western Front Effects Of War Essay
1064 Words | 5 Pages
However, when they were sent out into the midst of the war many of them realised the misconceptions they had and were led to believe. They became disillusioned as they realized that the war was much more brutal and horrific than they had previously believed. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque effectively comments on the horrors of war from Paul’s perspective, especially when Paul comments on injuries the soldiers endure and witness by stating “We see men go on living with the top of their skulls missing; we see soldiers go on running when both their feet have been shot away…Another man…with his guts spilling out over his hands as he holds them in.” (Remarque,
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1361 Words | 6 Pages
In All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque exposes the reality of war by refuting the idea of the “Iron Youth,” revealing the mistreatment of soldiers, and showing the critical effects war imprints on them. When any war begins, young men are always the first ones to be sent into the war zones. To clarify, older generations believe young adults are the best options for fighting; these boys are strong, full of energy, and do not have anything to lose. “The chief source of this pro-war ideology were the older men of the nation: professors, publicists, politicians, and even pastors” (Literature and Its Times).
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Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front