Remarque served not in the trenches but as a sapper behind the front lines, and he was in action for only about six weeks before a wound took him out of commission. “All Quiet” is not purely autobiographical, as many readers assume. A medical orderly takes one look and says, “You could have spared yourself.” The same chilling words are uttered in Edward Berger’s new film adaptation of “All Quiet”-a German-language production that has been nominated for nine Academy Awards.
Paul Bäumer, the book’s narrator, lugs his friend Kat to a field hospital. An equivalent scene appears in the novel. When one of them, Theodor Troske, was wounded by a grenade, Remarque carried the young man a considerable distance on his back, only to find that shrapnel had lodged in Troske’s head, resulting in fatal wounds. Many friends from school served alongside him. Remarque, who came from a lower-middle-class background in the German city of Osnabrück, was attending an academy for Catholic schoolteachers when, in 1916, at the age of eighteen, he was drafted into the army. The agony of destroyed friendship is at the heart of “ All Quiet on the Western Front,” Erich Maria Remarque’s enduring novel about life and death in the trenches. When the incinerated body lying beside you is that of a childhood neighbor or schoolmate, the trauma of loss is intensified. Other combatant nations did this to one degree or another, but Germany had a particular devotion to the strategy, whose psychological underside soon became clear. The assumption was that geographical bonds strengthened solidarity. After all, even though World War I was supposed to be "the war to end all wars," Germany would soon be at the center of another global tragedy in World War II, less than two decades later.During the First World War, the German Army followed a practice of localized recruiting, whereby conscripts from a particular town or region were kept together when they were sent to the front.
The trauma of his experience will haunt him for the rest of his days, and beyond that, Europe won't heal in the wake of the war. There are no heroes or victories in "All Quiet on the Western Front." Even though Paul survives and eventually discovers that the war has ended, he's clearly been forever changed. So, you can just feel shame and guilt and terror and a sense of responsibility towards that history. And I feel it. They had a sense of pride and a sense of honor about what they did. There's nothing honorable or to be proud about in terms of that part of German history. " you're allowed to tell a story of people that also did something with purpose that were probably broken just as much as soldiers from other countries, but they were allowed to heal.
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