Summary: All Quiet On The Western Front

From the beginning Paul has many doubts about his life after the war. Compared to the older men, he had no career or love to hopefully reunite with. As he imagines a life away from the violence, he realizes these boys entered the war before

The war also changed Paul by hampering his ability to communicate with the people on the home front. Paul learns that it is hard to communicate with them when he visits his hometown. He realizes that people have no clue how bad war really is especially his own mother. "Suddenly my mother seizes hold of my hand and asks falteringly: Was it very bad out there, Paul?(143)" He did not know what to say so he lied to her and said that it was not so bad. Paul could not believe said that. Of course the war was bad, anything is bad when people are dying. He sees that the gap between him and society is getting bigger especially with his mother. Also Paul has no way to describe his experiences, he can not put them into words because the experiences were so horrible

"A wounded soldier? I shout to him-no answer- must be dead." The dead body has fallen out the coffin and the coffin has been unearthed because of the shelling. Even the dead and buried cannot rest in peace during this war. This just adds to the horror of the situation Paul is in.

     “I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another (263).” Powerful changes result from horrifying experiences. Paul Baumer, the protagonists of Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front utters these words signifying the loss of his humanity and the reduction to a numbed creature, devoid of emotion. Paul’s character originates in the novel as a young adult, out for an adventure, and eager to serve his country. He never realizes the terrible pressures that war

4. Men of Paul 's age group fear the end of the war because the war has taken up so much of their lives and personalities that they wouldn 't know how to function in a world without the war. They were conditioned to violence and battle. Moreover, they spent quite a few of their formative years in the war, and essentially grew up in combat. Older men in the war have jobs and families to which they can return; Paul and his friends have nothing of the sort. They often joke about becoming postmen like Himmelstoss, solely because they want to best him in his own field. In reality, though, they have no idea how they will operate in the world, even if they escape the war alive.

The greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, is a novel that depicted the hardships of a group of teenagers who enlisted in the German Army during World War 1. Enlisting right out of high school forced the teens to experience things they had never thought of. From the life of a soilder on the front line to troubles with home life, war had managed to once again destroy a group of teenagers.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a book that describes the different struggles of World War 1 from the perspective of someone who was there but may have not necessarily experienced it all. In the book, there is a man named Paul. “…Here hang bits of uniform, and somewhere else is plastered a bloody mess that was once a human limb” (208). When Paul is at home, he is having fun with friends and thinking that going to school is so difficult and then he goes to war, and he sees a person blown into pieces and watches thousands of men dying. It is a very different life.

In All Quiet on the Western Front Paul witness all the horrors of war. He sees death crawling towards the wounded soldiers in the wood, hospital, and on the front. When a soldier was wounded it killed them, they lost a limb or they got sent back to the front. Another awful part of war is soldiers would get shot and stranded out in the woods. They would yell for help, but were never found. Mental wounds were another injury of war. Paul would see people go insane on the front and some soldiers got shellshock. The worst part of the war for Paul was watching all of his comrades die, and his connection with the ones he loved at home fade away. The horrors of war is clearly represented in both Battle Scars and All Quiet on the Western Front with physical wounds, mental wounds, and loss of loved ones.

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Remarque, is a classic anti-war novel about the personal struggles and experiences encountered by a group of young German soldiers as they fight to survive the horrors of World War One. Remarque demonstrates, through the eyes of Paul Baumer, a young German soldier, how the war destroyed an entire generation of men by making them incapable of reintegrating into society because they could no longer relate to older generations, only to fellow soldiers.

In Chapter five of Erich Remarque’s novel All Quiet on The Western Front, Paul explains that they are no longer young from the experiences such as being young and having to fight for their lives, not being able to know if they have a future, and lastly, death. As a result, it makes Paul feel older from those terrible experiences as he writes, “We are not youth any longer” (87). Paul makes this statement because even though they are nineteen or twenty, they will experience more in their life when they are in the war than any other time. Paul explains about how they are just starting their new independent life, and then it is shot to pieces from being in the war. “The war has ruined us for everything” (87). The war definitely did wreck everything.

The novel All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, is story of the fictional character Paul Baumer and his troop Troop 9 as they battle in World War I on the Western Front for Germany. This novel differs from most war novels in that it does not portray the men as valiant soldiers protecting their country. The way that the story is told strips away the romanticized view warfare and portrays the raw emotions that come with being on the front lines of a battle. As both Paul Baumer’s life and the battle progress, Paul’s values, along with those of the other soldiers, evolve until they culminate in Baumer’s own passing.

Yet another example of the brutalization and dehumanization of the soldiers caused by the war occurs during Paul’s leave. On leave, Paul decides to visit his hometown. While there, he finds it difficult to discuss the war and his experiences with anyone. Furthermore, Paul struggles to fit in at home: “I breathe deeply and say over to myself:– ‘You are at home, you are at home.’ But a sense of strangeness will not leave me; I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano – but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a

Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the greatest war novels of all time. It is a story, not of Germans, but of men, who even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war. The entire purpose of this novel is to illustrate the vivid horror and raw nature of war and to change the popular belief that war has an idealistic and romantic character.  The story centers on Paul Baümer, who enlists in the German army with glowing enthusiasm.  In the course of war, though, he is consumed by it and in the end is "weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope"  (Remarque page #).

Many of Paul's fellow army men do not survive. After the loss of Paul's closest friends,

While the disconnection allows the soldier to adapt to the brutal war environment, it inhibits them from re-entering society. When he takes his leave, he is unable to feel comfortable at home. Even if Paul had survived the war physically, he most likely would not have integrated back into society suitably. The emotional disconnection inhibits soldiers from mourning their fallen friends and comrades. However, Paul was somewhat less than able to completely detach himself from his feelings, and there are several moments in the when he feels himself pulled down by emotion. These rush of feelings indicate the magnitude to which war has automated Paul to cut himself off from feeling, as when he says, with unbridled understatement, “Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard. But a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army (p. 269) .”