Title: War's Horror as German Private Saw It
Author(s): Louis Kronenberger
Publication Details: The New York Times Book Review. (June 2, 1929): p5.
Source: Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale, Cengage Learning
In [All Quiet on the Western Front] it is the war as, in all its physical horror, it passed before the eyes of a twenty-year-old German private, an intelligent but not unusual boy who, with no preparation, with no fixed principles, was sent away to fight. We are told in a foreword that it is not to be a confession, or an accusation, or an adventure he chronicles, but the tale of a “generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” They were destroyed because they were cut off from life before they had found a fixed scheme for living....
[The] sense, less of being uprooted than of never possessing roots, is the governing motif of the book, the tragedy that Paul Bäumer and all his fellows instantly recognized and that has proved itself in the ten years since the war. Here are boys bewildered not only by war, but also by lacking standards to which they can revert in a psychological escape from war....
One may see how badly the war upset these lives and yet realize that theirs was not the supreme torture. For this soldiery of whom Remarque, through Paul Bäumer, writes took the war more unflinchingly, more directly, in a certain sense more phlegmatically, than many other participants. Certainly they saw it in all its physical horror, and in All Quiet we have a picture of that physical horror unsurpassed for vividness, for reality, for convincingness, which lives and spreads and grows until every atom of us is at the Front, seeing, mingling, suffering. For us readers, indeed, the picture finally acquires a kind of fascination; it so rivets our senses that it no longer terrorizes our imaginations. Under such a spell we can take in everything and need run away, psychologically, from nothing.
It almost certainly had no such fascination for these soldiers; yet All Quiet remains, essentially, a document of men who—however else their lives were disrupted—could endure war simply as war. It is for that reason representative of the largest number of men who fought, an Everyman's pilgrimage through four years of fighting. For the same reason, it is about youngsters who were half-puzzled over what it all meant: who were not driven to mental torture because they could not endure what they knew or check their imaginations at what they saw. They sit around, half shrewd, half näive, and speculate now and again.... But there is no sense of terrible knowledge, of moral responsibility. That is why, as pure revelation, All Quiet on the Western Front, though magnificent within its own limits, is yet definitely limited.