I
The war enthusiasm during August 1914 of several European countries involved in the outbreak of World War I has been widely discussed and analyzed (see Gollbach; Prangel; Linder; Schöning; Marsland). Approximately one million poems and thousands of narratives were written that gave expression to the enthusiasm and (in the German cultural context) the hope for change that war would bring to the entrenched society of the Kaiserreich. These poems and narratives represented and extrapolated from an image of war created during the liberation wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this image, a self-determined individual fought for the kaiser and for the fatherland in a war mainly characterized by rapid movements and individual soldiers’ “heroic” acts. This image had already begun to crack during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 as it was defied by the ongoing guerrilla war in the south of France in 1871 and the fact that most of the dead were not killed in action but by diseases. However, as time passed, German authors such as Theodor Fontane reinstated the former image of war, and by 1914, after more than forty years of relative peace, the Franco-Prussian War had been nearly forgotten.
In September 1914, the advance of the German armies stopped on the river Marne, and German soldiers found themselves stuck in trenches, attacking Allied forces burrowed into other trenches and making no obvious progress. The ideological reasons used to justify beginning the war now seemed contradictory to the reality of war. Thus the flood of publications and reports on the war, written especially for those who stayed on the home front, became more necessary than ever. A new interpretation of the war, one that provided “new” reasons yet did not contradict the “old” ones, began appearing at the end of 1914.
The main guidelines for describing and interpreting the war can be found in these writings. They attempt to treat “the whole thing”: both the war itself from a historical and ideological point of view and the experiences and deeds of the individual soldiers. They try to evaluate the war’s horrors, give sense to the war’s apparent senselessness, and provide the individual soldiers—who, in these writings’ definition, are not able to judge the war from their “worm’s-eye view”—with a reason they should go on fighting and suffering. Although these writings do portray the individual as material in the matériel battle, trench warfare does not lead to his demoralization. Rather, the soldier’s awareness of his superior morals and values gives him a new self-assuredness. Though the soldier faces dehumanization, the loss of self-determination, and the constant threat of death, these hazards are interpreted in such a way as to re-create the individual from the faceless masses of soldiers, from the matériel of war. The old image of war, in which the individual is able to change the “whole thing” by being heroic and courageous, is nearly gone. All that remains is his ability to maintain his humanity.
During the war, the German public was bombarded by these reports and publications on the war, and the guidelines these publications created had a strong impact on how contemporary histories, autobiographies, and literature represented the war. Countless numbers of these books on the war were published. Even the Hinrichs Halbjahrs Katalog, similar to today’s Books in Print, stopped its attempt to list the German war literature in a special edition after five editions in 1916. The publications listed under “literature” alone fill thirty small-print pages with dozens of titles.
One of the main factors contributing to the popularity of war literature was the publication, starting with the beginning of the war, of series of books dealing with the war. The German War, Friend and Foe, War and Victory, and other series published more than one hundred titles each that focused on nearly every aspect of modern life in connection with the war. Published in print runs of sometimes more than 500,000, these cheap books offered an image of the war in which the new and modern weapons and the new experiences of war were almost seamlessly integrated.
They sublimated the dehumanization of the individual soldier by producing new heroes who could control the new weapons such as airplanes or submarines and use them to accomplish their missions. Mainly officers who emerge from the masses by skillfully handling the machines of which they are part, these heroes are self-determined. These heroes have fears, they have doubts, and they are aware that they may be killed by chance—the part of the war that they cannot control. Yet, by overcoming these psychological obstacles, these heroes strengthen their wills and power as well as their ability to fight for the kaiser and the fatherland (or just their lust for hunting or adventures in foreign countries). Though these books never denied the new structure of war, they did create new myths through metaphorical comparisons between the war in the skies and hunting or the adventurous struggle of the individual to get home to Germany from China or Paraguay in order to fight for the kaiser. Illustrations and the precise identification of locations, times, and events lent the books authenticity. In short, author, text, and illustration were combined into a harmonious unity, giving readers the impression that what they were reading was not an adventure story but the war itself, the “true” war.
II
During the war, censorship prevented pacifist and even critical war literature from being published in the German Kaiserreich. This should be emphasized because antiwar literature was published in other countries and is still the main part of the canon of war literature and of scholarly studies of war literature. German antiwar literature only appeared in exile, mostly in Switzerland, where it was published by the Max Rascher publishing house in Zurich. In 1917 the Alsatian René Schickele, himself a pacifist novelist and literary journal editor, began publishing antiwar prose by writers of a variety of nationalities. One such writer, the Austrian Andreas Latzko, had such success with his stories Menschen im Krieg (1917; Men in War) that Schickele was encouraged to continue his program with Henri Barbusse, Leonid Andrejew, Romain Rolland, and Leo Tolstoy. In contrast to the usual German war literature of the period, these texts showed how modern warfare, particularly trench warfare, results in dehumanization. War inevitably leads to insanity and murder in these texts, and there is no way out of the war and no way to stop the killing.
The most successful and, for German war literature, most influential book to come out of René Schickele’s publishing program was the German translation (by L. von Meyenburg) of Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (in German Das Feuer, and in English Under Fire). Written in 1915 and first published in French in 1916, the novel was translated into German and smuggled into the country in 1918. Barbusse’s novel fulfills the standards for war literature—it claims to be authentic, its story is chronological, and its narrator/protagonist is identifiable with its author—yet it also changes them. The “hero” of Barbusse’s “diary of a platoon” is not a single person but a group of soldiers, the platoon. The novel’s topic is not the single, exemplary fate that re-creates the soldiers’ individuality but the slow vanishing of the social differences among the French soldiers of various class origins and of the national differences between the French soldiers and their German opponents. Written in 1915, before the main materiel battles of Verdun and Passchendaele, the novel creates stunning images of a modern war. The final chapter, “Dawn” (“Morgengrauen” in German, which can also be read as “morning horror”), shows the trenches filled with water and mud after days of rain, which has stopped the fighting. The mud-covered soldiers cannot identify one another; the soldiers from both sides of the front are equal and completely deindividualized. This leads to the recognition of the other, of the solidarity among all soldiers, which is, in Barbusse’s eyes, a socialistic salvation.
Without doubt, Barbusse’s popular Le Feu influenced German war literature as well as the image of modern war outside literature. But Barbusse did not create new standards for representing the war—he just reworked the standards for pro-war literature and thus stayed in discourse with them. His descriptive methods were not novel and could easily be adopted and used by pro-war authors, as can be seen in the work of Ernst Jünger. The criterion for evaluating war literature—even an antiwar literature—then, remained “truth”—that is, how accurately a work of literature captured the image of modern warfare, not the way in which it described the war.
The armistice and the end of the war generally did not change the standards and conventions of war literature. During the war, fiction and documentary had so intermingled that, even today, it seems impossible to distinguish between the two; likewise, both pro-war and antiwar literature of the early and mid-1920s used fact as well as fiction to pursue their ideological and political purposes. Some critics, such as Modris Eksteins, have assumed that in the 1920s the public got tired of war literature. Yet this verdict is fairly incorrect because the literature produced during the war, especially pro-war literature, continued to fulfill its ideological function. Not war but peace was subjected to criticism. And not the lost war but the Treaty of Versailles—which Germans largely believed was full of unfair, punitive Allied demands—was blamed for the social, economic, and political catastrophes Germany endured throughout the decade. The most popular literature of the period described the German army as unbeaten and heroic and provided the public with guidelines for interpreting the postwar present. The (very) few examples of antiwar literature were censored and sometimes even prosecuted by legal action.
A distinction should be made, however, between “documentary” publications, such as the forty-volume Schlachten des Weltkrieges (Battles of the World War, 1921-1930), and expressly fictional texts, such as Arnold Zweig’s Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (1927; The Case of Sergeant Grischa) or Leonhard Frank’s Der Mensch ist gut (1919; Man Is Good). The standards for postwar fiction about the war demanded that the author should be a veteran; that the events described in the text should have been experienced by the author; and that the events should be verifiable (and, therefore, exact dates and locations had to be given). Further, these standards prevented fiction about the war from formulating interpretations of the war. On a literary level, the war could be used as background for any kind of human subjects and topics, but valid texts about the war should show no obvious tendency or political meaning. Instead, they judged the war itself as meaningless. It had been cruel, and every soldier on the front had suffered from the war in some way, yet the German soldiers had fulfilled their duty. Postwar society and politics were the results not of the war itself but of postwar political events (such as the Versailles treaty) and the responsibility of the governing politicians—the democrats.
III
Erich Paul Remark —who, in 1921, would change his name to Erich Maria Remarque—was drafted into the German army on November 21, 1916. After more than six months of military training in Osnabrück and Celle, he was sent to the western front in Flanders on June 12, 1917. On July 31, the first day of the third Ypres battle, he was wounded in his left leg, right arm, and neck and sent to the Duisburg hospital, where he stayed until October 31, 1918. The end of war prevented him from being sent to the front again. While in the hospital, he questioned other wounded soldiers about their war experiences and, in late 1917, began writing a “novel” about the war. The death of his mentor and fatherly Osnabrück friend Fritz Hörstemeier halted his work in March 1918, and Remarque instead wrote Die Traumbude (The Dream Room), a novel about his experiences as an adolescent before the war, which was published in 1920.
In the fall of 1927, for no obvious reason, Erich Maria Remarque, now journalist for Sport im Bild, a fashionable Berlin literary periodical published by the national conservative Hugenberg trust, renewed his wartime plans and wrote a novel titled Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). Remarque worked out at least three versions of the text before he handed the typescript over to the highly respected S. Fischer publishing house in early 1928. The text was rejected because the publisher thought the market for war literature was oversaturated and that any type of war novel would be a flop. Through many hands the typescript finally reached the bourgeois and liberal Ullstein company in the early summer of 1928 and was accepted.
Remarque had written a “novel,” his third one after Die Traumbude and the serial Station am Horizont (1927-1928; Stopping Point on the Horizon). It was meant to be the first part of a trilogy describing the fate of German soldiers during the war, their homecomings, and the difficulties they face as they try to reintegrate themselves into postwar civilian society. Ullstein invited Remarque to a meeting on August 6, 1928, and presumably (no documents are available) forced him to change the whole text of All Quiet in order to align it with the period’s standards and criteria for war literature.
Remarque changed the novel from one that was, if not antiwar, at least critical of war into a text that, like other war novels of the period, refuses to offer an explicit interpretation of the war. He deleted all the passages that expressly criticized the war, its causes, and its senselessness, and added sentences and passages that relativized critical statements. For example, the famous staff corporal, Himmelstoß, who in the typescript version was meant to be a representative example of militarism and military thinking, became an exception, a curiosity. The new passage ended, “Es gab auch viele anständige Korporale, die vernünftiger waren; die anständigen waren sogar in der Überzahl” (Westen 31) [“There were many other staff corporals, the majority of whom were more decent” (Quiet 25)]. The young soldiers’ suffering remains in the new version, yet now they suffer not from the military system itself but from a vicious sergeant called Himmelstoß.
Other changes concerned the general critique of war. For example, the sentence “Wir entschuldigen nichts mit Notwendigkeit, mit Ideen, mit Staatsgründen” [“We don’t excuse anything due to necessity, to ideas, to reasons of state”] was changed to “Wir sagen nichts gegen Notwendigkeit, Ideen, Staatsgründe” [“We don’t say anything against necessity, ideas, reasons of state”]. The sentence appeared in the serialized version of the novel but was later completely deleted from the book edition.
In chapter 9, Remarque completely changed the famous discussion among the soldiers about the sense and causes of war after the kaiser’s visit. The original typescript showed Paul Bäumer reflecting that the discussion is typical for the ordinary soldier, who observes the war “aus der Froschperspektive”—that is, from “a worm’s-eye view”—and judging the discussion as a tragic expression of resignation. In Remarque’s revision, however, Bäumer fails to reflect on the conversation and remains on the level of the soldiers. The discussion finishes with Albert remarking: “Besser ist, über den ganzen Kram nicht zu reden” [“The best thing is not to talk about the rotten business”], to which Kat responds, “Wird ja auch nicht anders dadurch” (Westen 206) [“It won’t make any difference, that’s for sure” (Quiet 209)].
In its published version, All Quiet on the Western Front meets the standards and criteria of war literature—its narrator expresses opinions of the individual soldiers only and nearly always takes them back. Nothing is expressly antiwar. As in Barbusse’s Le Feu, the novel’s protagonist is a group of soldiers, not the reflecting Paul Bäumer.
But the Ullstein company still was not certain that even the depoliticized version of All Quiet on the Western Front would meet with success. Preparing the first World Congress of Advertisement in late 1928, the company embarked on a marketing campaign for the book that was unprecedented in German publishing history. The serialized print in the Vossische Zeitung was announced on November 8, 1928, and commenced on November 10, 1928. The ambivalence of the marketing campaign becomes evident when one takes into account that these November days were not only the tenth anniversary of the armistice (and German revolution) but also the fourteenth anniversary of the 1914 Battle of Langemarck, in which, as myth had it, fervently patriotic young German soldiers were massacred as they charged the Allied lines, and which right-wing groups yearly observed. Ullstein announced the text All Quiet on the Western Front as a documentary without “tendency”—a nonpolitical novel that nevertheless provided a new perspective on the war: that of the ordinary soldier. Ullstein created in Remarque a “new” author, too, one who could have been identical with the protagonist of All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Bäumer. Ullstein let it be known that Remarque was in his early thirties (he was exactly thirty years old), which readers took to mean that he could have enlisted in 1914; that he enlisted deliberately, which is definitely untrue; and that all the events described in the text were experienced by the author himself (J.E.). This text and its author now fulfilled the standards and criteria for war literature.
The serial of the novel was an unexpected success. It boosted the Vossische Zeitung out of the red, and thousands of letters to the editor reached Ullstein, some of which were at once published in the Vossische Zeitung to advertise the novel further. The book’s publication was scheduled for late January 1929, after the usual Christmas business, so that it would stand alone as an extraordinary event in the book market. For weeks before its publication, it was announced and advertised in newspapers. Journals that did not belong to the Ullstein company were allowed to print one chapter of the text gratis, and Ullstein offered complete shopwindow displays to booksellers—something that was then unprecedented in German publishing. Parts of the text were also printed on leaflets.
Meanwhile, the text changed again with the book edition. Some passages were deleted and replaced by new ones, increasing the amount of sex and crime in the novel (for example, the chapter 10 hospital scene with Lewandowski was added, though it was unknown to the American reader until 1975 because it was censored in the United States). As no handwritten or typescript documents of these passages exist, however, it is not known whether the new passages were written by Remarque or by someone at Ullstein.
On January 29, 1929, the day the book was published, or in the days that closely followed it, all of the Ullstein newspapers published enthusiastic reviews of the book by well-known authors such as Carl Zuckmayer, Bernhard Kellermann, and Fritz von Unruh, all of whom fought in the Great War and were thus legitimated to write about it. All remarked that All Quiet on the Western Front was “finally” telling the “truth” about the war.
At the same time, Remarque was living up to his new biography in interviews and in life. He declared that he had written the novel in six weeks, and without making any corrections, in order to “overcome” his war experiences and depressions. He denied that the novel had any political bias and instead emphasized that he “just” wanted to describe what happened to young men thrown into the war. This was exactly the opposite of what he originally intended—that is, what happens (not happened) to young people coming home from the war—but what else could he do? The Ullstein marketing campaign was extremely successful, and even after the book was published it continued publishing a steady stream of brochures and leaflets that collected and quoted positive as well as negative reviews. All Quiet on the Western Front became the best- and fastest-selling novel in German literary history; moreover, the text was discussed not in a literary context but in a cultural and historical one.
At first, public approval of the novel was nearly complete: left-wing as well as right-wing critics agreed with the Ullstein campaign that All Quiet on the Western Front was telling the “truth” about the Great War. But in spring 1929, opinions began to change. Sales figures were still rising, but as public debate turned to issues such as the construction of the country’s first pocket battleship, the Panzerkreuzer A, and the remilitarization of Weimar Germany, as well as the Young Plan for the German reparations, more and more critics, especially democrat and bourgeois ones, began to regard All Quiet on the Western Front as an antiwar novel. At the same time, those in the political center claimed Remarque’s former “novel” for their political position.
Ullstein changed its marketing campaign slightly with the book edition, which probably helped attract the controversy. The company had marketed the serial version as a testimony of the war experiences of the generation who fought in the war, yet it proclaimed the book version to be the war testimony of all participating German soldiers and, even more, a virtual memorial to unknown soldiers who had fallen in the war (Germany at that time had no official nationwide memorial for these soldiers). The chairman of the poetry section of the Prussian Academy of Arts, Walter von Molo, was even quoted on the front cover as saying, “Remarque’s book is the memorial to our unknown soldier—written by all dead.” Thus Ullstein changed the marketing campaign slightly. The serialized version was a testimony of the war experiences of a young generation, the classes of the 1890s. The book version claimed to be the war testimony of all participating German soldiers and, even more, a virtual memorial to the soldiers killed in the war. All Quiet on the Western Front now stood in a strict opposition to another virtual memorial of the Great War, Adolf Hitler. In nearly every one of his speeches of that time, Hitler pointed at his own war experiences as a “simple private” who suffered barrage and gas attacks and claimed them to be average, a rhetorical strategy that would give him the legitimation he needed to ascend to power in Germany. The supporters of the democratic Weimar Republic now assembled behind All Quiet on the Western Front, while right-wing (and left-wing) critics and enemies of the Republic opposed the text. Left-wing critics opposed the text for not describing the social and economic reasons for the war in a socialist way.
The discussion of the book now became an exact mirror of the political situation of the late Weimar Republic. Though for different reasons, the Left and Right alike became opponents of the book and denied that it contained any truth. The biography Ullstein had fabricated for Remarque began to unravel, and critics, especially those on the Right, tried to undermine the author’s legitimacy by unearthing his early, romantic writings and his various name changes as well as concocting stories and rumors that would later become legends. A year after so many critics had written about the truth of All Quiet on the Western Front, hardly anyone outside of a small group of young people who fought on the western front saw any truth in it at all.
In the wake of this controversy, All Quiet on the Western Front became the touchstone of German war literature. In the years following its publication, hundreds of texts appeared that, from various political viewpoints, would try to prove, ex negative, that it was a false representation of the war and claim to provide the true image of war. Discussions of these texts were mainly restricted to political criticism and rarely touched on the text’s literary qualities. Critics did not deny the cruelty of war (in this respect, they considered Remarque truthful) or even the senselessness of dying—but they condemned Remarque for failing to interpret the war (all such interpretations were deleted by Ullstein) and for asserting (as Ullstein’s marketing campaign made him appear) that All Quiet on the Western Front’s depiction of the war was representative of all soldiers’ experiences of the war.
Yet All Quiet on the Western Front did not create a new image of the Great War. Comparing the published version of the text with, say, National Socialist war literature, only a few differences can be seen. The latter tends to have even more confusing scenes (in a sense of innovation), especially among depictions of suicide, fear, horror, or self-mutilation. The National Socialist texts also emphasize how war experience builds camaraderie between the soldiers, resulting in a new social phenomenon: men forged by the storm of steel of the matériel battle to form a new society. And, in contrast to All Quiet on the Western Front, these texts depict the “worm’s-eye view” as necessary. Rather than refusing to offer an interpretation of the role of the individual soldier in the war, as All Quiet on the Western Front does, these texts make it clear that the individual is fully integrated into the group, making him part of a greater community and a greater purpose. Man as material becomes an individual again because he knows that he is a respected and useful part of the entire war effort. All Quiet on the Western Front offers no such interpretation; moreover, Remarque’s next novels Der Weg zurück (1931; The Road Back, 1931) and Drei Kameraden (1938; Three Comrades, 1937) demonstrate that, in Remarque’s view, comradeship is not able to withstand the social demands placed on the veterans in the postwar era. That this general social emptiness was an outcome of the war was the most dangerous claim of All Quiet on the Western Front for its critics. And this was the reason why Joseph Goebbels, as part of National Socialist cultural policy, mounted an opposition to the film adaptation in 1930, finally succeeding in banning it December 1930.
The Ullstein publishing house’s attempt to gain hegemony over the interpretation of the Great War in the Weimar Republic thus failed. The changes the house made to the text of All Quiet on the Western Front, along with its attempts to install Remarque as a legitimate author of war literature, were only the first steps of a campaign aimed at bolstering the democratic political system of the Republic. Remarque and his novel were just an inducement for a political controversy that had long been in the making. When the National Socialists succeeded in banning the movie, the discussion of the novel was effectively finished. And with the National Socialists’ 1933 government takeover, the political debates that started with the discussion on All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929 were at an end.
Yet despite the controversy the novel sparked in Germany, readers from all over the world have taken All Quiet on the Western Front—even in its depoliticized version—as a valid description of the front lines of modern war—and as an indictment of war. Thus Remarque’s original intentions for the novel have at last been fulfilled.