Indictment or Confession?

There are, admittedly, good reasons for a sceptical attitude towards the brief declaration which forms a kind of preface to Im Westen nichts Neues.1 It runs, it will be remembered, as follows:

This statement, despite its seductively modest claims and the directness of its laconic formulations, is certainly less transparent and straightforward than it appears at first sight. The reader may for instance be inclined to question Remarque’s assertion that the book is not intended to be either an indictment or a confession, for self-evidently it does include no small measure of criticism of the society which propelled his generation into a senseless war and more than a little reflection of Remarque’s own experiences and feelings whilst serving in the German army. And indeed, ever since the publication of Im Westen in book form in 1929, its critics have chosen to maintain that indictment or confession do represent the main point of the novel, regardless of Remarque’s explicit denial of such intentions. Again and again the book has been assessed as if it were documentary literature or reportage; and at the same time praised or vilified, according to the politics of the critic, as a pacifist polemic against militarism.2

Nevertheless, Remarque’s statement of intent, however incomplete or disingenuous it may appear to be, is essentially validated by the text. Im Westen is not an historical or autobiographical work, on the contrary it marks a departure from the countless war diaries and officers’ memoirs which had flooded the market after 1918, and which by the late 1920s seemed too devoted to factual reporting to afford any means of accommodating the emotional experiences involved in the war. Remarque himself told Axel Eggebrecht in an interview in 1929 that his novel was insufficiently representative to purport to be a documentary account of the war, since it showed only the subjectively observed experiences of one small group of young infantrymen on one short sector of the front during one phase of the war.3 Im Westen is a work of fiction. Although it makes use of numerous details from the past of Erich Paul Remark (to give him his real name), from his youth in Osnabrück, from his period at a military training camp, and from his stay in a Catholic hospital in Duisburg, it transforms them and weaves them into an imaginative pattern quite distinct from historical fact.4

Remarque’s other disclaimer, that the novel is not intended to level accusations, deserves even closer attention. It is tempting to suppose that the theme of Im Westen is the futility or obscenity of war, and both the critical portrayal of military values and the gruesome descriptions of broken bodies seem to support this reading. Thus Brian Rowley writes in an article on the novel that its fundamental theme is ’the monstrous unacceptability of modern trench warfare’.5 The same view dominates Brian Murdoch’s Introduction to the text: Im Westen ’remains an indictment of the modern mechanized war’, he states, ’… its message, though not overtly stated, is perfectly clear, that war is evil’ (p. 26). Here, however, Murdoch falls into the trap of imposing on the novel the predictable theme which it might be expected to contain rather than elucidating the more original ideas actually expressed in the text. In fact the horrific aspects of war are not discussed as a theme anywhere in Im Westen, rather they are taken for granted, reported with matter-of-fact bluntness and accepted as inevitable. Remarque himself said as much to Eggebrecht:

It might be objected that Im Westen contains rather more than occasional reflections, but Remarque’s main point is correct: the book is not about the war itself, but about the way in which certain human individuals experience the war.

Such pacifist sentiments as the novel does contain are vague and scattered platitudes, which are never developed into an argued case;7 and they are compromised by the perverse pleasure which Bäumer and his mates take in the earthy physicality of life at the front. A careful reading of the text suggests even that Remarque does not entirely disapprove of the war, or perhaps rather that he has failed to work out an unequivocal moral stance towards it. One recent German critic, Hans-Harald Müller, has argued plausibly that the theme enunciated in Remarque’s opening declaration, the traumatic effect of the Great War on both those participants who fought it and those who survived it, represents only part of the import of the book; and that there is a subordinate theme which remains unstated in this prefatory remark, namely nostalgia for the undemanding comradeship of the trenches.8 These two themes co-exist in uneasy duality in the text, the one emphasizing the negative consequences of the war, the other less obtrusively and less self-consciously dwelling on its dubiously positive aspects. Remarque is not then concerned with anything as morally simplistic as ’the evil of war’, but rather with the psychological impact of the war on the troops and its implications for their future, for those who have one, in a post-war civilian world. As his opening statement correctly asserts, he seeks to portray a generation which is being ’vom Kriege zerstört’, mentally even if not physically.

Brutalization

It is the realist Katczinsky who remarks that any human being is ’zunächst einmal ein Biest’; decency and altruism are merely social accretions, like dripping spread on a slice of bread (p. 71). The war has scraped this surface layer off its participants and exposed the brute in them. Bäumer himself reflects, with surprising ambivalence, on the reduction of their lives to a primitive state in which nothing matters to them but their animal existences (p. 227-28). This brutalized condition is also their means of survival, he maintains, for any vestige of sensitivity or fastidiousness would have long since driven them insane, caused them to desert or made them fatally careless under fire. The deaths of Detering and Berger shortly afterwards prove him right. In the trenches all normal human emotions in the soldiers have been suppressed, so Bäumer thankfully observes, and instead they are governed by ’Stumpfheit’, a zombie mentality which causes them to act only on instinct. They have become ’denkende Tiere’ [thinking animals], living a ’Dasein äußerster Oberfläche’ [existence of complete superficiality] like some primitive tribe in the bush before civilization. On reflection he realises that they are morally inferior to the aboriginal natives: whilst savages live contentedly and know no other way, the soldiers have forced themselves into this state, it is a conscious ’Anspannung zur Ruhe’ [stress in silence]. The aborigines may in time use their intelligence to become more civilized, but the soldiers at the front have abused theirs by reversing the course of civilization. In the trenches they have deliberately regressed to a prehistoric animality: ’unsere inneren Kräfte sind nicht auf Weiter-, sondern auf Zurückentwicklung gerichtet’ [our inner forces are not geared to development, but to regression] (p. 228). When in isolated moments he compares their present state to their past lives in normal human society, he can only marvel that such a radical adaptation has occurred.

In the description of the hand-to-hand combat following the French offensive Bäumer reports that he and his comrades have become ’gefährliche Tiere’ [dangerous animals] (p. 119). Seeing a prone French soldier’s eyes staring at him, he hesitates for a second, but then hurls a hand grenade at the man’s face, overwhelmed again by the instinct to slaughter rather than be slaughtered. In the German counter-attack an entrenching spade is used to cleave the features of an enemy soldier, and a bayonet is plunged into a Frenchman’s back. The impetus of battle has turned immature schoolboys into inexorable killers, ’zu Wegelagerern, zu Mördern, zu Teufeln meinetwegen’ [into highwaymen, into murderers, I suppose into devils]. How will such savage animals ever be able to resume a peaceful civilian routine? As Kropp points out (p. 101), ridding themselves of a state of mind in which killing has become a way of life will not be as simple a matter as taking off their socks. The extent to which normal human feelings have been overturned in the soldiers is revealed by Bäumer’s remark (p. 119) that they would kill their own fathers if they happened to be in the ranks of the advancing enemy. Later, observing the Russian prisoners of war during his leave, he reflects that they look like amiable German farmers. He has no quarrel with them, less so than with the German NCO’s, but some document signed at a distant table by obscure politicians has decreed that on the field of battle he should kill them remorselessly (p. 174). Murder, in peacetime the supreme crime, has become the supreme goal. Moral imperatives appear to have been reversed: Detering’s love of nature and of his home lead to his court-martial for desertion, and Berger’s sympathy for a suffering animal causes him to be mown down in a hail of enemy fire.

Earlier in the novel Bäumer remarks that the sadistic discipline of their military training had inured them to the horrors they were later to suffer: ’Wir wurden hart, mißtrauisch, mitleidlos, rachsilchtig, roh—und das war gut’ [we became tough, suspicious, hard-hearted, vengeful and rough—and a good thing too] (p. 59). The gains from their brutalisation are however outweighed by the losses. As adolescents they may enjoy the liberation from genteel propriety, the unabashed vulgarity about sexual and lavatorial matters, and the impossibility of personal hygiene. Yet in moments of reflection they know that the dehumanisation which they have undergone, their transformation into ’Menschentiere’ [human animals] (p. 79), has impoverished them, making them ’roh und traurig und oberflächlich’ [rough, sad, superficial] (p. 126). After being wounded Bäumer is ashamed when on the hospital train a young nurse offers him a bed with clean sheets; he feels like a dirty pig, unable to cope with this modicum of civilised existence (p. 209). How then would he manage with a lifetime of human decency? The war has suspended social and educational differences and made it possible to take revenge on bullies like Himmelstoß and on pompous autocrats like the teacher Kantorek. This measure of equality has, however, only been achieved by destroying individual identities, as if they were coins of various realms melted down into a uniform common currency (p. 226). They have all been reduced to nothing but soldiers, trained like circus animals to perform their military functions, forced into an ’Aufgeben der Persönlichkeit’ [surrendering our individual personalities], a loss of human dignity more degrading than that suffered by the most menial of servants (p. 56).

From the perspective of the life-and-death existence of the Flanders trenches they mock an authoritarian educational system obsessed with the encyclopaedic memorising of abstruse facts. What relevance to them has the structure of Schiller’s plays compared to the reality of a bayonet in the guts? Did Leer’s aptitude for mathematics save him from the shrapnel which tore away his hip? Yet such sarcasm derives from the bitterness of despair, and in their private moments soldiers like Bäumer realise that in jettisoning culture and intellect they have also lost a part of themselves as human personalities. During his leave he sits in his bedroom at home looking at the books, drawings, letters and pictures which had meant so much to him as a sixth-former, trying in vain to recover ’das Feuer der Wünsche … die Ungeduld der Zukunft, die beschwingte Freude an der Welt der Gedanken’ [the wind of desire … the impatience of the future, the soaring delight in the world of the intellect] (p. 159). The brutalising effect of the war has destroyed his emotional sensitivity and deprived him of his youthful hopes, dreams and ideals. He has no heart within him, only a ’schweren, toten Bleiblock’ [a heavy, lifeless lead weight]. Nothing matters but the facts (p. 55).

A Generation in Limbo

Bäumer’s generation has been denied a whole phase of their lives. In mental and psychological terms they have missed out the best of their adult years and grown old before their time. Thinking of Kantorek’s jingoistic description of them as the ’eiserne Jugend’ [iron youth] of Germany, Bäumer comments bitterly ’Wir sind alle nicht mehr als zwanzig Jahre. Aber jung? Jugend? Das ist lange her. Wir sind alte Leute’ [None of us is more than twenty. But young? Young men? That was a long time ago. We are old now] (p. 53). Whilst physically barely beyond puberty they have acquired the fatalism, the world-weariness and the readiness to compromise of the elderly. Like Prince Leonce in Büchner’s Leonce und Lena they have ’Den Frühling auf den Wangen und den Winter im Herzen’ [spring on their cheeks and winter in their hearts]. In fact Bäumer dreams of himself as ’der Soldat mit den großen Stiefeln und dem zugeschütteten Herzen’ [a soldier with big boots and a heart that has been buried alive] (p. 107). Later he makes a similar point by using two parallel images: ’Wir kennen Unterschiede wie Handler, und Notwendigkeiten wie Schlächter’ [we perceive differences only in the way tradesmen do and we see necessities like butchers] (p. 126); he and his mates have learned to base their actions on hard-bitten shrewdness and callousness. They have jumped straight to this premature cynicism from the early years of eagerness and good will, from the ’Bereitsein der Jugend’ [ready-for-anything world of youth] (p. 159). As young men at school they had felt

This tender and hesitant anticipation of adulthood was never fulfilled, however, for the war intervened. Now they have no desire to change the world or take it by storm, only to escape from it and themselves. They are shut off ’vom Tätigen, vom Streben, vom Fortschritt’ [from real action, from getting on, from progress] (p. 102), from that unquestioning energy and belief in progress, however naïve, which are the prerogative of the young.

In general these young men have a strong sense of being separated by a gulf from their own youth. During their training in 1916, as their boyish ideals were drilled out of them, their memories of the past had still been part of them and they had fought to retain them; now, at the end of the war, these ’Bilder des Früher’ [earlier images] (p. 124) are only a faint glimmer on the horizon, lost and unattainable. When Bäumer refers in this passage to the ’Landschaft unserer Jugend’ [landscape of our youth], he is thinking of a metaphorical landscape in which the topographical features are the experiences and sensations which he shared with his friends at school and which separated his generation from the world inhabited by their parents. Even if they could now be transported back into that youthful landscape, he concludes, they would be like tourists rather than natives, affectionately admiring the view but unable to relate to it. Sitting in his old bedroom Bäumer experiences a ’fürchterliches Gefühl der Fremde’ [a terrible feeling of isolation] (p. 160). He feels shut out of his own past, it has turned away from him. The loss of continuity, of any sense of belonging or identity, will evidently make it difficult or even impossible to integrate into normality after the war. For not only are he and others of his generation cut off from the past, they have no role in the future.

The peculiar social limbo in which they find themselves is analysed several times in the novel (especially pp. 54-55 and 240-41). The older soldiers have wives and homes and jobs, in short adult lives, which bind them to the past and provide a framework to which they hope to return. The generation following Bäumer and his class, not having taken part in the war, or at least not having been in the trenches long enough to be shattered by the experience, has its youth intact and can build a future for itself. Only the young men of his generation are aimless and superfluous, uprooted from their past and too demoralised and alienated from normal human society to face the future. At the time of their recruitment none of their interests and plans had amounted to a ’Daseinsform’, a purposeful way of life which might have survived the war. Now, after the enormity of what they have lived through, it seems to them absurd and repugnant to envisage settling into a civilian routine. They ought, says Bäumer, to do something extraordinary after the war; but he can think of nothing appropriate. What he seeks is a ’Daseinsmöglichkeit nach dieser Katastrophe aller Menschlichkeit’ [a reason for going on living after this universal catastrophe is over] (p. 174-75), some inspiring and purposeful future to compensate for the horror of the trenches; but the pacifist and egalitarian ideas which he entertains at this point remain too speculative and indefinite to constitute a coherent plan. He can gladly offer the dying Gérard Duval twenty years of his own life: ’nimm mehr, denn ich weiß nicht, was ich damit noch beginnen soll’ [take more, because I don’t know what I’m going to do with all the years I’ve got] (p. 194). It is no wonder that Bäumer dies with a look of composure and even relief on his face, for his death has exempted him from a future which the war had rendered him incapable of handling.

Perspective and Structure

Much earlier in the novel, when the group of soldiers had concluded that they were part of a whole generation without a future, Albert Kropp had summed up by saying ’Der Krieg hat uns für alles verdorben’ [the war has ruined us for everything] (p. 102). He and the others seem in the midst of the war to be endowed with a remarkable capacity to stand back from their situation and analyse its consequences. The reason is of course that Remarque is writing about 1918 in order to explain and come to terms with the problems of 1928. He has the advantage of a decade’s hindsight and knows about the predicament of the ’Heimkehrer’, the demobilised soldiers unable to settle down in the ensuing 1920s. As he claims in his prefatory statement, his aim is to describe the destruction of a generation by the war, ’auch wenn sie seinen Granaten entkam’. A novel apparently about the horror of the war turns out on closer analysis to be more about the difficulty of coping with the subsequent peace. As Alan Bance has demonstrated, Im Westen in many respects reflects attitudes prevalent in the Weimar Republic, such as the sense of powerlessness in the face of modern technology and the fear of social disintegration.9 Bäumer even predicts the disorientation which Remarque and the other survivors were to experience:

Such arguably anachronistic statements have led Hans-Harald Müller to suggest that Remarque is trying in this novel to provide a justification for his own drifting in the 1920s and for the failure before 1928 of his pre-war ambitions as a writer.10

Be that as it may, it is clear that the war itself, paradoxically, is not the focus of interest in Im Westen; and this fact also determines the form of the novel. Critics have frequently noted the absence of any proper plot in Im Westen. Alfred Antkowiak describes Bäumer’s narrative as a chain of loosely connected subjective experiences and, quoting a dissertation by Hans Joachim Bernhard, as a ’mosaic’, in which individual sections could be transposed without disrupting the logical train of events.11 Even the successive deaths of the group of soldiers do not represent turning points in this static narration, for they are seen as inevitable and registered mechanically. In fact there is hardly any sequence of cause and effect in Im Westen at all, only a shifting back and forwards from the front, during which there are repeated discussions and reflections on the significance and implications of the war. It is a structure, as Christine Barker and Rex Last put it in their biography of Remarque, of ’theme and variation’.12 Bäumer proceeds episodically and associatively, using flashbacks and memories and dreams like clips from a film in order to turn the issues over in his head. The emphasis is not on the external events of the war but rather on the states of mind which they engender.

Remarque was not alone in his generation in discovering that the war was remarkable less for death and horror than for the degradation of the human personality. Forty years later Carl Zuckmayer was to write in his memoirs that it was not the fear of death that had made life at the front in the Great War into a hell:

What is special about Remarque’s novel is that he shows with journalistic verve and immediacy the destructive effect of this dehumanisation and brutilisation on the personalities of those who were subjected to it. Writing in 1929 to General Sir Ian Hamilton, Remarque stated that his book was never intended to have any political message, either pacifist or militarist. ’I have not felt myself called upon,’ he maintained, ’to argue about the war… . I merely wanted to awaken understanding for a generation that more than all others has found it difficult to make its way back from the four years of death, struggle and terror, to the peaceful fields of work and progress’.14

Source

From Modern Languages 70, no. 1 (March 1989): 89-94. Copyright © 1989 by the Modern Language Association. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Notes