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Soaked in a festering cynicism

It’s a sad reality that All Quiet on the Western Front will continue to remain relevant in the foreseeable future. All the more reason to revisit this classic.
Last Updated 01 October 2022, 20:15 IST

When the news came through some days ago about Russia mobilising its forces and there were scenes of people rushing to airports and borders, it was impossible not to say that we’ve been here before. Too many times through history has this tragedy been played out. The powerful move the chess pieces, territory and power is ceded or lost, and with tongues ready to bully and lash out, young men are taken into the bowels of the war machine. Most will never be heard from again — they will fulfil their destiny as ghosts haunting battlefields.

I first read Brian Murdoch’s translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s German anti-war masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front in 2003, not too long after the USA invaded Iraq. Remarque’s classic of young men in the trenches in 1914-18 was as relevant 20 years ago as it is now. In fact, I can’t think of any point since its publication in 1929 when this slim, devastating novel hasn’t been relevant, its pages a brutal accounting of who exactly is the loser in the endless cycles of battles and invasions. The war strategies might change — trenches to tanks to air power to radar-guided missiles — but the result is the same. Loss, loss, and more loss.

The book opens with us straight by the side of the young German soldiers — who had just, a little time before, been schoolboys — as they change shifts and head off to their camp to eat. They are given bellyfuls of food and more than their allowance of tobacco because there’s been an error in supply logistics. In the wet and cold and stink of the trenches, any such good fortune isn’t questioned but gratefully received.

All Quiet on the Western Front is narrated by 19-year-old Paul Bäumer.

Along with the rest of his classmates, he’s pushed by the nationalistic speeches and goading of a schoolmaster, Kantorek, to enlist in the army. Bäumer is clear-eyed about those who cannot claim absolution for sending the young to fight the wars the old started:

“…there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in the way that was most comfortable for themselves. But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy.”

A novel like this on themes of trauma on the battlefield cannot have a happy ending, of course. There is a sad, slowly festering cynicism and deep anguish that courses through the prose — Remarque himself was a young soldier in the trenches and the book reads like a memoir because of his first-hand experiences in the mud and blood of Flanders.

All Quiet on the Western Front became a critically acclaimed bestseller. The literal translation of the original German title is ‘Nothing New on the Western Front’ but A W Wheen, Remarque’s first English translator, gave it its more poetic and potent title that has been used by translators ever since.

The book was also turned into a classic film by director Lewis Milestone in 1930.

The film infuriated the Nazis, with Goebbels disrupting its screenings in Germany. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Remarque found that he could no longer live in his homeland. The regime burned his works and he left for Switzerland. He moved countries and continents but eventually returned to Europe and died in Switzerland in 1970.

It’s a sad reality that All Quiet on the Western Front will continue to remain relevant in the foreseeable future. Those in power prefer ignoring what books like these say about their true nature when they should ideally be heeding the truths that are revealed in its pages.

The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.

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(Published 01 October 2022, 19:56 IST)

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