Erich Maria Remarque, "All Quiet on the Western Front": Nazism – Collective Responsibility and Individual Option

Abstract

This study analyses the novel A Time to Love and a Time to Die by the anti-fascist writer Erich Maria Remarque. It deals with a specific representation of the individual of the twentieth century, that of the relationship between the heroic and the erotic, between the involvement on the public level of History and the private level of individual fulfilment. The novel illustrates the restructuring of the traditional categories of heroism and reveals the fact that in the past century, involvement in war was a matter of personal opinion, of consciousness, not one of duty or calling. My study aims at proving that this novel, although written in a serious, journalistic style, follows established patterns, as it is infused with two myths: that of initiation, closely related to a spiritual master, and that of love and the recovery of mankind's golden age through a cyclic catastrophe - the only way to cast off the horrors of Nazism.

Headnote

Abstract:

This study analyses the novel A Time to Love and a Time to Die by the anti-fascist writer Erich Maria Remarque. It deals with a specific representation of the individual of the twentieth century, that of the relationship between the heroic and the erotic, between the involvement on the public level of History and the private level of individual fulfilment. The novel illustrates the restructuring of the traditional categories of heroism and reveals the fact that in the past century, involvement in war was a matter of personal opinion, of consciousness, not one of duty or calling. My study aims at proving that this novel, although written in a serious, journalistic style, follows established patterns, as it is infused with two myths: that of initiation, closely related to a spiritual master, and that of love and the recovery of mankind's golden age through a cyclic catastrophe - the only way to cast off the horrors of Nazism.

Keywords: humanism, Nazism, twentieth century, individual option, the myth of initiation, the myth of the golden age

In the humanitarian and antifascist tradition of the German literature - Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Boll, Berthold Brecht, Wolfgang Borchert and Ernst Jünger - Erich Maria Remarque has been considered, due to his enormous success, the writer of a single book, All Quiet on the Western Front. Although unequal in value, his work is much more than that. It is a chronicle of the twentieth century, a "seismograph" of the great events seen from Germany, the country he left in 1932 for an exile of no return: World War I, the Weimar Republic, the crash, the ascent of Nazism, World War II.

With a plot covering only several weeks, A Time to Love and a Time to Die depicts the rapid collapse of the German army on the Eastern front, especially the allied bombing of Germany in 1944. Ernst Graeber, like his predecessor of World War I, Paul Baumer of All Quiet on the Western Front, finishes school and goes directly to the front. Facing the tough reality of war, he realises that empty rhetoric has poisoned his mind. This is just another war of parents fought by sons who have not grown up yet. Graeber's inner enlightenment does not occur all of a sudden, as it does in the case of Baumer who, once on the front, wonders what he is doing in the war; in Graeber's case, it is a process during which problems arise at times when depressing defeats have replaced heartening victories. Russia has put the German army to shame and the reflection on the causes of failure has arisen. Hence the attribute of bildungs, "a novel of personal development" (Murdoch, 2006: 173), with the inevitable act of becoming self-aware determined by the encounter with a providential being - a classical topos in the literature of initiation, like in Parsifal, where the young knight is sent to a hermit to ask for advice (Ibidem: 177). Pohlmann, the former religion and history teacher in disgrace with the Nazis, acts like a catalyst for Graeber. He does not give him solutions, but makes him discover them himself. The contact with his directing conscience, the military and political experience influenced by an older brother-in-arms, Fresenburg, the erotic experience guided by his own instinct and the... pressure of generalized death, as well as the direct observation of the actions taken by the Nazis and their supporters - all this has changed the way Graeber perceives the German soldier's role at the end of a world cataclysm called war. The major ideological issue of the novel concerns collective and individual responsibility, the difficulty, especially for a soldier, to avoid guilt when living in the Nazi state and being forced to fight for the Nazi regime. Graeber's generation, says Pohlmann, is absolved of guilt; it is the generation that has had no time to assume the present lucidly, since its representatives were intoxicated by the Nazi propaganda machine before they were able to judge things by themselves. But what happens when they start judging by themselves?

Although All Quiet... and A Time to Love... describe the horrors of war, neither of them is a re-enactment of war. They both internalize it, showing it first of all as an impact on man's destiny and especially as an attitude of the protagonist. From one novel to the other, however, Remarque changes from a writer of the lost generation to a homo politicus (Wagener, 2001: 103). In A Time to Love., the question of responsibility and obedience is debated under all its aspects, until Graeber has formed his own political conscience that he displays through an act of resistance. Killing Steinbrenner, his comrade and a Gestapo spy (a scene similar to the one in Arch of Triumph, when Ravic kills the Gestapo torturer Haake), is not only a way to avoid the execution of the presumed Russian partisans whom he is supposed to watch, but also his own protest against Nazism. The denouement, the fact that Graeber will be killed precisely by one of the prisoners he has released, is an example of bitter irony that is also part of the war "recipe", proving the absurd effects of the fight for survival under terror.

War as a Different World

A Time to Love and a Time to Die is an atypical war novel. In the narrative present, the main character spends too little time on the front and much more time at home, in a three-week leave. Symbolically, we never see soldier Graeber attacking, we see him only in defence. All circumstances lead to the preconceived idea that the novel does not contain enough narrative, but the front at home will prove to be more or less similar to the front in Russia, though without cannons and guns, but equally dangerous. Death rules everywhere, notices the soldier when he arrives in his hometown and finds that his house has been bombed and his parents are missing. He expects nothing else from his leave but to spend it alone and to meditate far from the war, to put order in his conscience that has started to wake up in the gloomy Russian steppes, but has been inhibited by the idea that any debate on this theme is useless and dangerous. Back in his country, the reality he faces is different and the feeling of guilt is for the first time expressed clearly in front of his ruined parents' house, the only "real" ruins among the thousands he has seen so far ("I too have dug graves", thought Graeber; many graves"). The interiorization of the empty house and the desolate town breaks any connection with the heavens, as a result of a mistake made in a ritual. The stairs of his parents' house evoke the degraded image of Jacob's ladder climbed no longer by angels, but by planes that have rendered the earth useless and turned it into a cemetery. Dissolving one's intimate space and losing one's roots connote the distortions occurring deep down in one's identity and induce the idea of a man who has been "thrown into the world": "Mother! My soul is empty. I have lost my head, I have lost my innards." The absolute orphan, left without parents on earth and in heaven, unable to make the weakest connection with his world, can only have existentialist experiences.

A broken human being, Graeber discovers a new feeling: love. In this novel, more than in any other book, love is the counterbalance to generalized death and his chance to mend both his soul and body, in a new representation of his self. In a catastrophic situation, his relation with a woman is at first only temporary - as is the Ravic-Joan Madou couple in Arch of Triumph - a friendly relationship between two comrades: you find someone you can share your vodka with in the evening, because it may be your last vodka. Or you can eat out together one night, because that may be your last night. In another novel about a love affair started during a soldier's leave, This Above All, by the English author Erich Knight, the love affair is as unexpected as in A Time to Love.... It starts from sex, from an absolutely temporary and unequivocal situation so typical of war times: picking up a girl one Saturday night for a quick mating ritual that both sides take as mere amusement without serious involvement. Under the circumstances and starting from this level of expectation, love can turn into a dangerous accident, as behind categories defined by "skirt", "trousers", "uniforms" lies man and his soul under various types of "camouflage". If this man is an intellectual, usually a complicated intellectual, he is undesirable. The psychology of love, as Remarque's novel shows, changes with the shaping circumstances, invalidating an entire mythology which seen under the magnifying glass of lucidity becomes naturalist materialisation. The love discourse is rendered in biological terms, under the sign of a temporary reality of the "let's see if it works" type; the protagonists always pay attention to gender stereotypes which they invalidate at the earliest opportunity. War has its merit in reminding people what authenticity means.

Remarque's novel insists upon the drastic changes of habits occurring during a crisis. In times of war, all seeming frivolities - a sumptuous meal, a fancy dress, a new hat that you don't actually need - are linked with an ultimate feeling and become naive attempts to restore normality and intimacy, even the festive aspect of life. To live a carefree life of luxury, the symbol of a "safe bourgeois existence" before the war, becomes a challenging adventure that requires huge efforts which in peace times would be considered ridiculous.

Only the solidarity between two survivors who don't have anybody else in the world links Graeber and Elisabeth Kruse, his former school mate. After her father is taken to a concentration camp, she becomes a prisoner in her own house, where her father's denouncer, Frau Lieser, a fervent Nazi supporter, has come to live as well. The "attraction pact" lacks any seduction strategies or generic patterns: Graeber admits that what he expects from his female companion is neither mirth, nor compassion, but complete honesty and reciprocity: "We should not delude each other. This is not an easy thing to do." War undermines the current notions of necessity and uselessness and interferes with the representations of gender identities. Even the main characters are debatable identities that keep changing from one day to another, from the days on the front to the days spent on leave, from the military uniform to civilian clothing, from the air-raid shelter to the space of intimacy. The current perception of sexual morality is also overturned: prostitution is seen as a "patriotic act" when soldiers are involved, while adultery is a matter of "self defence" if the life companion is missing - as Böttcher, Graeber's funny counterpart who wastes his leave searching for his missing wife, says. Generally, the more or less serious assertion that "the ten commandments are not for the military" shows the difference between war and peaceful times. Based on abolishing the rules that govern everyday existence, Roger Caillois compares war to the festivals of the primitive society. Both of them are images of the "primordial chaos. This is because both primitive festivals and war allow acts that otherwise would be considered sacrilege or unforgivable crimes: the former imposes incest, the latter recommends killing" (Caillois, 2006: 198-199).

In Remarque's novel, the major change that predetermines the whole range of overturned representations is that affecting the space-time perception marked by the suggestion of being a prisoner and its succession of externalizing and internalizing types of behaviour: confinement in all possible ways - from the concentration camp to the harsh conditions of an air-raid shelter - no future possibilities, the permanent need to hide, to depersonalize oneself, to turn into a chameleon. In the novel, war is configured as a physical and psychological reality so concrete and precise that it turns it into a special world caught in a network of oppositions: alive-dead, natural-artificial, biological-mechanic, empty-full. Space is reduced to a number of minimalist variants of a ghetto: the tomb-like room in the dark, the air-raid shelter, the common graves or the precarious shelters improvised among ruins by those left without a home, the hospital that, in any novel of this type, shows that war mutilates as much as it kills. Both from an objective and a subjective perspective, the image of the town is that of a huge grave covered in the dark veil of the blackout, in which a general wake is held and days are counted after the number of air raids. The novel builds the brutal image of an earth on which it is easier to die than to live. The open, natural space, the air, the wind, the moon, the trees are all part of the inaccessible dreams of the mole-people who, hidden in the dark, adjust gradually to the subterranean psychology and become troglodytes again, re-experiencing exacerbated egotism and the survival instinct, routine existence, general suspicion or denouncement that keeps you safe. Switzerland, the place to which Europeans traumatised by war flee in their dreams, is the country of light and, symbolically, Elisabeth's wedding gift is an album with images of Switzerland given to Graeber by Pohlmann. Light and food are two obsessive themes in the novel. It is not accidental that the first love scene between the two protagonists occurs in open air, following the revelation of having survived another disastrous bombing episode, and the vaulted earth that Graeber touches while making love to Elisabeth must be the equivalent of the shell hole he has experienced on the front.

To a great extent, A Time to Love... deals with food - one reason for which the novel has attracted criticism. Food becomes currency: the fanatical Nazi supporter Frau Lieser can be bribed with half a kilo of sugar; the pantry of Binder, Graeber's former school mate, now a kreisleiter ("county leader"), is the image of paradise; and the major concern of the new couple Ernst-Elisabeth is to gather food supplies for the next days. Love's psychosomatic expressions suffer fundamental changes: if, under normal circumstances, falling in love involves an "inner struggle", in war the idea of erotic happiness must correlate with that of nourishment. In a larger context, this problem relates to the absolutization of a bodily perception: "Any war experience is, above all, a bodily experience. In war, it is bodies that make use of violence and suffer it at the same time" (Audoin-Rouzeau, 2009: 329). In All Quiet., Remarque speaks about the reduction to the elementary as a consequence of dissolving the notion of personality:

The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation.

Drink is more than necessary, it is something more, something connected to life's cheerful side, praised be the wine, for it can make you see things differently. Turn each day into a celebration - this is the concrete meaning that the novel assigns to Carpe diem!, which is no longer a philosophy of life, but a philosophy of... the moment, reminding us that man is nothing but an ephemeral creature that should not despise "animal happiness". And the best reason to celebrate is that you are glad to be alive. If you are alive, you can celebrate all your anniversaries at a time, it is worth celebrating them like this, since the only time that exists is the present. The future, when approached, is "a kind of future", a projection you should speak about with fear, lest you might challenge fate. Only subjective perception can prolong the short love break and the couple's attempt to self-delusion is not only tearful, but also dramatic.

... and Love As a Digression in the Empire of Death

On analysing the critical and psychological realism with which the writer depicts "the tragic egotism [...] resulted from the unleashed desire to survive", Mihai Isbăşescu also underlines the less debated subtext of his novel, namely the trust in man's primary values: camaraderie, generosity and love (Isbăşescu, 1968: 450). In A Time to Love..., the theme of love as the way of restoring normality in men under all aspects, particularly the symbolical one, is the first explanation of the invigorating feeling that a work of horror fiction provides. Thanks to love, the novel is among the few exceptions in the twentieth-century war literature, especially the World War II literature, that are narratives focused on male characters. Remarque returns to the valid and well-established formula of "love in times of war" and, although he follows the realistic manner of writing, the huge gap between the intimate experience and the aberrant background moves the narrative into the sphere of mythical significances. Unlike Hemingway, for whom love, in A Farewell to Arms, was a form of evading any kind of involvement, for Remarque love is the expression of the desire to evolve, the Great Salvation not from death, but from dehumanization, the reason "to make a better future" (Sargeant, 2005: 95), a future in which the chance of the couple to conceive a child is also symbolical. A child planned to be born and grow up to rebel against all the bad things in the world. The American editor of the novel changed its title to A Time to Love and a Time to Die. He preferred a combination that would be both successful and underline the importance of the erotic theme along with the more "serious" themes like Germany during war or the impact of the Third Reich on the population.

Indeed the plot of the novel motivates the evolution of the young 23-year-old soldier from the convenient state of non-involvement to personal option through understanding and feeling and also through the assumption of both, which is a great act of courage. Graeber becomes aware of himself using both reason and feeling. From Pohlmann he wants to hear nothing else but the "truth", "what he should do", "where complicity starts", more precisely, "when does what people call heroism become murder?" This is the key question of the book. However, like any teacher that intends to teach his disciple how to live on his own, Pohlmann confirms what he has already suspected, that the answer lies within Graeber and everyone has to decide for themselves. Facing an "impossible solution" - he has to go back to war, otherwise he, his parents or Elisabeth will be shot; if he returns to the front, he will have to kill, not just soldiers, but also civilians like those he leaves behind. All Graeber is left with is life, life without purpose, life as it is, with what it has to offer. And this life lasts for the two weeks that have remained from his leave. When he finally "knows", he feels at peace with himself and waits for the evening, for the date with Elisabeth, "as if a truce has been decided upon." Despite his terrible despair, his love grows stronger following a simple logic, that of emptiness calling for fullness of life in compensation.

Yet in Remarque's novel, love, "the love of death" in works of fiction dealing with passion (as Denis de Rougement says about Tristan's love), has its basic meaning. It is not seen through a filter, but as "love of life", the most intense expression of vitality, as it gives the individuals the chance to leave the context and rediscover "the inborn kindness of the human being" existing in themselves. Death being the general context, at night, when the windows are open and you can see the moon, the naked bodies, the thought that you can use "your hands and arms to do something else than shoot or throw grenades" marks the return to innocence and the real age of people who have grown older, but have been deprived of the experience of youth. Food, drink, love, all obsessions, all excesses represent a picture of longing for "the lost paradise of animality", part of an innocent dream of the golden age. During the day, however, in the middle of the ruins of the town, the spell dies and the feeling of being expelled from the world returns. Seeing his face in a mirror, the absolute orphan identifies himself with his spectre, watches himself "objectified" on the background of generalized death. He sees himself haunted by death, a stranger whose face he does not recognise, devastated and fearful of the nothingness. Death as the dissolution of the human being is revealed in the most existentialist, concrete manner. The hero of the twentieth century is complicated, metaphysical, an inert Gilgamesh filled with anguish when seeing the decomposed body of Enkidu, his double. If what one calls heroism is nothing but murder and terror, death is completely meaningless; it is a sentence to Nothing. Through this we return to Gilgamesh and the civilising values that replace the heroic ones:

It was neither panic nor struggle, nor the spontaneous cry of life trying hard to protect itself, to be more vigilant - it was a kind of fear, hardly perceptible, persistent, cold, almost impersonal, a fear you could not send away because it was invisible and resistant and it seemed to have sprung from the void where huge, silent pumps sucked blood from the veins and life from the bodies. Graeber could still see his image in the mirror, but is seemed to him that soon it would become blurred, and its undulating edges would fade away and vanish, absorbed by the silent pumps, leaving behind the real and the short-lived, accidental materialisation named Ernst Graeber - and would return to the infinity that is not only death, but also something else, more terrifying: dissolution, decay, death of the ego, a meaningless whirl of atoms - nothingness.

In the realistic novel, the counterweight of death can no longer be the mythical search for immortality, but that for an anchor in the evanescent world that gives the individual his minimal essence and fills his empty self. The solution that a man without a past and without a future sees at hand is marriage, a marriage like in war, preceded by temporary commitments and practical arguments. However, when living under such terrible pressure, the other side of the coin is the discovery that love is not a sweet, but a heavy burden, that not being alone means being responsible for another life; the fear for the other's destiny comes to replace the fear of death that love renders insignificant. In times of war, this seems to be the most solid proof of love. In this way, Graeber will discover that the war at home is different, it two, three even for times more dangerous than on the front, because when guns are fired, the target is not only you, but also each of those who are close to you. Family is the chain hanging on everyone's neck and makes vulnerable once again. Moreover, paradoxically, when you are married you are even lonelier when you are physically alone. On the front, the light of love does not bring him comfort; on the contrary, it is the cruel mirror showing him how sickening the swamp he lives in is. The front and the leave he obtains, the death and the life he has recently found cannot be linked together, because reality has several facets. Sick at heart, torn by a terrible dilemma, Graeber is another devastated soul, another Apostol Bologa from a different, yet similar War. Back on the "Eastern front", the concept of "enemy" changes. SS Steinbrenner is a more dangerous enemy than the Russians taken as prisoners and, when forced to choose, Graeber kills the former. On a mythical level, this is the classical confrontation with the monster that ends the hero's initiation; on the realistic level, it is a fatal error, because the war machine, when stopped, becomes vulnerable, and ironically Graeber will be killed by one of the Russians he has just released, precisely the moment he experiences the feeling of having freed himself of any moral burden. Discovering love, Graeber also discovers that he is still alive, that he is still a man in a world threatened and perverted by death. This is both good and bad. In a fight, it is better to be alone. Hemingway thought the same and expressed his belief through Robert Jordan. For Remarque's character, love means much more, is the conversion to a new religion. If before he acted out of duty - a familiar excuse - and like a mechanism whose aim was to save his life, when he meets Elisabeth the situation becomes more complicated. Once life has regained him on its side, he is no longer able to kill. Women, as all heroic stories tell us, complicate man's straight and well-established relation with death and life. They make him uncertain, metaphysical, and inert. They deviate him from the right path he has chosen, they make him ponder over the matter of necessary death and question his own existence. In A Time to Love and a Time to Die, we rediscover, in the historical context of World War II and the twentieth century, the eternal story or becoming more human through love, meaning the shift from the vocation for death to that for life. This is not the only possible way. The Romanian hero Apostol Bologa becomes human though mystical revelation and discovers himself as a being who obeys the "Though shall not kill" commandment. In Remarque's works, women and love play the major guiding role. The woman is the connection with a normal utopia, she is peace, light, the pillar of life whose help the absolute orphan needs in order to project himself in the virtual, post-war world. If war destroys bridges, as Hemingway's novel suggests, women as anchors in the river of men's evolution are the only beings who can re-establish the connection with the earth.

It is not difficult to notice the mythical scheme of this serious novel, though it is often naturalistic and mostly journalistic in style: the journey home is the journey to the hero's self that requires passing through certain evolutionary stages: death and spiritual rebirth. To be reborn, one has to die first, to become the First Man, the absolute orphan without identity, past or future, without a place in this world. This also explains Elisabeth's destructive desire to see her house ablaze, so that she can start everything from the very beginning under the most benign circumstances: in open air, in a church yard or the garden of the Witte restaurant, a symbolic oasis in the ash desert where no ruins can be seen. One should notice here the mythical need of universal regeneration through mankind's disappearance and reappearance. This desire is materialised in the "eternal return" scenario. According to this scenario, says Mircea Eliade, "life cannot be restored, but only re-created [author's emphasis] through repetition of the cosmogony" (1999: 81), which, despite all expectations, leads to an "optimistic character" reduced to "a consciousness of the normality of the cyclical catastrophe, to the certainty that is has a meaning and, above all, that it is never final" [author's emphasis] (Ibidem: 88). Remarque's novel also conveys the idea that the totally compromised cycle must be replaced with a new one that has the potential of a new beginning, that the whole prestige of primordial creation is concentrated in the surviving and pure archetypal couple, able to start the world from the very beginning under much better circumstances. Seen from this perspective, A Time to Love... becomes an allegory of Nazism as an Apocalypse of humanity, and the myth surrounding the plot is a form of rejecting a perverted History that brings nothing else but misery. Despite its tragic, absurd end, the novel conveys a general humane message expressed by a stateless man like Pohlmann: "If there comes a time when you lose trust in your own country, you should anchor your hopes in the rest of the world. Solar eclipses are always possible, but an endless night isn't." The solution of the eternal return to modern times lies, if not in time, than in time's memory, where mankind's consciousness can be rediscovered. One must only ask the right question. Like a new Parsifal, Graeber abandons obedience and puts the question that can restore truth and salvation and hope in mankind's regeneration.

References

REFERENCES:

Caillois, Roger, Omul şi sacrul (Man and the Sacred), 2nd edition revised, translated from French by Dan Petrescu, Bucharest, Nemira & Co, 2006.

Frevert, Ute, Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard (coord.), Omul secolului XX (The Man of the 20th Century), translated by Maria-Magdalena Anghelescu, Iaşi, Polirom, 2002.

Mihai Isbăşescu, Istoria literaturii germane (A History of German Literature), Bucharest, Scientific Publishing House, 1968.

Mircea Eliade, Mitul eternei reîntoarceri. Arhetipuri şi repetare (The Myth of Eternal Return. Archetypes and Repetition), translated by Maria Ivănescu and Cezar Ivănescu, Bucharest, Univers Enciclopedic, 1999.

Murdoch, Brian, The Novels of Erich Maria Remarque: Sparks of Life (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture), New York, Camden House, 2006.

Sargeant, Maggie, Kitsch & Kunst: Presentations of a Lost War, Bern, Peter Lang, European Academic Publishers, 2005.

Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Masacre. Corpul şi războiul (Massacres. The Body and the War), in Jean-Jacques Courtine (coord.), Istoria corpului (A History of the Body), vol. III, Mutaţiile privirii. Secolul XX (Mutations of Sight. The 20th Century), translated from French by Simona Manolache, Mihaela Arnat, Muguraş Constantinescu, Giuliano Sfichi Bucharest, Art Publishing House, 2009.

Wagener, Hans, Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues - Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben: Ein Autor, zwei Weltkriege, in Ursula Heukenkamp (ed.), Schuld und Sühne?: Kriegserlebnis und Kriegsdeutung in deutschen Medien der Nachkriegszeit (1945-1961), Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, Issue 50.1, Amsterdam - Atlanta, Editions Rodopi B.V., 2001.

Source texts:

Remarque, Erich Maria, Pe frontul de vest nimic nou, (All Quiet on the Western Front), translated in Romanian by Eman. Cerbu, Foreword by Const. Măciucă, Bucharest, Literature Publishing House, 1965

Remarque, Erich Maria, Soroc de viaţă şi soroc de moarte (A Time to Love and a Time to Die), translated in Romanian by Eman. Cerbu, Bucharest, Literature Publishing House, 1966.