Study Guide to All Quiet on the Western Front

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, written in 1929 as a reflection of WWI. As a work considered to be historical fiction, All Quiet on the Western Front focuses less on the story of war and more on the mental and physical destruction of those involved. Moreover, as a WWI veteran himself, Remarque delivers authentic and raw accounts of war using various techniques. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Remarque’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

EARLY YEARS

Erich Maria Remarque was born in 1897 in Osnabruck, Westphalia. His family, of French descent, had come to the Rhineland after the French Revolution. In contradiction to later Nazi reports classifying him as a Jew, Remarque was raised a Roman Catholic. He attended the Gymnasium and was drafted into World War I at the age of eighteen. During the ensuing war years, he was wounded five times, on the last occasion seriously.

After the Armistice his first two jobs were teaching, which he hated, and stone-cutting, in his hometown cemetery, which he enjoyed. Later he was a test driver for a Berlin tire company.

Remarque’s literary career began with magazine articles and advertising copy. Later, he was assistant editor of Sportbild, an illustrated sports magazine.

HIS FIRST SUCCESS

It was during this assistant-editorship in 1929, that Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front. Its launching was not without irony. The first publisher approached by Remarque refused the story, and the second accepted with distinct reluctance. Twelve hundred thousand copies were sold in Germany alone. Translations and movie rights made Remarque a rich man and a vulnerable one.

REACTION

A tall blond athletic man, Erich Remarque was built like a halfback. He was a crack mechanic as well as a fine musician. He loved dogs, and was energetic and vivacious in company he liked. But he was shy to the point of avoiding strangers, and hated publicity. His fame actually drove him to retirement to Porto Ronco on Lake Maggiore in Switzerland.

LATER YEARS

Remarque hated Nazism as much as he hated war, and the Nazis retaliated by burning his books and making his exile permanent by depriving him of German citizenship. He came to the United States in 1939 and took up residence in Los Angeles.

OTHER WORKS

Later publications by Remarque include Arch of Triumph, Spark of Life and A Time to Love and a Time to Die. Further information on these works is given in the Bibliography at the end of this study.

BACKGROUND

Germany After World War I

All Quiet on the Western Front was produced against a background of war fatigue and disillusionment in a conquered country gripped by inflation and starvation, a country disillusioned with nearly half a century of Prussian brainwashing that had led it only to this. The German Empire had become a land exhausted by entirely new or terrifyingly improved weapons of war; men had been robbed of all individuality; the age-old military factors of bravery, enterprise, and skill had been rendered meaningless. Men of all nations, on both sides of the conflict, had been reduced, finally, to merely passive recipients of torture.

It was a time when Conservatives, Socialists, and Communists, instead of cooperating to make their new republic a success, sabotaged each other’s efforts. Intellectuals paraphrased Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to remind the people that their pious obedience to their country had created only the Kaiser and his drill sergeants. Writers took advantage of the floodgate flung open by military defeat to unleash a torrent of abuse and criticism of both patriotism and war itself. No longer were the heroic aspects of battle featured. Instead, the new literature stressed mud and sweat, hunger and thirst, blood, lust, crime, brutality, and destruction. In the end, these authors took refuge in satire, or, with their fellow artists, sought escape in the forms of exoticism, expressionism, and dadaism.

To understand such a situation more clearly, it is necessary to review briefly the spirit of Prussianism, so largely its cause, and the nature of those engines of destruction against which this spirit had flung the German people in a war that involved most of the Western world.

Prussianism

Even before the appearance of Bismarck, Prussia had twice appeared as a leading nation, if not the leader, in that multitude of states ruled by feudalism and Church in the land which later came to be known as Germany.

In the years immediately following the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), while still under the control of the disintegrating Holy Roman Empire, Germany had two ideals: unity and liberty. Hope for the first was seen in the eighteenth century in the House of Hohenzollern. Frederick the Great, by his conquests, by his substitution of the doctrine of service for that of divine right, and by his forty-six years of almost unbroken labor (1740-1786) was an inspiring leader who pointed the way to a modern state. It would be a state in contrast to the dynastic lands of the Hapsburgs, who ruled earlier in its history, and to neighboring nations, festering with idleness. In him was seen a ruler under whom men might become united and for the first time hear the appellation, “German,” with honor, affirming a native high culture and a cosmopolitan spirit, combined with a unifying military superstructure.

Imitators of the Prussian monarch sprang up in the German states. George P. Gooch comments, in Germany, that (before Frederick) “Nowhere in Europe was absolutism more repulsive . . .” and a satirist is quoted as writing, “The peasant . . . is like a sack of meal. When emptied, there is still some dust in it-it only needs to be beaten.”

Oddly enough, the first setback in Prussia’s rise to eventual power came at a time when the other German ideal, liberty, was first becoming a reality elsewhere. The French Revolution was hailed in Germany, as was Napoleon’s conquest of the Holy Roman Empire. But it was that same conqueror who also destroyed the Prussian army. Nevertheless, as Gooch writes, again in Germany, “The years which followed the catastrophe of Jena (1806) were a time not only of suffering but of hope.” Prussia’s defeat by France only strengthened the feeling of nationalism in Germany, and even converted Johann Fichte, who had been one of Germany’s most eloquent philosophical advocates of radical cosmopolitanism. In an address to the German nation, Fichte blamed all Germans for their collapse, and urged all to cooperate in reconstruction on a national level.

Again Germans looked to Prussia with their new patriotism and, by cooperating with Austria and Russia for the first time, Prussia justified their hopes. With their combined forces and that of the British, the French were driven from Germany and Napoleon finally was defeated at Waterloo, in Belgium, in 1815.

Prussia’s second setback was caused by the contradictory action of its king, Frederick William IV. Where his great grandfather had abandoned divine right for service, he now revived the former doctrine and, in 1849, made it his reason for refusing the emperorship of the Federation of German States offered to him by the Frankfort Parliament. With it he would have had to accept a constitution, and it was against his principles to rule as the will of majorities wished. He believed that princes only, and not the people, could choose their ruler, who must then rule, as Gooch writes, “. . . in accordance with the law of God . . . and his own unfettered discretion.” Opportunity did not knock again until the days of Bismarck, when it was fulfilled with “blood and iron.”

When William I reconsidered abdication because Count Otto von Bismarck consented to head the Ministry in 1861, not only Germany’s fortunes, but those of all of Europe and eventually of the world were to change.

Under his leadership, Austria and then France were to fall before a German war machine headed by the Prussian military. But even Bismarck was to prove unable to control the force he had created. With matchless diplomacy, he had arranged matters so that both Austria and France were without allies when they faced Germany. After the fall of France, however, the military annexed French Lorraine as well as German-born Alsace (1871), a move which is regarded as perhaps the most important mistake in Bismarck’s career. It was the French who, toward the end of Bismarck’s rule, supported the various divisive elements in the German Empire and who, indeed, agitated stubbornly against political restpoints of the masses and against the friendly relations sought by Bismarck between France and Prussia.

At the time, however, this “victory” was part of the wave of exultation which flooded an area that was once composed of feudal states overrun by war, an area which now had been transformed by a diplomatic genius into an empire. All but a few Germans were content at first to leave rule to a revered Emperor, an adored Crown Prince, and an Iron Chancellor. The people were not to regain a real voice in government for still another 50 years. During that time, Bismarck was to be dismissed by a new emperor (William II, in 1890) whose organized chauvinism was far more deadly than that of the undisciplined Louis Napoleon. Also, in that interval, there was to be another war, which, as Bismarck had prophesied, was to make the one of 1870 seem child’s play. This war, of course, was World War I. The age of “blood and iron” was to run away from its creator.

Under the Prussian military, Germans were transformed from poets, thinkers, and dreamers to victorious soldiers. A creed of culture was replaced by a faith in force.

Even before Bismarck, professorial members of the Prussian school had paved the way for imperialism by glorifying the Hohenzollerns as destined leaders. And after the advent of that Chancellor, the most famous member of this school carried its work still further. Professor Heinrich von Treitschke, known as “the Bismarck of the Chair,” spoke to all Germans throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century as he proclaimed the supremacy of power and the State. He argued that peace was immoral, advocated the duel as a training ground for war, and otherwise attempted to promote national military supremacy. So influential was he that he was elected to the Reichstag as early as 1871 and, although he died in 1896, has been accused of being one of the instigators of World War I.

True Prussianism, however, the background of death on the Western Front, was pictured more clearly early in the twentieth century by Professor Hans Delbruck even as he argued, apparently, for democracy. Delbruck thought that placing all power in representatives of the people was as erroneous as giving it all to the autocracy. The first he declared an impossibility, because a true majority could never be ascertained in elections where many never voted. And he cited Jena as proof of the folly of the second. The best government, he asserted, was the dual kind existing in Germany where the Constitution was a balance between Prince and Reichstag. But even Delbruck claimed that real rule lay in military command. And he acknowledged that the loyal...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Erich Maria Remarque
• 2) Detailed Analysis
• 3) Character Analyses
• 4) Critical Commentary
• 5) Essay Questions and Answers
• 6) Bibliography