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Review of the work

EM. Remarque

"On western front no change"

Completed the work

II year student of International Economic Relations

5 academic group

Parshakova V.A.

Scientific supervisor:

Art. teacher

Novikov D.V.

“This book is neither an accusation nor a confession. This is only an attempt to tell about the generation that was destroyed by the war, about those who became its victims, even if they escaped from the shells.”

(Erich-Maria Remarque)

I chose this particular work for review because two years ago it made a huge impression on me. This is my first book by Remarque, the first book about war in general. Later there was “Farewell to Arms!” Ernest Hemingway, Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington. But it was this novel that shook me to the core, chilled me to the bone, caused disgust, pain and compassion. Knowing that war is a nightmare is one thing, but knowing and feeling are completely different things.

The novel tells about what the young soldier Paul Bäumer and his comrades experienced and saw at the front of the First World War. The narration is told from the perspective of a German, which means “Fritz”, “enemy”. But you read and think: what kind of enemy is he? The image of a soldier turns into an ordinary person, just as tortured by the war, the trenches, the fear of death, just like our Russian soldier. Since childhood, this small seed of hatred for everything German was nurtured in us, because we were on opposite sides of the trenches. But Remarque shows reverse side medals. Everyone was brave, everyone was courageous, everyone fought for their Motherland, for their family, for an idea. But just what are these ideas? Why did they, twenty-year-old boys, shed blood for other people's ideas? “I am young - I am twenty years old, but all I have seen in life is despair, death, fear and the interweaving of the most absurd thoughtless vegetation with immeasurable torment. I see that someone is setting one nation against another and people are killing each other, in a mad blindness submitting to someone else’s will, not knowing what they are doing, not knowing their guilt. I see that the best minds humanity invent weapons to prolong this nightmare, and find words to justify it even more subtly. And together with me, all people of my age see this, here and here, all over the world, our entire generation is experiencing this...” There is no patriotism, no high ideas - nothing that would somehow justify this massacre. This is just a meat grinder, where people are no longer people, but mechanical killers, who have dulled all feelings except fear and the instinct of self-preservation. Multi-day offensives, when all around there is only fire and earth, blood and suffering, severed body parts and decaying corpses of those who had just been their friends. Yesterday these guys were still sitting at school desks, and today they are suffocating in the trenches from asphyxiating gas, blown up by mines... It is difficult to survive, difficult not to go crazy, but it is even more difficult to imagine life after the war in which there is no place for you. This is the "lost generation". remark front war soldier

Remarque does not try to justify either the horrors of the war, or its consequences, or even Germany, which unleashed it. He paints a picture of life at war: this is how it was. And wild details, and blood, and dirt, and death, and pain - this is not the author’s imagination and not savoring at the request of the public. This is war. War through the eyes common man, war through the eyes of a soldier who gradually becomes indifferent to what ideals guided those who sent him to certain death.

This is war, again war. Actually, always somewhere there is a war going on. We divide eras into pre-war and post-war times. We say “Never again...”, but everything repeats itself again and again. World War II, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the war in Croatia, Kosovo, the Afghan War, Chechnya, the Iraq War - history, modern history, becomes again a time of war.

Today, when pacifism has again become a popular trend in European socio-philosophical thought, and reality is not particularly encouraging in terms of maintaining peace on the planet, Remarque’s works and his socio-political beliefs are again very popular. The significance of Remarque’s works in this regard cannot be ignored. He was a consistent and militant (by his own admission) pacifist, and this makes him very relevant today. Having chosen a person as a starting point, leading a narrative outside of political and philosophical-political paradigms, Remarque gives impetus to create a general philosophical position, showing what a person does not change: the search for humanity in any situation, the search for love as salvation. Only by preaching humanity and believing in it, processing the humanistic experience of previous generations, can humanity save itself not only from the loss of socio-philosophical guidelines, but also from direct physical destruction. No matter how absurd the reality is: “People were told: you can’t kill. But they were also told: to hit, you need to aim well; they can only be saved by doing something, trying to consciously find a way out.

Remarque never considered himself a member of any literary and philosophical movement, but the direction of his works is obvious. A person is forced to look for a solution to the problem of being alone, essentially left alone with the whole world, or rather, against the whole world. Somewhere on a subconscious level, at the level of instincts, a person knows that deliverance will come, this nightmare cannot continue forever. And then for the survivors who have lost all sorts of social and philosophical guidelines, the question arises of finding oneself. According to Remarque, only an analysis of one’s past can help this; a person cannot live without history, no matter how gloomy it may be. “If war has become an integral part of humanity and human history, then its evidence, memories, warning signals are needed. First of all - literature... We need something that would give an idea of this multifaceted monster and what it does to people.”

Remarque was a contemporary of Sartre, Camus, Jaspers, Heidegger and many other existential philosophers, but he never entered into purely philosophical debates, being essentially one of the most widely read literary existentialists in the world. There is a lot of philosophy in Remarque's stories. And philosophy is a timeless concept. The plots may change, but the ideas remain the same. You can like Remarque or not, read or not read, but one cannot deny his influence on the development of humanistic thought in Europe in the twentieth century. His novels are simply universal in terms of a person’s knowledge of himself.

So far this is the most morally difficult book I have ever read. It is necessary that everyone read it - and that there will never be a war again.

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Part 1. War and peace in the lives of the heroes of the novel

Known huge amount memories of this war. Historians are usually more interested in the memoirs of politicians, scientists, and military personnel. A works of art, written by contemporaries and participants of the First World War, give the reader the opportunity to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of life of people of that time. Such is the novel by E.M. Remark: “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

The novel by the German writer E.M. Remarque “All Quiet on the Western Front” requires, in my opinion, a more philosophical than emotional attitude. Even the style, style, and manner of the author’s narration speak about this: leisurely, abstractly, even seemingly indifferently, as if from the outside, he talks about one of the most terrible trials that can befall a person in life - about war .

And from this point of view, Paul Bäumer, Tjaden, Stanislav Katczynski, Haye Westhus, Albert Kropp, Müller, Leer, Detering - the heroes of the novel - are the most remarkable and happy people who managed early, in a very short period of time, to experience life and understand the main thing in it.

The main character of the novel is Paul, an 18-year-old German drafted to the front. He and his friends, classmates and colleagues are forced to fight not only with opponents, but also with those inhuman the conditions in which they found themselves. The pages of the novel tell how Paul moves with his squad through positions, goes home on leave, returns to the front, is wounded, ends up in the hospital and ends up at the front again. And it seems that there is no end to war, death, suffering, that there is no way out. Paul is killed in October 1918. And, perhaps, this outcome is natural. Paul and his peers have nothing behind them but war, and that’s why they are lost generation .

Remarque's heroes were unlikely to be copied from real models, and, of course, neither Kemmerich, nor Kat, nor Paul himself existed in life. However, these images make us understand what the heroes of a senseless, terrible war were like - people who wanted peace and defended their fatherland. Heroism in this war was apparently measured not by the number of successful battles and victories won, but by how much the soldier was able to remain human.

Everything, as we know, is known through comparison; You can truly know what heaven is only by being in hell. To Paul Bäumer and his colleagues, their entire pre-army, pre-war life seemed nothing less than paradise, especially since human memory has the ability to store only good things in its archives, extracting this good even from seemingly the darkest moments of the past life. Missing the lost paradise in the hell of war, the heroes of the novel are only alive with the hope of finding this paradise again by returning home. And here there is a very subtle psychological point: if in the army, in the war, they were disappointed in nationalist, chauvinistic ideas, in their teachers, politicians, orators, in the state, and finally, then in peaceful life an even more bitter disappointment awaited them: heaven , it turns out, no!

However, Paul Bäumer comes close to the idea that paradise is lost to him forever. “...We will no longer be able to settle down. Yes, they won’t understand us - after all, before us there is an older generation who, although they spent all these years with us at the front, already had their own family home and profession and will now again take their place in society and forget about the war, and are growing up behind us a generation that resembles us as we used to be; and for it we will be strangers, it will push us astray. We don’t need ourselves, we will live and grow old - some will adapt, others will submit to fate, and many will not find a place for themselves. Years will pass, and we will leave the stage."

But still, Paul still has hope for finding the lost paradise: “It cannot be that this will go away forever - the warm, gentle breath of life that stirred our blood. An unknown, languid, impending, rapturous premonition of getting closer to a woman. It cannot be that all this will disappear under hurricane fire, in the throes of despair and in soldiers’ brothels,” he calls to himself, to his heart, to his soul main character novel.

That is why Remarque felt sorry for his heroes: most of them, including Paul Bäumer, died with the hope of returning to the lost paradise.

“...He (Paul Bäumer - my addition) fell face forward and lay in a sleeping position. When they turned him over, it became clear that he must not have suffered for long - there was such a calm expression on his face, as if he was even pleased that everything ended that way.”

We still had the opportunity to observe Paul Bäumer in peaceful life, during his vacation. So what?! He cannot feel like he was before, he cannot imagine himself in the future. He can barely cope with himself in the present, restraining himself when meeting with a rear major - a martinet, with the inhabitants of his hometown, who can, so to speak, think big in terms of strategy and tactics of military operations.

Paul can’t wrap his head around how it’s possible to live a normal, familiar life here, in the rear, when shells are exploding THERE, people are being killed THERE, soldiers are being gassed, and stabbed with bayonets. Everything is indignant and seething inside Paul, but at the same time he has no strength or desire to explain anything to people. For them - on the Western Front - there is still a positional war going on, but it would be necessary, as one of the ordinary people thinks, to go on the offensive; finally, it’s time, they say, to give these Frenchmen the heat. For them, there really is no change on the Western Front, even if thousands of people have died during this time. “I shouldn’t have come on vacation!” – Paul Bäumer concludes...

Thus, the hero concludes that war and peace exist only in war; in peaceful life there is no place for this topic.

Part 2. Reflections on war and peace by the heroes and the second novel

Erich Maria Remarque volunteered for the front in 1916, he himself experienced everything that they experienced him literary heroes. Hence the realism with which the author describes the war and soldier’s life; hence his seemingly tired, unhurried, seemingly indifferent narrative. When the reader of “All Quiet on the Western Front” mentally imagines pictures of the war, hospitals, and simple soldier’s life described in the novel.

In his subsequent novels, such as “The Return”, “Three Comrades”, which can in principle be considered a continuation of the novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” discussed here, Remarque tried to tell about the fate of the soldiers who survived the war and returned home. The voice of the author, the voice of the narrator. And the one who tells all this seems to you to be deeply unhappy, physically and mentally wounded, coarsened, but at the same time a kind and surprisingly humane person.

And if he speaks in the same, even, almost indifferent voice about how people without feet, on only their stumps, ran to attack for another ten meters and about how best to deal with soldiers’ linen lice, then this is only because he emotions, his personal grief, personal tragedy reached their highest point, unnoticeable to the average person. This is akin to grief without tears - the most severe grief. The author conveys the thoughts of soldiers conscripted into the army - peasants, artisans, workers; and they don’t care about geopolitics, they just need to know why they are risking their lives, and they cannot find the answer to this question.

The war dealt the main blow to young people who did not yet have “roots.” They felt unnecessary even to themselves.

The war seems completely meaningless to these young soldiers, because no one can explain why it is going on, what its reasons are. The heroes of the novel are led to a conversation about the meaning of war by a meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who came to the regiment to award the soldiers with the “Iron Crosses”. The Kaiser does not seem as majestic as a ruler responsible for starting a world war should be, he seems person, the same as soldiers, only occupying a different social niche. The soldiers do not want to believe that the Kaiser could want this war. Why are soldiers at the front? They defend the fatherland, and their enemies defend the fatherland, but everyone understands that there are no rightists in this war, and there cannot be. So why sit in a dirty trench and put your life in danger? Remarque's heroes are trying with all their might to remain human, but during the battle the soldiers become “automata,” “ wild animals", which allows them to save themselves and their lives.

The First World War claimed a huge number of lives, more than any war before it. Remarque depicts many deaths in his novel. Here we can again trace the pacifist tendencies of this work. Before our eyes, the hero’s childhood friends, recruits, are dying, we see death on the battlefield, in the hospital, death from gas... Death in war is taken for granted, and it seems that it is impossible to mourn everyone, and from unbearable grief or fear you can go crazy. mind. Death becomes familiar to the heroes of the novel. And this is one of the most terrible results of the world war. A person who constantly sees mutilated corpses, who sees loved ones die, is unlikely to be able to live in peace after the end of the war. Therefore, for many, the fear of peaceful life turns out to be even stronger than the fear of death. Remarque did not leave any of his heroes alive, perhaps because from the very first pages he declared the generation of war participants lost, and denied them the right to a future as people whose “knowledge of life boils down to death.”

Conclusion

The First World War had no idea to die for. It did not live up to politicians’ hopes for a quick outcome, but became only “the collapse of everything human.” The only good thing that the author finds in this war is front-line partnership. The camaraderie of people committed to each other, but at the same time knowing that they could lose each other at any moment, resigned to this thought; people who do not understand what they are fighting for, but who are aware of the high cost of each battle. Last pages The novels show that nothing held a person in that war; desertion did not seem a shame - after all, it is much more natural to be homesick than to wait for one’s death. It is much more patriotic to cultivate your native land than to sit in a trench and follow meaningless orders from commanders.

Remarque's novel gives us the opportunity to learn about how people themselves thought of themselves in this war. In literature Soviet period there is often an opinion that the heroes of the novel are marked stamp of passivity, doom, what they are victims and passion-bearers, not fighters. However, perhaps, Remarque’s heroes can still be called fighters, fighters not for some high ideals, but for own life, for returning home as people capable of moving on with their lives. A man in war is not a German, a Frenchman, an Englishman or a Russian, he is not a peasant, an artisan, a teacher or a student, a man here is a friend or a stranger, a commander or a private. It is in fiction a concept familiar to us army breaks down into specific people-personalities.

According to Remarque, every person in a war plays his own role, he is necessary in it, despite the fact that the justice of this war and its meaning are in doubt. But at the same time, war depersonalizes, and behind each character depicted by Remarque there are thousands more like him. One person is unlikely to be able to influence the course of military operations. A person fulfills his social function even in war; he is obliged to defend his fatherland, and no one doubts this. Although, moving away from generally accepted ideas about the honor of a soldier, Remarque seeks to affirm the right of every person to choose and, as already mentioned, does not condemn desertion.

There have been, are and will be wars. Moreover, it is quite possible that the next world war will wipe out all of humanity from the face of the Earth. Cruel, predatory, with a lot of blood, fear, horror, death. And there is no stronger drug, because it enters not through a vein, lungs or any other organ, but directly, through the soul, powerfully absorbing the person entirely. Forever. This is how people of war are born. This is how entire generations of people are born, for whom the theme of love and death is not abstract.

List of used literature

1. Foreign literature 20th century /Ed. L.G. Andreeva.- M., 2006. – 237 p.

2. Zasursky Y., Mikeladze N., Vannikova N. Foreign literature of the 20th century. 1914-2000. Educational and methodological manual M., 2009 – 483 p.

3. History of foreign literature of the late 20th century / Ed. L.G. Andreeva. – M., 2008 – 294 p.

4. History of foreign literature of the 20th century / Ed. V.N. Bogoslovsky Z.T. Civil. - M., 2008 – 284 p.

5. Pavlova N.S. Typology of the German novel. 1900-1946. M. 1982

History of foreign literature of the late 20th century / Ed. L. G. Andreeva. – M., 2008 – 294 p. - With. 24

Zasursky Y., Mikeladze N., Vannikova N. Foreign literature of the 20th century. 1914-2000. Educational and methodological manual M., 2009 – 483 p. - With. 43

History of foreign literature of the 20th century / Ed. V. N. Bogoslovsky, Z. T. Grazhdanskaya. - M., 2008 – 284 p.

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History of foreign literature of the late 20th century / Ed. L.G. Andreeva. – M., 2008 – 294 p. - With. 134

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Foreign literature of the 20th century / Ed. L. G. Andreeva. - M., 2006. – 237 p. - With. 154

Erich Maria Remarque(real name Erich Paul Remarque) was born in 1898 in the city of Osnabrück. His father was the owner of a small bookbinding shop. Remarque studied at the local gymnasium, but did not graduate from it, since in 1915 he was drafted into the army and remained in the trenches of the Western Front until the end of the war. Was wounded five times. After demobilization, he completed teaching courses opened by the government of the Weimar Republic for former soldiers. For a year he taught in one of the villages near the Dutch border. But soon the future writer became disillusioned with this work: school programs did not agree with his ideas about life.

Having given up teaching, Remarque returned to Osnabrück. The difficult years of inflation came, and he took on any job - cutting stones in the cemetery, playing the organ in the church of a mental hospital, wandering around the country. In 1923, Remarque moved to Berlin. He is a test driver at a company that produces car tires, then a journalist at the Hugenberg newspaper concern. Thanks to his literary talent, Remarque quickly advanced in this field in 1928-1929. already held the post of deputy editor of the popular magazine “Sport im Bild”.

Remarque’s first published work (not counting his youthful poems) was “On Mixing Fine Vodkas” in 1924. It was a weak book, which went almost unnoticed, like other early literary efforts. Fame came to him when he published the novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” in 1929. This relatively small book has occupied a special place in German and world literature. Within one year, its circulation in Germany reached 1,200 thousand copies. Translations into most of the world's leading languages brought this figure to 5 million. The reason for such a tremendous success is the extraordinary truthfulness of the depiction of the terrible everyday life in the trenches. In the war that Remarque paints, there are no waving banners, no magnificent feats, but only blood and dirt in the trenches, and short days of respite in the front line. Remarque was not the first to expose the crime of war. Many artists before him did the same - first of all, Henri Barbusse in his famous “Fire”. However, Barbusse conceptualized war, first of all, as a social phenomenon, and this is the significance of his book. Remarque portrayed war as an individual experience. His attention is drawn to the psychology of the heroes, their emotions, since he wants to show the war as its participants saw it - that generation of young Germans “who were destroyed by the war, who became its victims, even if they escaped from the shells.”

Remarque's next book is the novel “Return” (1931). This is a story about those who, having survived the war, were crushed by the world. In 1932, Remarque, due to deteriorating health, left for Porto Ronco. Here he is caught by the news of the Nazi coup. Fascist rulers burned Remarque's books. And later they deprived him of German citizenship. Living in exile, Remarque did not take part in the anti-fascist struggle and avoided emigrant organizations. He worked for Hollywood, especially in connection with the film adaptations of his works. Only in 1937, after six years of silence, did Remarque publish the novel “Three Comrades”, first in the USA in English translation, and then in 1938 in a German émigré publishing house. The book begins in 1928. Its main characters are Robbie Lokamp (the story is told on his behalf), Otto Kästner and Gottfried Lenz - front-line comrades who now jointly own a small car repair shop. The social background is somewhat vague, specific signs of place and time are erased, and the circle of the narrative is extremely narrowed. But the artist managed to capture the main features of life in the German capital in the years preceding the victory of fascism - this feverish rhythm, this unbearable feeling of the unsteadiness of the ground disappearing from under one’s feet, the aching pain of hopelessness and growing discontent.

In the novel “Three Comrades” the features were determined artistic manner writer, that specific coloring of his works, which can be called “Remarque’s”. Remarque's world is the world of “real men”, strong, brave, restrained. Behind them is the difficult school of world war, the path of suffering, disappointed hopes and overthrown idols. This made them a little cynical, rude, stingy with words, and weaned them from excessive enthusiasm. But under the thin layer of ice that has shackled the souls, there lurks an unspent reserve of hot feelings, just waiting for a reason to break out. This reason is Robbie's love for Pat.

At the beginning of 1939, Remarque left for the USA, to Los Angeles and in 1942 accepted American citizenship. During the Second World War, the artist created two novels - “Love Thy Neighbor” (1940) and “ Arc de Triomphe” (1946), which depict the fate of German emigrants.

But, hating fascism and feeling contempt for the weak bourgeois democracy, Remarque does not accept socialist ideas. He remains true to his “noble individualist”, “a romantic, devoid of illusions.” It is precisely this hero who stands at the center of the next book - the novel “Arc de Triomphe”. He calls himself Ravik. Possessing an iron will and calm courage, Ravik was not broken by either the concentration camp or emigration. But he withdrew into himself and became a cruel, cold man of action. Loneliness is not only Ravik’s destiny, but also his life program.

In the novels of the period of the Second World War, a new hero appears for Remarque - a young man of the post-war generation, whose character is shown in development and formed under the influence of the life of Europe in the 30s. The manner of storytelling also changes. The first-person narrative gives way to the author's narrative.

Years after the end of the Second World War, Remarque turns directly to the anti-fascist theme. In 1952, he published the novel “Spark of Life,” which depicts one of the Nazi concentration camps. In 1954, Remarque created another novel, “A Time to Live and a Time to Die,” which is one of the culminating points of his creative biography and again touches on the problems of war.

In 1954, Remarque moved to Europe. The writer spends months in Germany, observing the life of the country. And much of what he sees reminds him of the early years of the Weimar Republic. Such a comparison not only helped Remarque understand old mistakes, but also prompted the artist to issue a warning addressed to German youth. This is how the novel “Black Obelisk” arose, a book that tells about the past, but is aimed at the present.

Remarque returns to the early 20s, to the days of his favorite heroes' youth. The narration is told on behalf of the former soldier Ludwig Bodmer, who serves in a company that manufactures tombstones. The senior owner of the company is Georg Krol, a front-line comrade of Ludwig. Both of them are making desperate efforts to survive in an environment of crisis and inflation.

“Black Obelisk” is unusually rich in autobiographical material, the book does not have a clear plot core, there is relatively little action in it, the main fabric of the novel consists of reflections and dialogues. This compositional structure stems from the task of rethinking the path that the German intelligentsia followed between the two world wars, and raising the question of the very meaning and purpose of human existence. In the same 1956, Remarque wrote the play “The Last Stop”. Until now, he has never tried his hand at this genre, however, the experience was unsuccessful.

In 1959, Remarque published the novel “Life on Borrow” in the Hamburg magazine “Crystal”. The reader again comes into contact with the atmosphere of a high-mountain tuberculosis sanatorium, already familiar to him from “Three Comrades,” again before his eyes racing car. On it, professional racer Clerfe arrives at the sanatorium and meets a terminally ill girl, Lilian. She goes “down” with him, wanting to finally enjoy the joys of life. Plot basis books are the love of heroes. Its ideological center is the metaphysical problems of life and death.

In his last two novels, “Night in Lisbon” and “Shadows in Paradise,” Remarque returned to proven themes - the image tragic destinies German anti-fascist emigration.

Seriously ill, having suffered several heart attacks, Remarque lived in his home in Switzerland in the mid-60s, received almost no one, and was reluctant to give interviews to the press. He's in a hurry. According to him in my own words, he had little time left, but he wanted to finish the novel. This novel - “Shadows in Paradise” - was published in 1971. Almost a year after the writer passed away.

E.M. Remarque occupies a special place in modern German literature. He never joined any direction. He has his own range of problems, his own “Remarque” heroes, his own way of seeing and drawing reality. However, many critics believe that if Remarque had remained the author of only one novel - “All Quiet on the Western Front” - then his mark on German and world literature would be considered more significant. Since with each subsequent work he, in the eyes of these critics, shifted more and more definitely towards what is commonly called “fiction”. “All Quiet on the Western Front” was a true masterpiece of the writer (1929)- an amazingly simple and truthful book about the war, about those of its victims who went down in history as the “lost generation.” This is the story of the murder in war of seven classmates, poisoned by chauvinistic propaganda in the schools of the Kaiser's Germany and who went through a real school in the hills of Champagne, near the forts of Verdun, in the damp and dirty trenches of the Somme. Here the concepts of good and evil were destroyed, moral principles were devalued. In one day, the boys turned into soldiers, only to be senselessly killed soon after. They gradually realized their terrifying loneliness, their old age (although each of them was no more than twenty) and doom: “there is only one way out of the cage of war - to be killed.”

The leading theme in the novel is the meaninglessness of war, and is recognized by its heroes as a simple truth: the one you killed is not your enemy, he is just as unfortunate. Paul peers at the documents of the French printer Gerard Duval, whom he killed, and at a photograph of his wife and daughter. “Forgive me, comrade! - he says. - We always see the light too late. Oh, if only we were told more often that you are the same unfortunate little people as we are, that your mothers are just as scared for their sons as ours, and that you and I are equally afraid of death, we die in the same way and suffer the same pain ! Paul would be the last of his seven classmates to be killed, in October 1918, “on one of those days when the front was so quiet and calm that the military reports consisted of only one phrase: “All quiet on the Western Front.”

In Remarque's novel there is a cruel truth and the quiet pathos of rejection of war, which determined genre features book as a psychological executioner story, although, unlike Aldington, who emphasized that he was writing a requiem, Remarque is neutral. He writes in the epigraph: “This book is neither an accusation nor a confession. This is only an attempt to tell about the generation that was destroyed by the war, who became its victim even if they escaped from the shells.” The author did not set out to get to the bottom of the true culprits of the war, although his position is quite clearly expressed on the pages of the novel through the mouths of his heroes, as in this fragment: “... Kropp is a philosopher. He suggests that when war is declared, there should be a kind of celebration, with music and entrance fees, like a bullfight. Then the ministers and generals of the warring countries should enter the arena, in shorts, armed with clubs, and let them fight each other. Whoever survives will declare his country the winner. It would be simpler and fairer than what is being done here, where the wrong people are fighting each other.” The writer is looking for a cure for quenching pain in the eternal values and joys of human communication, the harsh male brotherhood.

Remarque's novels were very popular in our country. They were filmed and republished in many languages. Their success was brought to them by a confidential manner of narration, without rhetoric or pathos, and a restrained laconicism of speech. The reader gratefully discovered Remarque's fidelity to simple feelings, love and friendship, that spark of kindness that gives hope even in those times when everything is falling apart, being falsified, and people are becoming embittered. At least for a while, the thoughts of his heroes about the meaningless cycle of existence, loneliness as an eternal refrain of life brought comfort.

Remarque masterfully mastered the classical novel form. He did without formal innovations, following only the truth of conveying psychological states and entertainment plot collisions. True, in latest novels this often led the writer to repetitions and banalities.

We invite you to familiarize yourself with what was written in 1929 and read its summary. “All Quiet on the Western Front” is the title of the novel that interests us. The author of the work is Remarque. The writer's photo is presented below.

The following events begin the summary. "All Quiet on the Western Front" tells the story of the height of the First World War. Germany is already fighting against Russia, France, America and England. Paul Boyler, the narrator of the work, introduces his fellow soldiers. These are fishermen, peasants, artisans, schoolchildren of various ages.

The company rests after the battle

The novel tells about soldiers of one company. Omitting the details, we have compiled a brief summary. “All Quiet on the Western Front” is a work that mainly describes the company, which included the main characters - former classmates. It has already lost almost half of its members. The company is resting 9 km from the front line after meeting with the British guns - “meat grinders”. Because of the losses suffered during the shelling, the soldiers receive double portions of smoke and food. They smoke, eat, sleep and play cards. Paul, Kropp and Müller head to their wounded classmate. These four soldiers ended up in one company, persuaded by their class teacher Kantorek, with his “sincere voice.”

How Joseph Bem was killed

Joseph Boehm, the hero of the work “All Quiet on the Western Front” (we describe the summary), did not want to go to war, but, fearing refusal to cut off all paths for himself, he signed up, like others, as a volunteer. He was one of the first to be killed. Because of the wounds he received in his eyes, he was unable to find shelter. The soldier lost his bearings and was eventually shot. Kantorek, former mentor the soldier, in a letter to Kropp, conveys greetings, calling his comrades “iron guys.” So many Kantoreks fool young people.

Death of Kimmerich

Kimmerich, another of his classmates, was found by his comrades with an amputated leg. His mother asked Paul to look after him, because Franz Kimmerich was “just a child.” But how can this be done on the front lines? One look at Kimmerich is enough to understand that this soldier is hopeless. While he was unconscious, someone stole his favorite watch, received as a gift. There were, however, some good leather English knee-length boots left, which Franz no longer needed. Kimmerich dies in front of his comrades. The soldiers, depressed by this, return to the barracks with Franz's boots. Kropp becomes hysterical on the way. After reading the novel on which the summary is based ("All Quiet on the Western Front"), you will learn the details of these and other events.

Replenishment of the company with recruits

Arriving at the barracks, the soldiers see that they have been replenished with new recruits. The living replaced the dead. One of the new arrivals says that they ate only rutabaga. Kat (the breadwinner Katchinsky) feeds the guy beans and meat. Kropp offers his own version of how combat operations should be conducted. Let the generals fight on their own, and the one who wins will declare his country the winner of the war. Otherwise it turns out that others are fighting for them, those who do not need the war at all, who did not start it.

The company, replenished with recruits, goes to the front line for sapper work. The recruits are taught by the experienced Kat, one of the main characters in the novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” (the summary only briefly introduces readers to him). He explains to recruits how to recognize explosions and shots and how to avoid them. He assumes, having listened to the “roar of the front,” that they will “be given a light at night.”

Reflecting on the behavior of soldiers on the front line, Paul says that they are all instinctively connected to their land. You want to squeeze into it when shells whistle overhead. The earth appears to the soldier as a reliable intercessor; he confides his pain and fear to her with a cry and a groan, and she accepts them. She is his mother, brother, only Friend.

Night shelling

As Kat thought, the shelling was very dense. The pops of exploding chemical shells are heard. Metal rattles and gongs announce: “Gas, gas!” The soldiers have only one hope - the tightness of the mask. All funnels are filled with “soft jellyfish”. We need to get to the top, but there is artillery fire there.

The comrades count how many people from their class are left alive. 7 killed, 1 in a mental hospital, 4 wounded - a total of 8. Respite. A wax lid is attached above the candle. Lice are dumped there. During this activity, the soldiers reflect on what each of them would do if there was no war. The former postman, and now the main torturer of the guys during the Himmelstoss exercises, arrives at the unit. Everyone has a grudge against him, but his comrades have not yet decided how to take revenge on him.

The fighting continues

The preparations for the offensive are further described in the novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque paints the following picture: coffins smelling of resin are stacked in 2 tiers near the school. There are corpse rats in the trenches, and they cannot be dealt with. It is impossible to deliver food to the soldiers due to the shelling. One of the recruits has a seizure. He wants to jump out of the dugout. The French attack, and the soldiers are pushed back to a reserve line. After a counterattack, they return with the spoils of booze and canned food. There is continuous shelling from both sides. The dead are placed in a large crater. They are already lying here in 3 layers. All living things became stupefied and exhausted. Himmelstoss is hiding in a trench. Paul forces him to attack.

Only 32 people remained from a company of 150 soldiers. They are being taken further to the rear than before. Soldiers smooth out the nightmares of the front with irony. This helps to escape from insanity.

Paul goes home

In the office where Paul was summoned, he is given travel documents and a vacation certificate. He looks at the “border pillars” of his youth from the window of his carriage with excitement. Here, finally, is his home. Paul's mother is sick. Showing feelings is not customary in their family, and the mother’s words “my dear boy” say a lot. The father wants to show his friends his son in uniform, but Paul does not want to talk to anyone about the war. The soldier craves solitude and finds it over a glass of beer in quiet corners of local restaurants or in his own room, where the atmosphere is familiar to him to the smallest detail. His German teacher invites him to the beer hall. Here, patriotic teachers, acquaintances of Paul, talk brilliantly about how to “beat up the Frenchman.” Paul is treated to cigars and beer, while plans are made on how to take over Belgium, large areas of Russia and the coal areas of France. Paul goes to the barracks where the soldiers were trained 2 years ago. Mittelstedt, his classmate, who was sent here from the infirmary, reports the news that Kantorek has been taken into the militia. According to his own scheme, the class teacher is trained by a career military man.

Paul is the main character of the work "All Quiet on the Western Front." Remarque writes about him further that the guy goes to Kimmerich’s mother and tells her about the instant death of her son from a wound to the heart. The woman believes his convincing story.

Paul shares cigarettes with Russian prisoners

And again the barracks, where the soldiers trained. Nearby there is a large camp where Russian prisoners of war are kept. Paul is on duty here. Looking at all these people with the beards of the apostles and childish faces, the soldier reflects on who turned them into murderers and enemies. He breaks his cigarettes and passes them in half to the Russians through the net. Every day they sing dirges, burying the dead. Remarque describes all this in detail in his work (“All Quiet on the Western Front”). Summary continues with the arrival of the Kaiser.

Arrival of the Kaiser

Paul is sent back to his unit. Here he meets with his people. They spend a week racing around the parade ground. On the occasion of the arrival of such an important person, soldiers are given new uniform. The Kaiser doesn't impress them. Disputes are beginning again about who is the initiator of wars and why they are needed. Take, for example, the French worker. Why would this man fight? The authorities decide all this. Unfortunately, we cannot dwell in detail on the author’s digressions when compiling a summary of the story “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

Paul kills a French soldier

There are rumors that they will be sent to fight in Russia, but the soldiers are sent to the front line, into the thick of it. The guys go on reconnaissance. Night, shooting, rockets. Paul is lost and does not understand which direction their trenches are located. He spends the day in a crater, in mud and water, pretending to be dead. Paul has lost his pistol and is preparing a knife in case of hand-to-hand combat. A lost French soldier falls into his crater. Paul rushes at him with a knife. When night falls, he returns to the trenches. Paul is shocked - for the first time in his life he killed a man, and yet he, in essence, did nothing to him. This is an important episode of the novel, and the reader should certainly be informed about it when writing a summary. “All Quiet on the Western Front” (its fragments sometimes perform an important semantic function) is a work that cannot be fully understood without turning to the details.

Feast during the plague

Soldiers are sent to guard a food warehouse. From their squad, only 6 people survived: Deterling, Leer, Tjaden, Müller, Albert, Kat - all here. In the village, these heroes of the novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Remarque, briefly presented in this article, discover a reliable concrete basement. Mattresses and even an expensive bed made of mahogany, with feather beds and lace are brought from the homes of escaped residents. Kat and Paul go on reconnaissance around this village. She is under heavy fire from In the barn they discover two frolicking piglets. There's a big treat ahead. The warehouse is dilapidated, the village is burning due to shelling. Now you can get anything you want from it. Passing drivers and security guards take advantage of this. Feast during the plague.

Newspapers report: "No change on the Western Front"

Maslenitsa ended in a month. Once again the soldiers are sent to the front line. The marching column is being shelled. Paul and Albert end up in the monastery infirmary in Cologne. From here the dead are constantly being taken away and the wounded are being brought back again. Albert's leg is amputated all the way down. After recovery, Paul is again on the front line. The position of the soldiers is hopeless. French, English and American regiments advance on the battle-weary Germans. Muller was killed by a flare. Kat, wounded in the shin, is carried out from under fire on his back by Paul. However, while running, Kata is wounded in the neck by a shrapnel, and he still dies. Of all his classmates who went to war, Paul was the only one left alive. There is talk everywhere that a truce is approaching.

In October 1918, Paul was killed. At this time it was quiet, and military reports came in as follows: “No change on the Western Front.” The summary of the chapters of the novel that interests us ends here.

Boimler Paul — main character novel, a nineteen-year-old schoolboy, together with his classmates, volunteered to go to war (1914-1918), succumbing to the general patriotic impulse and militaristic propaganda. But several weeks of military training with drills, steps and soldierly stupidity had dispelled the “classical ideal of the fatherland” in the eyes of the young man. B.P. gets to the front line, having already lost all illusions. The hero's further journey through the circles of front-line hell becomes a chain of new and new discoveries of the terrible, inhuman truth about the war. The narration is told in the first person and, despite the lack of dating, resembles a front-line diary. The description of the military events in which B.P. participates is interspersed with memories of peaceful days and sad thoughts about the injustice and evil of the world, personified in the war. Reflection, flight of thought from specificity to philosophical generalizations, awareness of human existence as suffering and trials place the young soldier among the intellectual heroes German literature following the distant Goethean seekers and a slightly more mature contemporary Hans Castorp. But if the latter, having gone through the school of the “magic mountain”, turns out to be stunned by the military cannonade of 1914 only in the symbolic finale of T. Mann’s novel, then the war itself with its massacres, the dead rotting on parapets and in abandoned trenches, lice, dirt, soldiers swearing becomes the content of the novel and B.P.’s habitat. The inevitably cynical dormitory in the trenches, described with naturalistic details, amazes and shocks the young man from a provincial, poor, respectable German family. But the dirt of war does not stick to him; on the contrary, trials strengthen his soul. Each borderline situation reveals precious human material in the hero. B.P. has an intuitive, impeccable moral reaction to his surroundings, and in the horror of war, he exists according to the laws of good, no matter how difficult it may be. Chastity and purity, even lyricism in the story about the first meeting with a woman, even if she is a girl from a dubious establishment on the enemy side. Adult courage in grief at the bedside of a painfully dying classmate and then the “holy lie” of his mother about the instant easy death of her son. Sympathy and willingness to help the hungry, ragged Russian prisoners, in whom B.P. sees not an enemy, but “only the pain of living flesh, the terrifying hopelessness of life and the ruthless cruelty of people.” And finally, the key scene of the novel: the hours spent in the crater after the battle, next to his mortally wounded, B.P., with my own hand and in front of his eyes, a dying young Frenchman. Horrified by what he had done, looking at a photograph of the wife and child of the murdered man, he conjures: “Take twenty years of life from me, comrade, and stand up!..” He promises to dedicate later life memory and assistance to the family of his victim. But from the brief last paragraph of the novel, the reader learns that the hero of the book was killed in October 1918 during the days of calm, when military reports read: “...no change on the Western Front.” No change - only one priceless life left the world. And this postscript of the writer to the soldier’s confession he read illuminates it with a new tragic light.