Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a predicament in which war itself becomes a kind of Ithaca, the only home to which the adolescent soldier has any intimate or tangible connection. Narrator Paul Bäumer and his schoolfellows inhabit a No Man’s Land of their own: they are young but have lost hope; they feel old but have no yesteryear; they are refugees whose yearning is without shape or object. Whatever images of home they had when they enlisted, whatever plans for the future, were too nebulous, too lacking in resilience to compete with war’s intensity, its ubiquity and noise. The chapter shows that, despite its apparent pessimism, All Quiet was envisaged as a first step towards finding the ‘way back’ and pointing out ‘the road onward’, and that writing the book was itself a form of nostos.