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Everyone except the Nazi party. After the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front, the Nazis accused Remarque of being unpatriotic. Remarque did not retaliate to the Nazi’s attacks because of fear of the rising Nazi control in Germany. Despite the Nazi hostility towards him, Remarque published a sequel to his first novel, titled The Road Back. This novel told of the post-war experience of German citizens. In 1933, the Nazis banned many books including Remarque's two novels and held a bonfire to burn copies of the books. Two years later Remarque had his German citizenship taken away. In exile, Remarque traveled to the United States were he eventually obtained citizenship. Even though he seemed to have escaped the wrath of Nazi hate in WWII his sister was beheaded by the Nazis because of their hatred toward him. The novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a moving novel about a group of soldiers,particularly one named Paul Baumer, in World War I. Paul is the narrator who gives thebitter view against the romantic ideals of war. Paul describes the horrors he sees allaround him. The reader sees how people he was close to get killed. The first painful andgraphic death of Joseph Behm kills all the initial thought of romanticized war and makesthe soldiers despise and mistrust there elders that had so confidently sold them on theidea of war. With this first loss everyone realized that the war would change life forever.You observe Paul, who basically represents any common solider, start to realize things he used to cherish now and from this point forward mean nothing to him. War becomes theonly life they know. To add to the inner conflict most of these soldiers seemed trapped in a period between childhood and manhood. The only thing that kept Paul going throughout the war was the comradeship of the other soldiers. Very soon soldiers start to die. Paul’s friend Leer dies from a thigh wound and even at the end of the war Katczinsky, the forty year old who Paul bonds with dies in Paul’s arms after being carried to safety. They all shared the common bond of everyday hell. The soldiers risked their lives everyday for one another. The battlefield became home. This is the only place he feels he was accepted and understood. Like Paul, many of the soldiers questioned why they were fighting. They were breaking every moral they had ever been taught solely because it was what their countries and elders said was right. Paul began to realize that the real enemy wasn’t the soldiers from different countries that were just like him, but the leaders of the countries who sold there youth into eternal hell. When Paul kills his first person in hand to hand combat, the French Gerard Duval, he starts to see that the soldiers are the ones with the bonds, all of them. They are killing people just like themselves. Paul eventually gets wounded and arranges to stay in a hospital with his friend Kroop who is now an amputee. All the young men, German, American, French, or any other nationality had joined the war under the assumption that it would be a marvelous adventure. Instead, All Quiet on the Western Front is a definite tragedy. The reader can see early on that the novel is anti-war. People often say Remarque wrote this book solely to shock the public. People didn’t want to think about the real truth, the real horrors of what really happened to their children, friends, and fellow citizens in war. This feeling was international. Although Remarque was German the idea of what the war had really done to the soldiers is revealed and many didn’t want to accept this. In many ways, such people were like Paul's schoolmaster, Kantorek. People want to believe the classical, romantic, glorified notions of war. Remarque opened the whole worlds minds the absolute horror and reality of war. More importantly, the novel started to show a theme of the disillusioned. Propaganda was disillusioning the public while talk of glory and feeling of strong nationalism is fed to the actual soldiers. Everyone is told that war is good and the images of success and pride are planted in the public’s minds. No matter what country you were from the propaganda existed. Everyone was suppose to support the war and believe it was just, right, and the absolute best situation. Remarque wrote his novel specifically to shatter those idealistic illusions. The “children” that enlisted in the war thinking they would fight for their country and be home by Christmas often never recovered from their horrific experiences. The German soldiers in particular came home with both emotional and physical destruction to a poverty stricken and humiliated civilian population that often regarded them as constant reminders of a war everyone longed to forget. Once again disillusionment sets in. Civilians wanted to believe that the soldiers experience wasn’t any worse than there own, and most veterans were so destroyed by there experience they couldn’t speak of it to any civilians. The soldiers had gone to war for disillusioned reasons of glory and pride and returned to the people who were so disillusioned by what actually happened in the war they simply had no pity. The book illustrates the horror and tragedy of war because all humans are alike. The German soldier’s experience was horrible when they returned home, but it was like this for all soldiers, in all countries. The only people that really seemed to be allies in understanding now, were all the soldiers that weeks earlier had murdered each other. They all saw the hundreds and thousands of men died to win a few yards of land only to lose it again in another battle. They all saw the war continued because civilians and soldiers demanded some justification for the slaughter and the suffering. They all knew many of the dead, their friends, maybe family were never buried in marked graves. They all lived the hell of the trenches and saw the deadly No Man's Land between the trenches. It’s estimated that between nine and twelve million soldiers died in action and others died from complications from wounds or from disease. Millions more lost arms, legs, or suffered from permanent facial wounds. All Quiet on the Western Front is a protest against the betrayal of the power hungry, pride driven men of the younger, naive generation. Young men enlisted believing they were embarking on an exciting adventure to fight for glory and honor all in the name of their country. The only belief they returned with was that they had been used as pawns in a game, a game that cost all, regardless of nationality their innocence, pride, and morality. Bibliography: Word Count: 1188
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