All Quiet On The Western Front Knowt

Who is the author of AQOTWF and what is his background?

Eric Maria Remarque, a German novelist who fought in WWI, got shrapnel in the neck, was sent home, and then forced to return to the war later. During WWII was exiled from Germany for being “anti-German” but he loved Germany.

What is the setting and year range of AQOTWF?

The novel is set during World War I, usually on the Western Front, from 1917-1918.

Who is Kaiser Wilhelm II?

Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German Emperor, who visits the front lines and is a figure of both curiosity and disillusionment for the soldiers

Paul Baumer

Narrator. He is a boy from Duisburg Germany who was in school with his friends before joining the war. He dies at the end. He WROTE POEMS AND PLAYS

Who is Stanilaus Katczinsky?

The leader of the group with all the schoolboys in it. He is approximately 40 years old in the novel. Very good at scrounging items together, great cook. We don’t know much about before the war but he was a cobbler and very smart. He thinks that war brings out the animalistic “veneers in people”, he dies from a small sharpnel splinter to his head 

Who is Albert Kropp

Good friend of Paul’s from his class, probably kills himself due to an amputated leg, headstrong. Kropp thinks of war philosophically.

Who is Muller?

Definitely misses the old life, misses school and his home. Carries books with him. He is killed towards the end. It is shown that war kind of brings out selfishness in him, especially with Kemmerich’s boots.

Who is Tjaden

Sort of a joker. He was a locksmith and also a Bedwetter. Huge appetite. Really dislikes himelstoss. We don’t know what happens to him at the end.

Kantorek

Was the headmaster of the school Paul and friends went to. He was a silver tongue. Definitely shows hypocrisy of the older generation by sending the boys to the war, saying it was their duty. Unknown what happens to him at the end.

Corporal Himmelstoss

 Used to be the boys mailman, turned corporal, which made him power hungry and cruel. Described as short. The boys play pranks on him. We don’t know where he is at the end.

Franz Kemmerich

One of Paul’s friends from school. killed early on in the novel(leg amputated and infected) and seen as symbolic to the horrors of war. Gives his boots to Muller and then Muller gives them to Paul.

Joseph Behm

The first of Paul’s classmates to die in the war. Behm did not want to enlist, but he caved under the pressure of the schoolmaster, Kantorek. His ugly, painful death(blind in no man’s land and cries for help and shot to death) shatters his classmates’ trust in the authorities who convinced them to take part in the war. Paul’s friend who did not want to enlist and died

Detering

One of Paul’s close friends in the Second Company. Detering is a young man with a wife and a farm at home; he is constantly homesick for his farm and family. Tries to flee the war and is caught

Gerard Duval

A French soldier whom Paul kills in No Man’s Land. Duval is a printer with a wife and child at home. He is the first person that Paul kills in hand-to-hand combat, one of Paul’s most traumatic experiences in the war.

Haie Westhaus

One of Paul’s friends in the Second Company. A gigantic, burly man, Westhus was a peat-digger before the war with a wife at home. He plans to serve a full term in the army after the war ends, since he finds peat-digging so unpleasant. He dies with a fatal injury on the back where you can even see his lungs through the hole.

Give an example of Horror of Modern War(be able to see it on quotes on the test)

Haie’s back injury where you can see his lungs; when the soldiers went insane and ran out during a bombardment.

Give an example of Survival (be able to see it on quotes on the test)

Paul sees a man biting his artery of his arm for over two hours to not bleed to death

Triumph of the Human Spirit

When they were cooking even during a bombardment and risking their lives for food

Camradery

Paul’s friends comforting him after he had killed the French soldier

The Lost Generation

Paul struggles to go back to society during his leave.

The Hypocrisy of the Older Generation

Kantorek persuades the young men to enlist, glorifying war while not even knowing anything.

Animal Instinct

What helped the soldiers survived even though it might have been something they thought they would never do(an example in real life would be cutting your arm off to survive)

Gore and Violence

Shows how horrible the war actually was and that it wasn’t “glory”.

“He does not speak of his mother or his brothers and sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.”

Talks about Kemmerich last moments. Shows the horror of modern war

“As sure as they get a stripe or a star they become different men, just as though they’d swallowed concrete.”

Refers Himmelstoss/Kantorek small men that are put in power and abuse it, when they get power they go crazy with it

“To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend.”

Personification of the Earth as protection in the war, while it's ironic that that is where they will end up once they die. Said by Paul

“We are so completely played out that in spite of our great hunger we do not think of the provisions. Then gradually we become something like men again.”

Animal Instinct; “we become something like men again.”; saying that they were not humans before. Said by Paul

“On a foggy morning another of the Russians is buried; almost every day one of them dies. I am on guard during the burial. The prisoners saying a chorale, they sing in parts, and it sounds almost as if there were no voices, but an organ far away on the moor.”

Theme: Camaraderie: between the Russian Soldiers. Violin was played. Music acts like a language for Paul when he can’t speak

“We stand to attention and the Kaiser appears. We are curious to see what he looks like. He stalks along the line, and I am really rather disappointed; judging from his pictures I imagined him to be bigger and more powerfully built, and above all to have a thundering voice.” 

Propaganda: Tie back to Animal Farm(It is Propaganda) Same could be said if Joseph Stalin was seen because he was seen as a tall powerful strong man but in reality was short and not strong. Probably thinks this because of propaganda.

“And men will not understand us—for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten—and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves.”

The hypocrisy of the older generation & Lost Generation/superfluous means unnecessary/said by PAUL

“Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.” 

End of the book, talking about Paul: Significance: Having a calm face is because he died with the hope of a better future and died with peace. If he was suffering, he did so in peace. 

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”

Before the book even starts, talking about how he does not blame anyone but is simply telling how horrible the war was and how it affected that generation who fought in the War. This tells us the purpose of the book.

“Comrade, I did not want to kill you. . . . But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. . . . I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”

Animal Instinct. This is when Paul stabs the French soldier and he eventually dies. Paul feels less hatred for his enemy and considers him and himself the same.

“At the sound of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. . . . It is this other, this second sight in us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without our knowing how. . . . We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers—we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals.”

Animal Instinct. describes how their animal Instinct and how it saves them throughout the war.

“For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity . . . to the future . . . in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. . . . The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.”

A. Hypocrisy of the Older Generation & the Lost Generation

B. The “mistake” Paul is referring to is trusting the old generation blindly

Remarque makes a lot of commentary on what?

Remarque makes a lot of commentary about country vs. state we can love our country and not love our state. We can love our land but not our political situation

When is the climax and why?

Climax: When Paul kills Gerard Duval. It is the climax because it shows Paul’s animal instinct and loss of innocence. It also shows camaraderie

Why might some not consider this book to be the best war novel?

The novel may not be considered the best in the world because Remarque shows bias by showing how he dislikes the concepts of modern war and disapproves. Not glorified or romanticized and very realistic.

Give a few examples of advancements in technology

Airplanes, bombs, trench warfare, chemical warfare, tanks, machine guns

Give a few examples of how we know the war is almost over.

Artillery is bad(won’t even shoot straight), trenches are destroyed, wearing the same clothes, food is wrecking their stomachs, opposition is in great shape.

What is the significance of the Title(Irony & Tragedy): 

1. Irony: It's ironic because it’s never quiet on the Western Front

2. Tragedy: Paul’s life is not significant enough to put in reports, also dies one month before the war ends

“Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.”

He will go on in life fearlessly and ready to live because his spirit wants to live. Triump of Human Spirit

Who is the god in this book?

Chance