All Quiet on the Western Front
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In honor of the 10 year anniversary of this book blog, I’ve asked a few VIP book lovers to write guest reviews. This review is by Brandon Koone, one of the first people I met at UVA and a fellow Colleen Hoover hater. Here’s his review of All Quiet on the Western Front:
All Quiet on the Western Front is a first-person narrative written by Erich Maria Remarque in 1929 telling the story of Paul, a soldier fighting in World War I. I picked up a copy back in 2022 around the time the Netflix adaptation dropped (“the best war movie since Saving Private Ryan”). The story keeps with the thematic tradition of war media, highlighting “the horrors of war”, humanizing soldiers and exploring the camaraderie that develops between them. But in a few important ways, All Quiet diverged from my expectations: WWI is a unique setting, and it’s odd to experience the war through the eyes of a German soldier, a bona fide “bad guy”.
The narration also includes unexpected moments of grace that caught me off guard. For example, I found this prayer-like ode to Earth to be a compelling illustration of trench warfare and Paul’s experience in it:
“Earth! - Earth! - Earth! Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!”
A lot of credit is due to A. W. Wheen, who originally translated the work from German to English. In the book, passages like this appear infrequently enough to add a richer layer of description without slogging down the pace of the narrative.
Another divergence from expectation comes in Chapter 7, when Paul recounts his experience on leave from the front line at his childhood home. This chapter alone is a good reason to read this book. Early on, Paul introduces us to the concept of “the veil”, which is used to illustrate Paul’s feelings of foreignness towards his civilian life:
“A sense of strangeness will not leave me, I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano- but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.”
Over the course of the chapter, Paul grapples with, and begins to lament the existence of “the veil”. Paul’s contemplates “the veil” while conversing with his father, who presses Paul to share stories from the frontline:
“I no longer have any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?”
Taken in its whole, Paul’s time at home is characterized by an unexpected strangeness that mutates into broad discomfort and a bitterness towards his family for their inability to grasp just how much the war has changed Paul. The chapter elicits feelings of melancholy and ends with Paul’s haunting statement : “I ought never to have come on leave”.
I’m no expert in fictionalized war media (books, movies, television shows), but it plays such a central role in our broader cultural conversation that it’s impossible to be oblivious to general trends and themes. In my estimation, no piece of war media puts effort into describing “the veil”, at least none that are recent or popular. So rarely does contemporary war media reach beyond our expectations that “the veil’s” inclusion makes All Quiet on the Western Front (the book, not the movie) that much more interesting.
Why doesn’t contemporary war media contemplate “the veil”? The answer seems to be this: because we don't want it to. Popular media is a simple reflection of current cultural and entertainment preferences. If there was tangible interest in “the veil”, we’d see it depicted alongside everything else we’ve come to expect in popular war stories. It seems that we expect our war movies to be settings for compelling action scenes, but not much beyond that.
On reflection, “the veil” seems like something we should care about, as the struggles veterans face upon returning home is well documented: veteran suicide rates are about 1.5 times as high as those same rates for civilians, and the count of homeless veterans is estimated to be about 36,000. But in popular war movies, “the veil”, if even addressed, is often used as a shallow plot device. In American Sniper, 15 second cuts of Bradley Cooper staring blankly at a television screen break up tense action scenes. The Hurt Locker, which somehow won the Academy Award for Best Picture, appears to go so far as to romanticize “the veil”, as detachment from civilian life drives Jeremy Renner’s character back to the Middle East. Most damning, the very film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front neglects to incorporate the events of Chapter 7 in any meaningful way.
To be clear, there are several examples of media that do grapple with the experiences of veterans re-entering society, but they either fall outside the boundaries of the broader “war” genre (Bill Hader’s Barry is a strikingly thoughtful reflection on a veteran’s struggle for meaning disguised as an action-comedy about an aspiring actor who is also a hitman), or fail to garner enough popularity to be worth mentioning.
Perhaps I’m exaggerating the problem by comparing a book to movies, and perhaps the simple explanation is that we want our action movies to just be action movies. These both seem like fair criticisms, but I can’t help but feel that our disinterest in “the veil” points to some vague cultural deficiency. This country is exceedingly proud not only of our veterans, but also of the reverence that we pay towards our veterans. Flying a flag on your porch on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July is as much a show of support as it is an expression of one’s commitment to “supporting the troops”. We allow ourselves to be entertained by war movies, with their depictions of heroism and acts of bravery, while missing the other part of the story where real-life veterans who live among us struggle with a very real “veil” every day.
Memorial Day, a holiday that honors those who have died in the line of duty, was just a few weeks ago, and we recently celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion. Veterans Day will take place on November 11 this year and celebrates our living Veterans. Perhaps we can use these next 6 months to consider the “veil” they feel and reconsider our role in helping them pierce it. All Quiet on the Western Front receives 4 out of 5 flames.
