Im Westen nichts Neues
1928
- world war, 1914-1918
- fiction
- translations into english
- german fiction
- soldiers
- german language
- history
- continental european fiction (fictional works by one author)
- fiction, war & military
- fiction, historical
The story
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. These young men become enthusiastic soldiers, but their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the hatred that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another... if only he can come out of the war alive.
What it’s like
Plain, unadorned prose carries the weight here: short declarative sentences, a voice that sounds like a young man talking low and exhausted, with little ornament and no comfort offered. The sensory world is mud, shellfire, rotting horses, damp dugouts lit by a candle stub, and the grey of field hospitals, rendered in blunt physical detail rather than lush description. Its vibe is bleak, elegiac and unsparing, the kind of reading best taken in one steady sitting on a grey afternoon rather than in bed at night. Pacing is episodic and restless, moving from front-line bombardments to home-leave scenes in a quiet hometown and back again, so the stillness of the classroom and the kitchen feels almost painful next to the noise of the trenches. Tone stays close to grief and disillusionment: a group of schoolboys, eager and patriotic at the start, is steadily stripped of its certainties, and the arc belongs to one narrator who keeps hold of a fragile humanity while his friends are lost. Intensity is high: sustained combat, graphic wounds, death and dismemberment described plainly, with dread and suffering weighing on nearly every chapter, and no sex or romance to soften it. For readers who want an honest, unflinching portrait of the First World War's human cost, told with restraint, and who can carry heavy material without relief.
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