On Monday, October 4th we discussed the book we just read, "All Quiet On The Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque. A large part of our discussion, and one of the big themes of the book, is identity. As we've discussed in class in the past, Germany has gone through three empires that have risen and fallen, and this has caused big issues with Germans being able to have a solid identity. In Remarque's book, the narrator and the people around him struggle with their identity as soldiers, and with their previous childhood identity and what it will be after the war, since they can't imagine it as anything but a soldier.
Although this book revolves around war, and my copy even says "The Classic War Novel of All Time" right on the front cover, it is not a book about a war, but of the people who were part of it. The story does not revolve around what is going on in the war, how the Germans are holding up against the Allied forces, or the strategies being used. Paul, the narrator, along with his friends Katczinsky, Kropp, Müller, Tjaden, Kemmerich, Detering, and Behm, many from a high school class in Germany, discusses their fight to not only survive, but to maintain their mental sanity.
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