All Quiet On The Western Front Memory Analysis

In All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, a major theme is that memories before the war belong to another world for the soldiers; this theme follows them and their struggle to cope with the new world of war. The soldiers cannot begin to imagine the luxuries of going back to their previous lives, because those memories are so far gone. The war completely consumes the way they think, so that the memories of who they used to be are very distant from who they are in war. All of their memories seem to have a feeling of calmness, but there is no calmness in the world they live in now. These memories still exist, but they are so far gone that the soldiers are in awe when they think about them.
The soldiers cannot begin to imagine the luxuries of going back to their previous lives, because those memories are so far gone. Paul explains how the memories of their previous lives are incomprehensible by saying, “made the world of our parents a thing incomprehensible to us— for then we surrendered ourselves to events and were lost in them, and the least little thing was enough to carry us down the stream of

Paul explains that they are different people than they used to be in their memories when he says, “They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. In the barracks they called forth a rebellious, wild craving for their return; for then they were still bound to us, we belonged to them and they to us, even though we were already absent from them”(121). To the soldiers, their memories are long gone and tucked away in a completely different time. Back then, they were a different person. Now, their memories are absent from their personalities because the war has caused this to be so. Their memories are no longer bound to them, and it is almost as if they belong to a completely different