Summary Of All Quiet On The Western Front

The Harvard University professor and civil rights activist Dr. Cesar A. Cruz once said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” During World War One, many artists started to create works of art that portrayed the horrors of war. It brought the attention of those who lived in oblivion, and opened up the reality of war. Many of these artworks were also used to show the artist’s objection to war. Like in the historical fiction novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, the story is narrated by a eighteen year old German soldier fighting on the Western Front named Paul Baumer, and it illustrates the daily terrors soldiers faced while being neglected and mistreated by the power holding authorities. Visual

Kemmerich, Paul’s classmate, is visited by his fellow soldiers at the hospital after he wounded his thigh. He states to Paul that “they have amputated my leg”, and as Paul tries to comfort him, Kemmerich explains how he “wanted to become a head-forester once” (Remarque 27-28). After being incited through nationalistic pressures by his teacher, Kemmerich enlists in the army only to lose a part of himself. Kemmerich’s lose and the cold pointlessness of his eventual death disillusions the idea that there is honor in war. Remarque also shows opposition to the war later on in the book when he illustrates a scene of soldiers starting to question the actions of the higher authorities and pondering the reasons for war. After the Kaiser’s visit to see the army, many of the soldiers are left in disappointment as the Kaiser was not as remarkable as they hoped. Tjaden asks his fellow soldiers, “What exactly is the war for?”, and Kat explains that “every full-grown emperor requires at least one war, otherwise he would not become famous” (205-206). Months of fighting in horrid conditions lead the soldiers to wonder what their sacrifices were worth. Instead of benefiting the people who shed blood in the battlefields, it only serves to bring prestige to the men who signed their death sentence and illustrate the meaninglessness of war to those who

In Dix’s artwork Roll Call of the Returning Troops, the six soldiers look patchy and are not fully filled in, while the administrating officer stands tall and completely solid (Dix). Like the officer depicted in the drawing, men in the position of power were unscathed by the war, while the men not fortunate enough to be in that position, lost themselves. The initiators and the beneficiaries of the war exploiting the common man for their own prospects illustrates the injustice of war, as the people who have the least to gain, lose the most. This work also ties in with the ideas from Remarque’s novel that question the true nature of war, and who benefits from it. Another aspect of the drawing is the expression on the soldiers’ face. Most of the soldiers look sorrowful, but some hold blank and lost looks (Dix). While the propaganda posters of the time depicted men with pride on their faces to fight for their country, the expressions of the drawing showed the opposite. The haunted and damaged men from the battle depicted in the artwork disillusions the notion that there was any pride or honor gained through war for the individuals who served. Like Kemmerich from All Quiet on the Western Front, these men’s hopes and dreams before the war are ravaged by the cold realities of war. The use of visual techniques to express such