All Quiet on the Western Front

"My copy, rather histrionically, advertises itself as ‘the greatest war novel of all time.’ I remember thinking, when I picked it up in a second-hand shop: that’s big promise. But I think it might be right. It’s pretty horrible, I almost don’t like to recommend it, because you have to be prepared for it. It’s hard to talk about, because it’s too sad. My favourite part is where Paul goes on leave, he’s 18 and he returns home, and in his bedroom he looks at his shelf full of books and he finds himself completely unable to feel the quiet rapture he used to feel when he looked at his own bookshelf. There’s that famous line: “We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.” In another part of that leave, he goes to a beer garden, and there are all these old men talking about how to win the war. And he thinks to himself: these men don’t understand that the purpose of life is to sit in a beer garden and drink beer. They think it’s to win the war, but I’ve been to the war and I know that they are wrong. That’s a clumsy way of expressing it, but it’s very distressing and actually quite life-changing. The book gave me a permanent jolt in perspective. I think it jolted me out of a depression, too. I thought: Paul would tell me to buck up and enjoy myself, and he is right. So it’s a very beautiful and valuable thing to have read. If you’re even remotely interested in any war, this is the first book I would recommend you read. Sure. In Memoriam is set in an idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. The protagonists are Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. Gaunt is half-German, and has always been a bit out of step with his peers. He’s against the outbreak of war; he’s not actually a pacifist, but he thinks this particular war is going to be bad for the empire. His closest, maybe his only, friend at school is this incredibly popular boy, Ellwood, who is ethnically Jewish but culturally Christian, and is the opposite. He’s romantic and excited about the war. When I was describing the children from Edwardian school books, who can’t wait to go and fight when they grow up? He’s like that. So there’s this conflict between them in their friendship, where they completely disagree about what this war means for their future. The rest of the school agrees with Ellwood. They’re very excited when this war breaks out. “Wilfred Owen said: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity’” The other major plot point is that they are in love with each other, but neither of them realises; they think it’s unrequited. And they aren’t able to communicate how they feel because it’s 1914. Anyway, they both end up at the front together, where the love story comes to a head because everything becomes so raw and intense. The question becomes not whether they love each other, but whether they will both survive. I was trying not to write a novel. I’d written three, quite unsuccessfully. So I thought, right, I’m not doing that anymore. I was procrastinating writing a screenplay, and found out that my old boarding school had uploaded all of its newspapers from during the war years. I was in a war phase, you know? Reading Robert Graves. So I read all the newspapers from 1913 to 1919. They were these newspapers written for students by students. It was a weird experience to read them, because unlike all the war literature I had read before—written by someone who had been to a war, come back, processed their feelings, and was now repackaging it so that people could understand it—these were by people who were in the moment. It was obituaries written by 16-year-old boys about their 17-year-old friends, which all their friends would read before going to sign up themselves. So I read all these papers, got quite obsessive about them. You’d read a paper and there would be a lot of stuff that wasn’t that compelling. Then there would be three sentences that would just break your heart. I collected those, created a paper that was just filled with the things that hit me the hardest. I wasn’t really thinking. Then I just started writing, and it turned into a novel very fast. Most of the first draft was done in two weeks. Then I got stuck—it took about a year and a half to finish an edit. But it was the newspapers that were the impetus. What I was saying earlier about Vera Brittain wanting people to learn from her experiences—something you see again and again in these newspapers is: some 19-year-old gets killed, and in his obituary, his friend or his brother is like, ‘no one will ever forget his death.’ I found that so upsetting. I mean, of course, you can’t remember everyone who died in a war for all eternity, but there was something so tragic to me about how forgotten those newspapers were, when they must have been so important when they were written. Wilfred Owen said: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” I think that’s exactly what you’re saying: it’s that softness, beneath all this violence. That’s where, I think, what Wilfred Owen would call the poetry comes from."

"Well, this is an utterly persuasive anti-war novel. All these books, as we said, are historical novels in or about France. And I think this is really the most disturbing novel about World War One . I don’t think it’s been bested. We see through the eyes of a young man from northern Germany. He’s a gung-ho patriotic young German volunteer. The story takes place in the trenches in northern France, in murderous close engagements with the French and British. Paul Bäumer, the narrator, experiences the horrors of it all first hand, and very soon begins seeing the immorality and the stupidity of what his commanders are telling him today. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Of course, this book is a pacifist book, a great anti-war book. It was very popular when it came out. Erich Maria Remarque wrote the book at the end of the 1920s. When Hitler came to power, the book was banned, and was one of the books that was burned in that infamous book-burning episode in Berlin. Later on, Remarque was forced to leave Germany. He went to America and remained in the United States. It’s a story of a young man’s tragic disenchantment with war. If I’m allowed a rival for Remarque from the French side there’s Fear ( La Peur ) by Gabriel Chevallier, published in 1930 in equally disenchanted vein. Chevallier’s influential autobiographical novel so chillingly brings out the absolute horror of First World War trench warfare that publication was suspended (with his accord) in 1939 for fear its anti-war messaging would block French conscription for the war against Hitler. I would add that I thought of putting forward Robert Graves’ book Goodbye To All That , which is more wistful and sort of poignant, but also a wonderful book about World War One. Neither falls into the trap that eventually the anti-war movement fell into—one of strident demonstration and anti-war hysterics. And they do a better job, in my mind, of putting forward the anti-war case. Yes. It is a novel. Paris itself, the setting, is also character if you like. The Siege of Paris happened in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war. The Prussians had defeated Imperial France on the battlefield in eastern France. The reason for war was that Prussia’s leader Bismarck wanted to unify Germany—that was his lifetime’s ambition—and France wanted to stop that. Both believed they had a good reason for going to war. Suddenly, after a couple of months of pretty savage warring out in eastern France, the imperial army of Napoleon III collapsed—this was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew—and the entire army was taken prisoner and packed off into Germany. But the Prussians knew that you didn’t defeat France necessarily by defeating its army, you had to capture Paris. So 400,000 Prussian men advanced on Paris, but decided not to make a direct attack. This is quite hard to visualise now, but Paris of 1870 was surrounded by high stone ramparts which were pretty well impregnable. The Prussian high command chose instead to lay siege to the capital—at that time, the greatest city in the world, with a population of more than two million. This was a huge undertaking and when Paris refused to surrender the invaders decided to starve it out. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . My novel takes place inside Paris. The Prussians have cut all communications, and all supplies into the city. Pretty soon, hunger sets in, yet the population is very buoyant about it. My two heroes are two people trapped there, a young English gentleman of the Victorian age who has found himself trapped in Paris like everyone else and who falls in love with a radical young French woman who sides with the capital’s revolutionaries — an unlikely love match. The city holds out for a sweltering month, then a second, then an Arctic third month when the temperature falls to -15ºC. In the end, the Prussians bring up the latest weaponry, giant Krupp-made cannons, and start bombarding Paris to hurry the capitulation along. Bismarck realises that other European powers don’t want to see Prussia getting this powerful—there might be intervention by the British, Austrians or Russians—and butts heads with the German military command over the slow-moving starvation plan. The eventual capitulation of Paris had a very, very considerable impact. The unified Germany annexed France’s precious eastern provinces amongst other burdensome armistice conditions it imposed. Economic prosperity does return to France after some years, but it nurses a deep grievance about what has happened, the humiliation of it. It was never going to be content until it got its revenge on Germany for what happened in 1870, and this, to my mind, is a fundamental source of World War One, which itself leads to World War Two. Even Lenin used what happened in Paris—because revolutionaries did take over in Paris after the Prussians left—as a model for the Russian Revolution in 1917. Not as a model for what you should do, but for what you shouldn’t do—what you must avoid—in order to succeed in revolution. I found it quite difficult. The nice thing about historical biographies , which I’ve written before, is that you get lots and lots of information and you make your own decision on putting it all in place to tell what happened. Here you are much more out on your own with licence to invent, which has its own problems. Developing characters is difficult; I found perhaps I was letting the history intrude too much into the narrative, but I tried my best to marry the two. Have I succeeded? I hope so, and certainly it’s an interesting time in world history that is somehow almost forgotten considering the impact it has had."

"Well, I’ve never written a thriller. Oh, no, I have. One. One thriller. Not a Penny More Not a Penny Less is a caper, Kane and Abe l is a saga. I change all the time. I’m lucky. Well, it’s remarkably well-written. It’s evocative because it’s the First World War seen through German eyes. We always see it through British eyes, though the National Theatre have taken the imaginative step of seeing through a horse’s eyes. War Horse , based on a novel by Michael Morpurgo , really is the most remarkable play. All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of a German private soldier on the front line and it’s a very moving account of the deprivation and the hardship he goes through, showing us that innocent people were thrown into uniform and told to serve whether they liked it or not. Yes, I think it teaches you to see the other person’s side. Remarque went on to write A Time to Love and A Time to Die about a German soldier falling in love with a French girl and he does it with great empathy. I think with any discussion in politics and, indeed, in life, you have to remember that most things are 50/50. Nobody is 100 per cent right. I mean 60/40 is a fairly major difference. Nobody is really right or wrong and you must think that way, get into the skin of the other person. Yes, it’s very important. Of course I get asked that a lot: Who are your major influences? I mean, I read a lot and who can say which books influence you and which don’t. But I certainly hope Remarque has influenced me!"

"All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque. This is a landmark novel about war in general, and the First World War in particular. Remarque was a German writer who subsequently was exiled from Nazi Germany to the United States. He had quite an extraordinary life. He fought in the First World War, and the book, which is written in the first person, is largely autobiographical. It’s a remarkable novel which I chose for mostly two reasons. The first one is that, better than any novel or indeed first-hand account I’ve read about war, it shows what’s animal and animalistic about war. The second reason I chose it is because it also claims that, even in the middle of such horrors as were experienced in the trenches, there was always a spark of hope, a spark of life, without which you can’t go on. So let me start with the animal/animalistic dimension of war. Animals are very present in the book. For example, there is a scene where the soldiers get very distressed by the sound of horses which have been injured and which are screaming in agony, and they are so distressed that one of them in particular—a farmer in civilian life—can’t bear it anymore. He leaves the trench at great danger to himself, and goes off to kill the horses to alleviate their suffering. What’s interesting in that scene is that as much as the deaths of the fellow human beings was something that the soldiers were slowly becoming, not indifferent about, but inured from, the suffering of those animals somehow was unbearable, as if causing such suffering to animals, the innocent par excellence, really is a mark of profound inhumanity. In other scenes, the narrator tells the story of the extent to which those soldiers were being dehumanised by the conditions under which they had to operate. To my mind, one of the most powerful passages illustrating that point is one where he describes a sleepless night that they’re all spending in the dugout, sleepless not just because of the cold and the mud, but because the rats have turned up, having smelled leftovers of food. As a result, the soldiers spend the entire night defending themselves from the rats. The description of the scene ends with the sentence ‘we were about to set ourselves upon each other.’ What this scene describes is that in just the same way as the rats viciously fought each other to get the last bit of the breadcrumbs, the soldiers were so exasperated, out of their mind exasperated with having to fight the rats, that they almost became like the rats themselves. That is, again, a profoundly evocative description of what fighting under those claustrophobic, constrained conditions can do to people, to human beings. The other reason I chose the book is because in the middle of this horror, there is always, as I’ve mentioned, a spark of hope, and also elements of beauty, which is slightly different. Let me start with this idea that even in the horror you can find beauty. In fact, more precisely, you can find beauty in scenes which, actually, in the ordinary course of events, you wouldn’t find beautiful. One of the scenes where the narrator describes joy and happiness the most vividly is one where he and his friends have managed to find a place where there are proper latrines, and the latrines are outdoors. So they all sit down and defecate, basically, in the company of each other. The narrator says that in the open air, listening to the birds, away from the front, the soldiers found enormous joy and tranquillity in this very simple act of sitting and defecating peacefully together. Now, normally we don’t think of this particular act as being a beautiful act, but what’s remarkable is that precisely because of the conditions of war, that act, that very animalistic act, has become something to be treasured. The inference I think we’re meant to draw is that only war will enable you to tap into this. “I’ve always enjoyed reading fiction, so that’s part of it, but I think I also do it almost as a matter of professional duty” That said, I think the most important lesson of the book is the spark of hope in the middle of horror. That’s how the book almost ends. I want to read a paragraph which I think is wonderful. So, it’s October 1918, and there are rumours that an armistice is imminent. The character is feeling deeply sad and melancholy, because he realises that when the war is over, as it soon will be, they will all go back to their former life, except that their former life is gone forever, and no one, he says, will understand them. This is what he concludes, nevertheless: ‘But perhaps all these thoughts of mine are just melancholy and confusion, which will be blown away like dust when I am standing underneath the poplars once again, and listening to the rustle of their leaves. It cannot have vanished entirely, that tenderness that troubles our blood, the uncertainty, the worry, all the things to come, the thousand faces of the future, the music of dreams and books, the rustling and the idea of women. All this cannot have collapsed in the shelling, the despair and the army brothels.’ That’s not the last paragraph of the book. The last paragraph of the book describes, from a third-person perspective, the soldier, the narrator, being found dead in October 1918, and the last paragraph says: ‘He had sunk forwards and was lying on the ground as if asleep. When they turned him over, you could see that he could not have suffered long – his face wore an expression that was so composed that it looked as if he was almost happy that it had turned out that way.’ So just before dying, that soldier, with whom we have lived for the 200 pages of the book, has come to the realisation that he still has that hope to which he can cling, that it cannot all have vanished entirely. He dies, that’s the tragedy of it, but I do think that Remarque is trying to tell us that even then, even in something so horrible as trench warfare, it was possible for some, until the very end, to keep a spark of humanity within them. I don’t think the character, the narrator, thinks that things will go back to normal. I think he’s really aware that the idea of women will not be the idea of women that he would have had had he not been to war. He knows that his pleasure at a beautiful landscape, at the smell of good food, will forever be coloured by what the landscape looked like in the trenches, by the food that was cooked in the trenches. What the narrator is saying, I think, and what Remarque through him is saying, is that even if you are forever altered by the experience of war, it remains possible, at the point at which war is at its most awful, to hope that you will not be indifferent, that you will not have lost your humanity to such an extent that it will no longer matter to you, that you might find a landscape beautiful, that you might desire a woman, and so on and so forth. I think that’s what the novel is trying to tell us in its concluding pages. No, I haven’t been in a warzone myself. I think it’s a very good question that I raise quite a lot with the soldiers I have the opportunity to talk to once in a while. I always feel that, as a philosopher, I somehow don’t have the right to moralise about war because not only do I have no idea of what it’s about, but I fervently hope that I will never have an idea of what it’s about. Now, invariably, those soldiers, and I hope that they’re not just being polite, respond to me that not having first-hand experience of war doesn’t necessarily disqualify me from being able to talk about it. I hope they’re right. But one of the reasons why I keep reading fiction, literary works about war, is as a partial substitute, if you will, for actually experiencing it myself. I don’t find in even the best philosophy books that I’ve read about war, two of which we are going to talk about presently, enough descriptive, evocative content to give me a sense of what it can be like, actually to be told at gunpoint that you have to go over the trenches, failing which you’ll be shot by your superior officer, what it can be like to lose control of your bowels as you do that. To even begin to get a sense of what it might be like, I have to read literature. I’ve always enjoyed reading fiction, so that’s part of it, but I think I also do it almost as a matter of professional duty. I can’t go to war, I don’t want to go to war, and the very least that I can do is actually read those works which, even if it’s not obvious in what I write, nevertheless inform the way I write."