All Quiet On the Western Front - War is Human Deterioration

All Quiet On The Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, is a war novel that doesn’t glorify the war effort, but denounces it as the cause for human deterioration. It also places much emphasis on the idea that even though a man can be trained to not have feelings, they do come out every now and then in often dangerous ways. Paul Baumer is a living testament of a man destroyed by the war, …

…to be one. But, if his life hadn’t ended as it did, if the war had indeed come to an end, one can be sure that, as far as he’s concerned, he lost the war. Every little bit of solitude that he once possessed, and everybody that meant something to him, had died... spiritually and physically. His life had ended long before his pale face fell to the ground upon the western front.