Comparison of Erich Maria Remarque & Ernst Junger Essay

Ruthless in his hatred of war, Erich Maria Remarque and Ernst Junger, romanticizing her, are both writers, who tried to show the true face of the war, but they did it in different ways. It is said that these two German writers hated each other. Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), who came from a wealthy family, looked at the son of a simple bookbinder Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) somewhat down and called him “an empty mediocre person with claims”. Remarque himself was not embarrassed by his humble origins, and he considered Jünger to be an ordinary envious person and despised for his “dry martinet writing style”.

An ambiguous attitude to the war has long been established: for pacifists, it is akin to the plague that affects people; for the militarists, it is a cleansing sea. The war leaves no one indifferent, and even the outwardly emphasized neutral narrative of Jünger, in essence, also carries a gamut of emotions. Another thing is that the future first writer of Germany is already complicated in his debut book and requires painstaking analysis, even though “Storm of Steel” do not have that philosophical depth and stylistic sophistication inherent in subsequent books of the master. Jünger went to the front as a young man – he was only 20 years old. Caring, and, as fate showed, the visionary father recommended his son to keep diaries, writing down everything that seems interesting in the war – but what could be uninteresting, unremarkable on it? The First World War was terrible with its “novelties”: for the first time by such mass extermination of people, the use of chemical weapons, and finally, the massive introduction of technology. Therefore, it is fair to call it a war without heroes, meaning those old heroes who went to the enemy with a sword or barehanded. Now the war has become more positional, the enemy often did not see you and did not know whether he killed someone or not. It was here that the bullet became a fool – because it almost ceased to have a purpose for a particular person. It would seem that all this should bring down the patriotic (sometimes patriotic) pride from the youth. Moreover, it happened. However, not with all.

Jünger perceives war almost as work. From it, you cannot escape, the more to hide. In addition, he is a toiler of this war. Therefore, he had nothing left but to love her, or at least accept. What he does. Moreover, although with time patriotic pathos leaves, Ernst does not “leave” from the war: “At that moment a feeling crept into me, still alien to me: a profound change in the feeling of war, stemming from a life-prolonging abyss on the edge. The seasons changed, the winter came and the summer again, and the battles continued wars, but it was this habit that made me see everything happening in a completely different, dim light. No one was blinded by the power of her manifestations anymore. War threw the sun more challenging puzzles. It was a strange time (Jünger, 1929).”

Contrary to stereotypes, the book is not about war workers, not about the harsh everyday life and not about life. It is about the war, although it is devoid of lengthy and, most likely, unnecessary arguments. There is a war for Jünger – they do not record it, they write about it in the hope of understanding it, the actions of people who are willing to die not only for their homeland but also for the commander in the temple). Or rather, do not even understand, but feel. Reflection on the war and its events – yes, so, perhaps, it is possible to characterize the book of Jünger.

Jünger fought at the front until the very end of the war. During this time, he was wounded 14 times, including in the head and chest (Howell, 1983). For his bravery, he was awarded high awards, including the Order of Merit – the highest military award of Prussia during the First World War. During the war, Jünger constantly kept diaries and, in parallel, based on them, wrote his first and later most popular novel Storm of Steel, first published in 1920 (Honsberger, 2006). “Why do you need to constantly kill and kill? When is this shitty war over?” – the writer asks in it a question. Moreover, this is evidence of how much his notions about life, death, and war have changed in the front-line trenches. In the following editions of the book, such authentic reasoning is increasingly replaced by metaphorical descriptions: “The monstrous will to destroy, which was heavy on the battlefield, thickened in the brain and plunged it into a red fog”. On the one hand, Jünger described the horrors of war. On the other hand, he presented it as “the deepest life experience”, “inner experience”. Representatives of National Socialism, which originated in Germany in the 1920s and quickly gained influence in the country, perceived this as “exalting the war” and even tried to claim their rights to the author who had won by that time. However, Jünger, who himself was fascinated by the ideas of National Socialism for a short time, opposed this. Literary activity encouraged the politically active writer to stay away from radical totalitarian views. Comprehending the experience of the war, which became the determining factor of all his work, he repeatedly reworked and reprinted the book Storm of Steel. It became almost his mania. Comparison of different versions of the novel allows us to understand how deep and never healed the wound inflicted a war on Ernst Jünger.

Speaking about the First World War, they always recall one work by Erich Maria Remarque “All Quiet on the Western Front. This is a story about German boys who, under the influence of patriotic propaganda, go to war, not knowing that not the glory of heroes, but disability and death awaits them (Remarque, 1928). Every day of the war kills someone’s fathers and sons, and the newspapers time impartially reported: “All Quiet on the Western Front”. This book is not an accusation, not a confession. This is an attempt to tell about the generation that was destroyed by the war, about those who became its victims, even if they managed to escape from the shells and escape from the bullet.

Erich Maria Remarque described the war in much more specific language. His famous novel “All Quiet on the Western Front “became a kind of portrait of a generation whose representatives were sent to the front right from school. “We were told that a polished button is more important than Schopenhauer’s four volumes. We were convinced — first with surprise, then with bitterness and finally with indifference — that it’s not the mind that decides everything, but the shoe brush, not the thought, and once established routine, not freedom, but drill”, – he wrote. The soldiers’ everyday life in the trenches, the roar of grenades rushing in the darkness of the night, the death of comrades who did not bring rest to the gap between battles — Remarque, who was an ordinary soldier in World War I, knew firsthand about her nightmares. He tells about them in his anti-war novel. The story in this work is in the first person. The hero of the book is a young soldier who is unable to find himself in civilian life because of the traumas he received during the war (GOLE, 1987). “The corporal crawls two kilometers on his hands, dragging his broken legs behind him; the other goes to the dressing station, pressing his hands to the stomach with creeping intestines. All the horrors can be overcome while you simply submit to your fate, but try to think about them and they will kill you – writes Erich Maria Remarque in the book “All Quiet on the Western Front”.

Through all the narrative is the theme of war as a terrible mistake of mankind. It brings death, pain, blood, sweeps away the state and the nation on its way. Its victims are simply people for whom war is unnatural, but by the will of a handful of morally and physically sick patients, they are involved in a deadly act called war. All social is erased in man, only animal fear remains, forcing him to fight for the preservation of life. “Heavy fire. Barrage. Fire. Mines. Tanks. Machine guns. All these words, but behind them stand all the horrors that mankind is going through, ”Remarque’s expression has become common. The mountains of corpses, blood and torn pieces of still warm flesh, dirt and lice, and nothing heroic. The most powerful instinct in a person is the instinct of self-preservation. Because the war turns the human mind inside out. It is foreign and alien to the very principle of the existence of mankind. The novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” claimed millions of lives, crippled the fates and bodies of even more people, ceased the existence of such powerful powers as the Russian, Ottoman, German and Austro-Hungarian empires. All the experience of Europe created over many hundreds of years was destroyed. Life had to be rebuilt. The minds of people were infected with the horror of war. The novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” shows the absurdity of the war. His main characters – Boymer, Kropp, Muller and Leer – drafted into the army from the walls of the school. They come from peasant families and the war is alien to them. The story is similar to the diary of one of the characters, Paul Boomer. The novel is not eventful. But this only exaggerates and intensifies the feeling of doom. They were pulled out of ordinary life and thrown into a bloody meat grinder, where you need to survive. The war cut off the heroes from their usual reality. They are physically and psychologically isolated. They intuitively understand that they were betrayed by those who started a war. Disappeared under the fragments of the bombing of the old ideals and values ​​of life. There is no culture, no art. Even human relations have scattered from the explosion of the next shell. A new worldview was created in the process of survival.

Remark first in literature so described the war. Quietly, almost routinely, he told about death, about sticky animal fear, about the meaninglessness of everything that is happening, about the horror of the very fact of the killing of one person by another. Survivors remain victims of war forever. Remarque hated fascists. He was called non-German, books burned on the main street of his hometown. The showing of a Hollywood film based on Remarque’s novel was banned. The writers of the proletariat also negatively responded to the work “No Change on the Western Front,” accusing the author of excessive pacifism. But the unequivocal popularity of the novel among readers has proved that all criticism is useless and subjective.

This novel was published in 1929 and immediately began to enjoy great success. A short time later, on its basis in Hollywood, the film of the same name, released in 1930, was shot. The Nazis who came to power in Germany in 1933 banned Remark’s works as “betraying the heroes of the First World War.” His books were burned. The writer himself emigrated to Switzerland. All his life Remarque enjoyed the reputation of “militant pacifist.” However, in his declining years, the writer admitted that in fact, he had always been an absolutely apolitical person, which, by the way, were the heroes of his works.

At the same time, the importance of anti-war works, released from the pen of both the one and the other writer, is difficult to overestimate. The novel of Remarque “All Quiet on the Western Front” to this day is considered the best work of art about the First World War. It is translated into more than 50 languages. Worldwide sold over 20 million copies.

Jünger spoke about the bloody battles of the First World War in his book “Storm of Steel” – a memoir written on the basis of diaries that he kept at the front. The pictures of wartime and the experiences of a simple soldier, detailed in them, still amaze readers, although this work is perceived ambiguously: some criticize the writer for “aestheticizing violence”, others, on the contrary, praise Jünger for the merciless truth he told about the war. Despite the fact that Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarque are very different writers, many things united them. Both were born at the end of the 19th century, in an era of great changes and upheavals, when technological progress became the driving force of life in Europe, the economy developed rapidly, social reforms were implemented, psychological knowledge was widely distributed, women’s struggle for their rights intensified. At the same time, one of the clear signs of this transitional period was the socio-political uncertainty in society.

Paradoxically, in such a situation, many were eager for war, which would serve as a kind of “purgatory” that would change the balance of power and “balance” life in Europe. One of those who held this position was Ernst Jünger. Moreover, when World War I did begin, he voluntarily enlisted in the 73rd Hannover Regiment, and from December 1914 he had already fought at the front as an ordinary soldier. However, Jünger’s illusions that the “great” war would be short-lived and at the same time provide an opportunity to show the wonders of heroism, quickly collapsed. It was drawn out, and she had an ugly face. Front-line weekdays were completely devoid of pathos. Their components were dirt, blood, and suffering. Meet with death accounted for at every turn.

References

  1. Howell, Anna (1983) The infuence of politics on German cultural life during the third Reich, with particular reference to opera, Durham theses, Durham University. Retrieved from Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7873/
  2. GOLE, H. (1987). The Great War: A Literary Perspective. Retrieved from http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a522029.pdf
  3. Jünger, E. (1929). The storm of steel. London: Chatto Windus.
  4. Honsberger, L. (2006). A Difference of Degrees: Ernst Juenger, the National Socialists, and a New Europe. Retrieved from https://dlib.bc.edu/islandora/object/bc-ir:102328/datastream/PDF/view
  5. Remarque, E. (1928). All Quiet on the Western Front. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

The terms offer and acceptance. (2016, May 17). Retrieved from

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016.

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

freeessays.club (2016) The terms offer and acceptance [Online].
Available at:

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]
close
Haven't found the right essay?
Get an expert to write you the one you need!
print

Professional writers and researchers

quotes

Sources and citation are provided

clock

3 hour delivery

person