Loving hopelessness. A brief review of Erich Maria Remarque

Once, my grandmother suggested that I read the works of Erich Maria Remarque. I still recall how she distinctly and somewhat melancholically said, “I love how Remarque’s books are so hopeless.” Indeed, Remarque writes about arguably one of the worst epochs of recent history, the 20th Century, and of all his books I have read, not a single one has a happy ending.

To give a quick overview, Remarque’s books are historical, and they portray various stages of the 20th Century, namely the First World War, The Great Depression, The Second World War, The Holocaust, and the immigrant rush towards America. His genius as an author is that he writes very plainly, too plainly even compared to other German authors like Heinrich Böll or Thomas Mann, who are excellent in their own right but significantly more complicated to read. No Remarque’s characters are ordinary, and almost like a documentary, the author relates what they are going through. He does not fall into moral preaching or sentimental cursing of his character’s faith. No, he introduces the environment of their suffering, spares no detail, and then leaves the reader with their thoughts.

The usual tone and feel of his writing are startling, more startling than any poetic exhortation on the tragedy of man, the horror of war, etc. It would seem that Remarque understood that it is enough to give a good account of what happened without “instructing” the reader to be shocked or grieved. Here are a few examples from All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), his landmark novel. Most people think soldiers used their bayonets during hand-to-hand combat, but the problem with bayonets was that they quickly got stuck between the ribs of your enemy. Using a nicely sharpened shovel to cut up your adversary proved better. Or how one soldier remembers a play he has left half-finished in his cabinet at home and concludes that he will probably never have a chance to finish it. These are enough to touch you deeply.

In his book The Three Comrades, which is about the Great Depression, in one section, Remarque quickly lists the tenants in the apartment building where his main character lives. A student who is so wretchedly poor that he cannot finish his education cannot find a job and will probably die of starvation. A widow whose children died of malnutrition, a lone woman with cats only, a family that is constantly bickering, with the husband perpetually in fear of being laid off, working double shifts to keep his job. Other authors might include a few paragraphs per struggling person, but not Remarque; he is telegraphic, just listing with a sentence or two, which is much more moving than a deep analysis of the sorrow of his characters.

Why hopelessness?

I know from my writing that a piece of art should relate beauty, which was suggested to me by my aunt Maria Bakalova, an accomplished writer, editor, journalist, and co-founder of Five Plus Publishing House. She, of course, did not forget to add that a piece of art may be shocking, painful, and filled with grief, but it still had to be beautiful. It had to retain aestheticism even if descending into the lowest ring of Hell. Well, this is very hard to put in words, but this is true: great works of art remain beautiful regardless of the emotions they evoke. We look to art for pleasure, excitement, humor, grief, tragedy, or horror. The fine line is where the artist does not emphasize the emotion, in essence, telling you what to feel. Remarque does not do that, which is one of the reasons his writing is so impactful.

Returning to my grandmother’s words, one might be puzzled about how she could love hopeless novels. Was her love for them in the emotional surge that the stories cause? Indeed, we watch comedies so we may laugh or horror films and books to feel fear. And indeed, Remarque’s works fill the reader with shock and sadness like any good tragedy would. But it is not just that; hopelessness defines that there is a spark of hope before, ultimately, the curtain falls. 

A good example of this is the animated film Grave of the Fireflies. This is a marvelous movie about two children, a brother and sister, during the Second World War in Japan. Three minutes into the film, you already know the ending as the two main characters are reunited in the spirit world, dying very young. Yet you hope with all your heart that these two kids will make it, which is a double suspension of disbelief. You suspend your disbelief once when you enter the fictional narrative. You let the story draw you in, then it tells you that it won’t end well, and you understand this, and then, against all logic but abiding by all that is human, you suspend your disbelief once more, hoping that all will be well.

That is what Remarque does with his characters. The reader wants them to make it, rooting for them every step of the way. When things turn for the worse, the feeling of hope remains and is the last thing to go. Is it not the true tragedy of war, the real suffering behind it, that many people were hoping to make it (or for their loved ones to make it), grasping at the last straw of hope?

Contemplating history

Another interesting point is to consider history as a watcher and examiner. Studying history involves the moral aspect of learning from humanity’s mistakes. Actual history (at least from my perspective) may become laborious and technical, especially from an academic perspective. It is punctual and forcedly stripped of subjectivity, as any science should be.

But from the vantage point of an amateur (non-professional historian), it turns out that the emotional drive and spark related to the epos of humankind is far more interesting than the bear facts. You want to know how people from a particular day and age felt about their struggles, philosophies, metaphysical assumptions, superstitions, why they held them, and how they survived (as human beings, not as points in a statistical inquiry). Then, when the focus shifts to emotion and applied philosophy (not academic philosophy but real-life philosophical actions and beliefs), science is left high and dry, a fantastic vessel devoid of a sea to traverse.

Then we turn to art. Then we turn to The Scream by Edvard Munch, or to historical fiction for a more middle-ground view, and yes to fictional authors like Remarque. We turn to the artist to experience an age, a conflict, an intense emotional situation, and the like. Well, when reading the works of Erich Maria Remarque, it is plain to see that his characters suffer all in their own way; some of them are crooked, some of them are naïve, some of them are depressed, and most of them are cynical.

Here, I use the word cynical loosely. Remarque seems to have a genuine distrust of other people’s motives based on all he experienced during his lifetime. So is with his characters. Mostly, his main characters are virtuous cynics. They are good people but carry their values in a gilded cage with an overarching distrust of humanity: gritty survivors and a product of their age. A common way to preserve one’s sanity is to become a cynic, push back emotions, and be grossly practical and pragmatic. Remarque’s characters drink, drift, reside in cheap flats, struggle, cheat, and get into fights. This cynical preservation of sanity culminates in his novel about a concentration camp, “Spark of Life,” where the main character is known only by his prisoner number, calling himself skeleton #509, forfeiting his humanity because, hay, what is the point! 

It is unclear here how accurately Remarque’s philosophy reflects that of the period. It might be accurate—Hell, it probably is—but there are indeed other modes of being he didn’t know about or did not consider. More so, as stated earlier, by being dreadfully hopeless, the author, in a very eloquent way, pays a great tribute to hope, virtue, and the beauty of life.

Sometimes, we ponder what we would do if we met the same circumstances as our forefathers some 50 – 100 years ago. This drenched-in-blood history page was not so long ago, which is scary when you think about it. There are many ways this philosophic and existential inquiry may go, but for me, one interesting and somewhat strange vantage point stands out, and I want to close this little review with it.

“What I am confident about is that if something terrible happened to me like things that have happened to many of my friends during the past year, then it would be not I who would meet it, not this ordinary I, but another I within me who would be equal to the occasion.” That is from the book In Search of The Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, who was a Russian philosopher and esotericist known for his expositions of the early work of the Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff. It is most accurate to say that any intellectual discussion of history, especially of grim history, lives in the now, from the comfort of our home or in a lecture room. Any prognosis on what one might have done if such and such or how people should have acted is like a cloud; a few hours from now, it would be different, and a year from now, it might be way around the world or in a glacier somewhere.

But the fact remains that when a calamity hits, people will change instantly, not in the same way, not in one direction, but all in their unique way, and their I (and this is the glory of being human) will match the occasion as stated by Ouspensky.  And Remarque got a pretty close look at that I and several significant occasions. His works grasp the soul and transcend simple morality and distanced philosophy, and I will indeed be returning to the works of Erich Maria Remarque during my lifetime.