All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, addresses the idea of memory and identity in deep, if highly confusing, detail. The novel guides us through a year of one soldier in World War One, and we get to experience what a young, nineteen-to-twenty-year-old man by the name of Paul Bäumer thinks and lives, both in his homeland Germany and on the fronts of trench warfare. In this novel, we see that his identity is challenged and changed in ways he cannot control.
In the book, we watch as Paul Bäumer receives leave in Chapter Seven, and during this time at his home, he looks upon his books of his school years and tries to bring himself back to that time. However, he can’t, as the harder he tries, the more “[his] disquietude grows” and so does “a terrible feeling of foreignness”(172). Paul soon feels panicked when he can’t connect to and is not part of his past life. He is lost to that world he had lived in; he’s “shut out” and becomes “listless and wretched, like a condemned man” as he “sit[s] there and the past withdraws itself”(172). The war has made it impossible for Paul to return to his past, as his prior life has been erased and now belongs to “another world that is gone from [him]”(121). He and his comrades are forced to leave their old lives, forgetting the pleasure of simplicities like books and poetry and carefree minds: things that we enjoy in excess.
With memories gone and no time left to wonder about a bleak future before him, Paul has become defined by war. He has lost his past, his future, and his life to the brutal battle he is forced into, conscripted to take and break all his old habits and both his own and his comrades’ youths. His identity remains, but changed, broken and in tatters, exposed only in sombre moments of idleness or heart-bleeding moments on the front, at times where confronting himself is the only battle going on in his head.
In Chapter Nine in All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul, while hiding in a crater and lost, stabs a French soldier who then falls on top of him. He spends hours in the crater with the dying man, feeling guilt and fear as he watches a terrified man die, slowly and noisily. The shreds of his self draw together as he looks on at the dead man, saying, “I did not want to kill you....But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind”(223) and reflecting on how he and this Frenchmen were never enemies, when “you [Frenchmen] are poor devils like us [Germans], that your mothers are just as anxious as ours”(223). He recognizes, just as he thinks while watching Russian war prisoners, that he and the Frenchman “have the same fear of death...the same dying...the same agony”(223) in this life of war. His livelihood and mannerisms are forged by war, but the last spark of himself that resides still gives him pause about why he, and anyone else, is fighting this war.
If identity is connected to memory, then the war has made any emotions we notice in the novel as connected to memories either forgotten or changed. During sentry duty, soon after a bombardment on the front, Paul sees a grove of poplar trees on a river bank and remembers when he had played under such trees as a child. But when he experiences this memory, it isn’t happy as he remembers. He calls them “quiet” even though the drone of the front is constant. Paul believes that the memory’s stillness “is the reason why these memories...do not awaken desire so much as sorrow”(121) within him. Instead, he becomes very melancholy, thinking of how these memories bring nothing but sorrow for him now, slowly luring him into a void that he knows he should not go into. He knows the void will be inescapable once it finally claims him. So Paul, afraid of this void, cuts off the memories before they can consume his final shreds of self. We witness Paul’s decline and resistance to his slow degeneration, trying to remember and feel things that are truly no longer part of him.
In essence, what shreds remain of Paul’s identity is not happily connected to his memories, as so few moments of his previous life are happy any more. We can say identity does have a connection to memory and it still does within Paul. However, we are shaped by the joyous and sorrowful memories we have, while Paul’s changed memories weakly and morosely shape him. His connection to memory is built on the lack of connection to those memories rather than the memories themselves. His true identity, or what we see of it, is more closely connected to his comrades and his constant race against annihilation on the front lines.
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