Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front: Nazism – Collective Responsibility and Individual Option
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front: Nazism – Collective Responsibility and Individual Option

Summary/Abstract: This study analyses the novel A Time to Love and a Time to Die by the anti-fascist writer Erich Maria Remarque. It deals with a specific representation of the individual of the twentieth century, that of the relationship between the heroic and the erotic, between the involvement on the public level of History and the private level of individual fulfilment. The novel illustrates the restructuring of the traditional categories of heroism and reveals the fact that in the past century, involvement in war was a matter of personal opinion, of consciousness, not one of duty or calling. My study aims at proving that this novel, although written in a serious, journalistic style, follows established patterns, as it is infused with two myths: that of initiation, closely related to a spiritual master, and that of love and the recovery of mankind’s golden age through a cyclic catastrophe – the only way to cast off the horrors of Nazism.

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