All Quiet on the Western Front

On this re-reading of All Quiet on the Western Front, I find myself reflecting most on the dichotomy Paul posits between "primitivity" and "civilization". The "weapon of instinct" he describes (on p. 294 of my copy)leads to an extended meditation on the difference between being "naturally primitive" and "artificially primitive." He argues that he and his comrades experience an artificially primitive state during warfare, but "the Bushmen are primitive and naturally so" (294). My hackles raise at such descriptions--even while I know the historical context and I understand how casual racism does have a place in works of this period--because it partakes of a particularly ugly strain of thought that was dominant at the time. 

"Eugenics" was a popular branch of pseudo-science at the turn of the century, positing that the human race could be selectively bred to minimize "undesireable" elements (including the mentally ill, the physically disabled, as well as the "stupid," etc.). This was paired with a conception of the "races" of humanity mapped onto a sort of family tree, which figured the "primitive" races at the bottom and the "civilized" races at top branches. The pseudo-scientific eugenics, when paired with the image of the "family of man," became a powerful cultural trope that persists today. The term "primitive" came to denote a (mis-)reading of Darwin, in which--with the help of the "civilized"--the "primitive" could become civilized. 

As we may be able to tell with Remarque's work, however, a certain measure of "primitivity" is never distant--savagery abounds, and the combination of flat affect when describing the horrors undergone by Paul and his friends coupled with the elevated rhetoric of his philosophical meditations, we can tell that setting up "primitive" and "civilized" in contrast isn't a useful division. It's a category failure. 

When we arrive at the final pages of the novel, Paul's tone grows more frantic as the "action" of the "civilized" diplomatic efforts is abstracted from his own circumstances. 

As we go forward into the poetry of WWI and transition into WWII this week, it is worth considering the replication of this dichotomy, and how it fails in different ways.