The Road back, although less well known than All Quiet on the Western Front, is just as thought-provoking and, in subtle ways, even more heart breaking.The story begins during the last few days of WWI. As battle rages around them, a group of young German soldiers contemplate what peace will be like and dream of returning home with both fear and longing. They grieve for lost comrades who won't be returning with them but anticipate the joy of being back with friends and family, of returning, finally, to their old lives.When peace finally does arrive, they head home anticipating a hero's welcome; instead, they are met with indifference and lack of understanding. The people who had remained behind while they were off fighting for the Fatherland, have continued their lives without them and, for these people, peace is not much different from war - everything is pretty much the same. But these young men have changed. When they marched away to war, they were just boys, hardly more than children, with all the hopes and innocent dreams of youth; they have returned as men, old before their time, damaged physically and psychically and they no longer fit into this civilized world.Nothing is the same for them and they feel lost and betrayed. Wives have taken lovers, jobs, once promised, are now occupied by others who hadn't left, they are too old and too restless to return easily to their studies, and they no longer respect those who once held authority over them - parents, teachers, police. They are scorned by the profiteers who became rich off the war and they have been forgotten by the girls they left behind. They suffer from shell-shock and depression and can't shake habits they developed for survival in the trenches. They steal to eat even though food is available, they have flash backs and jump at every loud noise, and their nights are plagued with nightmares.One reenlists, hoping to regain the companionship they had shared during the war only to discover it doesn't exist in a peacetime army. One seeks to change the world through revolution only to be shot and killed by soldiers whom he once fought alongside. For some, the only solution is suicide and, for a very few, including Ernst, the narrator of the story, true peace is finally found in nature.The Road back is possibly the hardest, most gut-wrenching book I have ever read. Remarque's characters are so vividly drawn that they seem to live in the pages and it is impossible not to feel every lost hope, every disappointment, every pain, every betrayal that they feel. This book is a must read for anyone whether pro- or anti-war, who wants to understand what it is to be a soldier during wartime.
First time in 2014 I've read a book worthy of 5 stars. It's a brilliant book, I'm still overwhelmed by this book. It's so intense, so powerful and dramatic (not melodramatic), that I simply wasn't able to concentrate on anything while I still had some pages left to read.It's been six years since the last time I read All Quiet on the Western Front, which still remains one of my favourite books, and only a couple of months ago I started to wonder whether Erich Maria Remarque had written any more books. And he had! So, the natural place to start with was with the so-called sequel to his most famous novel. It starts in the last months of the war, in April 1918, but quickly moves to peacetime. Actually, you actually get to know more how life was in the trenches through the character's memories than during those 40 odd pages at the beginning. However, they are also interesting because they will serve as a contrast in the interaction between a group of six or seven soldiers who were only 18 when they became soldiers, and now they have to come back to civilian life. At the beginning, even if Ernst is the narrator, we don’t know much about him. Most of the story is about what happens to his comrades, to the company of men he is with, they are a community. But this stops when they come back from the war and need to adapt to their civilian lives. They lose touch and they become different people, so that even they cannot understand each other. It's a beautiful book, beautifully written (something that already fascinated me from his first novel), and it's a pity that this translation is not very good (or that's my feeling). But it's very tough to read sometimes, the accounts of what happened in the war, or the despair of some former soldiers, who see that they are no longer fit for "normal" life, they cannot adapt to society, that war has killed them in some other cruel way. It is also a very interesting portrait of German society after the war and it gives an intuition of what happened later.Anyway, great book, the best I've read this year so far. It's not required to have read All Quiet on the Western Front to understand it!
What do You think about The Road Back (2001)?
The psychologically haunting follow-up novel to All Quiet on the Western Front. These boys traveled to the depths of human depravity and brutality and came back to a thankless, cold, poor society. A society that didn't know who these boys were or what they did or why they did it, and didn't want to know. Welcome to the 20th century boys! Here we are individuals, we do not have social infrastructure to help reintegrate you into society. It's up to you to find it within yourself to just forget the horrors of war, and find your own place somehow. Good job, you went and fought for this meaningless abstraction, "the Fatherland," now carry on with your lives and don't make a fuss and don't disturb us."I've had a look at most things, Ernst--professions, ideals, politics--but I don't fit into this show. What does it amount to?--Everywhere profiteering, suspicion, indifference, utter selfishness."What about comradeship among the troop? Comradeship carried them through the war, perhaps it can see them through the post-war society? Perhaps individual friendships can help, but there is no comradeship left among the troops as a whole, for in society, men are individuals.The major theme of the novel is that youth was robbed away from these boys, as they were thrown into a meat grinder and spat back out again. Ernst, the narrator, has a look at the former spots of his youth--maybe he can reclaim what was lost by seeing the old pond he went to, or dating his old crush. No, the eyes that have seen the trenches, seen mates destroyed, and seen enemies blown to bits are different than the eyes that lived that youth.Overall a beautiful, brutal, haunting work and perhaps the most profound (anti)war novel I have ever read. Had the lessons of The Road Back truly been understood and assimilated in Germany during the interwar period, men would never have flocked to repeat the same errors.
—Slareck
All Quiet on the Western Front is the staple of Erich Maria Remarque, but in my opinion this book is a much more important piece of literature. It is a prophetic piece of literature. It demonstrates the ease at which a country wishing for the end of conflict (All Quiet on the Western Front) can change into an aggressor wishing for lost glory (The Road Back). It carries a theme similar to Catch-22 by Joseph Heller in that it displays the dichotomy of good intentions and morbid consequences of military institutional thinking. I love it because it was written after World War I and seemed to be a warning unheeded. It pleaded for a change of mood, a decrease in the fervent fever of German nationalism, but was unheard resulting in the Second World War.
—Corbin Routier
The Road Back: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...I am quite astonished that The Road Back is much less known than its famous prequel All Quiet on the Western Front. For me The Road Back is a heartbreaking story, that left me crying myself quietly to sleep in the middle of the night. In All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque was not quite himself – the author I know for dissecting human relationships and for philosophizing about life and love. Instead he was focused exclusively on the grotesqueness, violence and fatuity of war that leaves young men physically and emotionally crippled. In The Road Back Erich Maria Remarque is again the author I fell in love with. The story begins during the last few days of WWI, a short time after All Quiet on the Western Front ended. Although it doesn’t feature the same characters (with the exception of Tjaden) in The Road Back many of the soldiers from All Quiet on the Western Front are mentioned…but they are already dead. Read more: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...
—Lora Grigorova
