/lit/ - Literature

>>21323723
Forgot: "Only the healthy [gesund] man is capable of justice" (p. 4), but Remarque is "one-dimensional and worrying, problematic [bedenklich]".

In other words it's about fairness, even to the First World War, and every reader should be able to see the truth in the general sentiment that Remarque's book is very, very bleak. Outside of Paul Bäumer's own group of comrades, he encounters mostly scum, unless it's his dying mother, of course. If you've delved deeper into this issue, as an example, the boot camp is an absolute cliché of Prussian military management whereas actual military service was more likely just as boring and old-fashioned but a lot less malicious than what Remarque says, indeed the Himmelstoß character approaches comedy as a model of an evil bastard, "Musterschweinhund" (p. 14).