The Romance of Death
A Time to Love and a Time to Die.
by Erich Maria Remarque. Translated from the German by Denver Lindley.
Harcourt, Brace. 378 pp. $3.95.
The novel starts on the Eastern front, some time in early spring 1944. It starts with death, and the dead: the hand of a German corpse grows out of the melting snow, and a group of Russian partisans are executed over the graves they have been digging themselves. Among them is a woman; “she lay there with her arms braced like a great bright frog that could go no farther and she hissed without turning her eyes aside for an instant. . . . Only at the last moment did she see the revolver. She thrust her head to one side and bit Muecke in the hand. Muecke cursed and with a downward blow of his left hand knocked her lower jaw loose. As the teeth let go he shot her in the nape of the neck.” It is a great scene; in its brutal directness, and its obsession with death, one is tempted to call it a mythical one.
Soon after, however, we see Remarque engaged in telling a conventional war story, sugar-coated with a thin layer of moralistic arguments. The plot is based on the contrast between the pensive innocence of the hero and the bed-and-bathroom humor of his entourage. In this it is All Quiet on the Western Front all over again, with the exception that here the skilful handling of a seasoned recipe has to make up for what was a first-hand experience in the old book. Ernst Graeber (the “symbolism” of the name that means “serious tombs” is slightly irritating) is given a furlough to visit his parents somewhere in Central or Southern Germany. He finds the city destroyed, his parents bombed out, the morale of the hinterland shaken. The hermetic isolation which, in Hitler’s army, the front soldier had to maintain in order to survive, is shattered and pierced; his doubts of the ultimate victory turn into the expectancy of disaster. In many respects Ernst Graeber seems to be patterned after the soldier Happy in the movie Decision Before Dawn; he is possessed of the same masochistic noblesse that has to perish under the impact of war. Like Happy he blames the catastrophe on his elders, and like him he atones eventually for a guilt which he has never fully accepted, or even grasped intellectually. After having returned to the front, and succumbed again to its rigid thoughtlessness, Graeber kills a Nazi bully, and releases, in. a fit of irrational revolt, a group of Russian partisans, who have re-emerged like a leitmotif in a Wagnerian opera. But both his revolt and sacrifice are devaluated by Graeber’s innate passivity and confusion. One of the Russians had tried to win him over to their side: “ ‘Live—you young—war over for you then . . . live.’ It was a soft deep voice. It spoke the word ‘live’ like a black marketeer saying ‘butter.’ Like a whore saying ‘love.’ Tenderly, demandingly, enticingly and falsely.” In good romantic style, German variety, death has become an escape from an insoluble dilemma.
_____________
Nor is the component of Liebestod missing. The process of the soldier’s awakening is not only intensified but utterly spoiled by a love affair (a trap which Decision Before Dawn avoided); it is spoiled precisely because this love story is the most competently told among the many erotic adventures in Remarque’s books. He bestows upon the romance between the classless and almost faceless soldier and the beautiful and distinctly upper middle class Elisabeth the air of a fairy tale, the tale of the swineherd who is redeemed by the princess. Furthermore, Elisabeth’s father has been sent to a concentration camp, she herself lives in poverty and humiliation, whereby the motive of Cinderella is joined to that of the swineherd. (Graeber’s changing from his uniform into civilian clothes is presented with all the paraphernalia of a magical metamorphosis, and the many meals the lovers share with one another assume a ritualistic importance.) Yet the fairy tale, patiently and almost believingly told, serves only to befog the moral issues of the story. Indulging in her wishdream of breaking out from their Nazi ghetto into the open world, Elisabeth points to the hatred of Germany growing up among the free nations: “Perhaps you destroyed enough,” she says to the soldier, “so that they will go on hating us for many years.” And he answers: “Yes, perhaps. . . . Perhaps they do hate us. . . . There aren’t many undamaged countries left. Is there still something there to drink?” Unable to disentangle his personal share from the collective responsibility, he reaches for his glass of champagne. Like his hero, Remarque himself has apparently never outgrown the self-pity and escape fantasies of the child.
_____________
In general, however, this novel does represent an attempt at a more mature narrative technique. The characters are more complex than in Remarque’s earlier novel about Nazism, Spark of Life, and speak fewer platitudes. Genuinely human situations arise more often from the melodramatic premises. Some images have a hauntingly appropriate place in this love story, like the forest which has been changed into Christmas glory by the aluminum strips tossed down from Allied airplanes to interfere with radar communications. Sometimes, when the hero is concerned with his ego, he is able to state his, and Remarque’s, condition impersonally, and validly: “He still saw his image in the mirror, but it seemed to him as though it must soon grow indistinct, wavy, and the outlines must dissolve and be absorbed, sucked up by the noiseless, cosmic pumps, drawn away from the surface and out of the accidental form that for a short time had been called Ernst Graeber, back into something limitless that was not simply death but horribly much more than that, extinction, disintegration, the end of self, a vortex of meaningless atoms, nothingness.” This passage sounds at any rate like the starting point of a contemporary war novel. I am reminded of a recent German novel, Kimmerische Fahrt (“Cimmerian Voyage”), by Werner Warsinsky, a stoker in the industrial area of Dortmund who has described movingly and on the level of myth a returned soldier’s attempt at recapturing his identity.
But with Remarque we have only the starting point. The image of humanity atomized by the Second World War refuses to be translated into the glib style that is characteristic of his literary salesmanship. Thus, Remarque’s best, or at least most interesting book, is at the same time his worst. For it is almost good, a graveyard of opportunities never realized.
_____________
