Customer Reviews

The Road Back

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There seems to be a plethora of both novels and non-fiction books now about the ravages of war and its aftermath, describing both the physical and emotional scars, now that the world has gone through World War II, Vietnam, and scores of other wars. However, when Remarque was writing, there was very little literature of this sort. He nailed it early on, when the Allies were still celebrating their triumphs after the War to End All Wars, and no one outside Germany really cared what happened there. In the West, even today, we have been conditioned to think of Germany during the World Wars as an army of emotionless automatons who blindly followed orders and suffered no moral apprehension. This novel, and others by Remarque, show this to be untrue. The Germans died, cried, loved, lost, and suffered, both physically and emotionally, as much as any soldier of any army. This is the fitting sequel to "All Quiet on the Western Front" (Paul Baumer even gets a passing mention as the protagonists remember lost comrades), and while it lacks the grit and guts of Remarque's wartime novel, it shows the sense of loss, grief, and hopelessness felt by many on both sides after the Great War, and other wars as well.

A wonderful mix of poetic and politics, idealism and romanticism, beautiful scenery and horrible flashbacks. You are never completely sure what is going to happen and you are not allowed to be led by any single event in the novel except life itself. Remarque hits on our own senses and emotions and gives us a rare opportunity to follow the affairs and thoughts of another being. Amazing

The Road Back, sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, is a incredibly touching story of comrades returning from years at war to a society that neither wants to accept nor help them in their search for a meaningful life after war. This lost generation goes through life seeing no more purpose in living.

Remarque's incredible descriptive style leads the reader through turmoil in Germany, from food shortages, to political unrest, suicide, and murder, and yet at the same time he makes pauses to simply show some of the beauty left in the world. The characters are incredible and after putting down the book I felt that I had bonded with people I had only known for a couple of hundred pages and yet had been through so much with. Follow the comrades through tough times and their realizations about their own meanings of life.

"Yes, things were much simpler at the Front; there, so long as a man was still alive, all was well."

The sequel to "All Quiet on the Western Front," this novel explores the lives of the surviving members of Paul Baumer's regiment, as they attempt to integrate back into society in postwar Germany. Peace has come at last, yet the "road back" to civilization is a hard, arduous journey that countless ex-soldiers lose their way. Although the war has ended, the youth whose lives were ever changed are still soldiers at heart, trained to kill. The years in the trenches have rendered the soldiers hollow and incapable of recovering their former innocence. Whereas life in the trenches taught comradeship and survival, life back at home is a tedious, mind-numbing process of seemingly petty trifles and inconveniences.

No members from the original novel, save for Tjaden, appear, but there are references made to the original gang (who were killed, of course). The novel is told in the first person by Ernst Birkholz, and 18-year old student who returns home after the armistice. In style and form, Remarque delivers a novel similar to the original. In a terse and direct style, Remarque paints a portrait of Ernst as he struggles with disillusionment and fear, for the battle back in civilization is far more arduous and heart-wrenching than the trenches.

Throughout the novel, Ernst attempts to recapture his youth, for it is his youth that was taken from him. Although he has survived the war, he was irrevocably damaged psychologically. Everything has changed. Even the simple pleasures of a pre-war existence have vanished, although they may physically be the same. For, once a boy becomes a soldier, he can never recapture his youth.

Yet, for all the broken soldiers, Remarque does deliver hope. Not all of his comrades have fallen victim to the ravages of war. Tjaden, Arthur, and Bruno show that one can find happiness back in society. In the midst of the chaos of the Weimar Revolution, there can be found peace and contentment. Although he fails to find it until the very end, it seems as if Ernst has discovered the secret to navigating the "road back."

I must say that I am surprised this novel hasn't generated more interest on Amazon, as I am only the 9th reviewer. Although the novel doesn't have quite the edge of the first one, which is a war novel afterall, it does deliver a poignant image of struggle and redemption. And the novel is not totally devoid of war scenes, for flashbacks occur periodically, particularly the haunting image of the English captain whose legs were blown off by Ernst's grenade. This is a superb book and is a brilliant sequel to the original.

I read this book for a course on Inter-war Europe and I absolutely devoured this book. Admittedly, you need to have a basic grasp on German history during the first few years after World War I, but I think that this would be a useful book for creating a better understanding of those who return home from war. As much as "All Quiet" was great for it's strong anti-war messages, "The Road Back" really hits home because it is about life after and away from war. It is about families and friendship and estrangement. It is a book about life. And life, in the confines of this book, is excruciatingly beautiful. Well worth a read.

This is an excellent story about a group of young men who try to to put some semblance of normality back into their lives after experiencing the horrors of war. One cannot help feeling sympathetic for these men. Perhaps they were the enemy, perhaps they were on the "other side". But for the most part they were ordinary young men, generally decent and not so different from men in the U.S., Britain or Canada. They went to war with the same ideals of patriotism and duty as allied soldiers, and came back scarred physically and emotionally. As well as feeling disillusioned to find that their sacrifices had been for nothing, the people at home seem to be almost indifferent and have no understanding of what they went through. What they experienced then, seems to be very similar to what soldiers of today are experiencing. Post traumatic stress disorder.

i have recently read All Quiet On The Western Front, Remarque's first novel. to follow it up, i have read The Road Back. to anyone who's read the first, the only way to give closure to the tough, touching story of Paul Baumer is to read the sequal- The Road Back. In it, a young soldier named Ernst and the few men left of his company come back home after 4 grueling years of the unspeakable horrors of military life in World War 1 only to discover that the world may no longer be at war, but there's still a war far more horrifical raging in their own hearts. They must now fight to fit back into society, and stay true to themselves and their dead comrades. In this story of lost youth and the fight for survival, Ernst and his friends fight to regain control of their shattered lives and go on in what seems to be an almost pointless existance, finding hope in the strangest places... And as Remarque once said, this is a story of 'a generation ruined by war'.

This is an even better book than Remarque's better-known "All Quiet on the Western Front." The character development is excellent, and many of the scenes are extraordinarily powerful.

By far, this is Remarque's best work. His writing style is much more mature than in All Quiet and the themes, while similar, are far more complex. Anyone interested in PTSD should read this book--from the nightmares to the flashbacks, Remarque has it all here. The vividness is such that I find it difficult to imagine that he himself did not experience something close to what he describes. Ultimately, Remarque is interested in showing those who did not serve in war what the true consequences are for those who did. In All Quiet, the emphasis was the life of the trench soldier. In The Road Back, he focuses in on the failures of soldiers to reintegrate into life. Along the way, Remarque criticizes the bourgeoisie, the upper classes, the war profiteers, the petty officials, and the REMFs. In the end, he finds meaning for the veterans in just being useful, but then, this is not enough to stop the renewed militarism which leads to the Nazis--something Remarque acknowledges. Read A Time to Love and a Time to Die for a post WWII follow up.

In the novel "The Road Back," the main character, Ernst longs for feelings of being whole, searching for the feelings of comradeship that he had had out on the front lines in The Great War. Likewise, for Ernst's friends assimilating is also difficult, with jobs and social statuses removing the comradeship out in the trenches and replacing it with some pseudo form of reality. With a "silent war ravaging this country of my memories," Ernst is unsure on how to live his life. Not as much as a novel, but more of a passive argument for pacifists everywhere, "The Road Back" by Erich Maria Remarque is an introspection of a veteran that has had his life changed while out on the front. The book is near philosophical in its grim portrait of World War I veterans returning home to Germany from a long life in the trenches.

The continuation of Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front begins with the road back to Germany after peace has been declared and soon follows with the troubles that befall The Great War veterans. Ernst and his close friends must face war crimes in times of peace, poverty, lack of comradeship, emotional turmoil, feelings of being used, and forgotten. Ernst and his company witness protests and riots with machine guns massacring crowds in front of them and experience the death of the closest of comrades. Contrary to what Remarque says- these two books are indeed a confession of what he saw in these times.

As Ernst attempts to live his life in post-war Germany, he soon starts to remember all of the responsibilities he had when he wasn't a soldier. Ernst is faced with assimilating back into school, family life, and potentially a job. However, it isn't only Ernst being reluctant to assimilate back into civilian standards. His friends, Willy, Ludwig, and Albert too have problems, and even at times openly oppose assimilating back into city life. In a dispute during their welcome back speech to school, the veterans slam the principle, with overwhelming information, and unsuppressed frustration of the front. While the principle attempts to paint each man that died, and each man that came back, as heroes, the soldiers continually beg to differ. In an especially revealing quote, Willy booming with laughter screams at the principle "Hero's death! Would you like to know how young Hoyer died? Stuck in the wire screaming, and his guts out of his belly like macaroni." Willy continuing, reveals that Hoyer died by being shredded by shrapnel that is comparable to a "nutmeg grater." Refusing the hero's speech, and refusing a standard education, the company soon vouches for a more accelerated and shortened education; exemplifying how little the veterans care to assimilate back into a standard style of living.

Erich Remarque offers up painfully thoughtful questions about war, and with statements proposed like, "Because none can ever wholly feel what another suffers - is that the reason why wars perpetually recur?" One truly begins to understand Ernst's struggle. Likewise, this quote runs deep with Ernst. The largest reason why he has such trouble getting back into normal civilian life is due to the fact that he feels that no one understands him. He feels he doesn't belong, and that he is no longer the same person. In a specific part of The Road Back Ernst revisits an old fishing pond in where instead of viewing old memories or finding old joys, he only sees how to make the pond a battle emplacement. Ernst is continually confused as these feelings, while seemingly wrong, do not feel wrong, and with perpetual thoughts that are the exact equivalent of the above mentioned Ernst only begins to reinforce the thoughts that civilian life is not for him, and that he does not belong with the populace surrounding him.

Ernst's quest for wholeness leads him to move out and away from his parents. Sadly this proves to no avail, and only continually isolates Ernst from everyone around him. However, while in his house he sees the worst side of the war. The riots and protests that are demonstrated, while viewing these, he sees men missing their whole bodies, all limbs gone, just a torso of flesh. Some of these protests get so out of hand and even begin to threaten government officials. The military is brought in, and machine-guns are pointed at the crowd opposing the rioting crowd. This ever present tumult is just a grand presentation of the question asked earlier. While there may be no war in Europe, one still exists even in peace-time Germany because one cannot wholly feel what another does.