Title: A Universal Loss of Innocence: “All is Quiet on the Western Front” by NoteSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essayAuthor: Katherine PerryWords: 1,139Written: January 23, 2009Paul Bäumer lives in a world where killing is the only way to live, where Memories are as foreign as the enemy itself, and a single bombardment can age a man fifty years. He lives in a world of relentless violence and tragedy and yet he is numb – too alienated from his past to seek solace in the memories of his youth and too desperate to consider the possibility of escaping the hellish reality of his present. Paul Bäumer is lost, but he is not alone. Erich Maria Note's novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a poignant account of the human face of war and the harrowing psychological wounds that inflict an entire generation. Note's novel chronicles a universal loss of innocence that has left an entire population alienated, dehumanized, and disillusioned. In the novel, Remarque describes a core of men who know how to play cards, swear and fight – which he says is “not much for twenty years old – and yet it is too much for twenty years old » (89). When Paul and his comrades joined the army, they were just teenagers, unaware that the war would completely rob them of their youth. “None of us are over twenty,” he said. “But young? Youth? It was a long time ago. We are old people” (18). The “damned business” of war, as Paul says, has completely alienated him from his past. Memories function only as “silent apparitions” that cannot be relived or fully understood. “They have passed away, they belong to another world which has disappeared from us,” he explains (121). This feeling comes to the fore when Paul is granted two weeks' leave from the battlefield. At home among all that is his origin, he feels alienated and alone. Note writes: “We [the soldiers] could never again recapture the old intimacy with these scenes. It was not the recognition of their beauty and meaning that attracted us, but the communion, the feeling of camaraderie with the things and events of our existence. , which cuts us off from everything and makes the world of our parents something incomprehensible to us..." (122). When Paul puts on his civilian clothes, he feels “embarrassed”. When he looks into his mother's eyes or flips through the volumes of books on his bedroom shelf, a "feeling of strangeness" and a "terrible sense of strangeness" overcome him. “I don’t feel at home among these things,” he says. “There is a distance, a veil between us” (160). The distance Paul speaks of also describes the generational divide between soldiers his age and those who had already carved out an adult existence before the war. The legacy of the older generation is “so strong that war cannot erase it” (20). Paul and his former classmates differ in that they do not have an adult life to which they can return. They have no occupation, no wife, no foundation on which to rebuild their lives. “We hadn’t yet taken root,” he explains. “The war took us away” (20). For the thousands of men who moved from school to the battlefield, the postwar period presented an insurmountable identity crisis. Estranged from the past and the future, Paul clings desperately to the present: “I am a soldier, I must cling to this. .” (173). But being a soldier does not confer true identity. Instead, the dehumanization that followed did not.