Kemmerich is a boyish young man and schoolfriend of the narrator, Paul. Kantorek encourages his students to join the German army through propaganda. Paul feels Kantorek misled them and gave them no useful skills or information to use during their time in the war. Tjaden's story ends a little differently than the rest of his friends' do At least in this novel. We guess everyone dies eventually Character Analysis Himmelstoss The former postman, whose name means "heaven-knocker ," overexerts his authority and is reported by the son of a local magistrate.
How does Himmelstoss react in battle? He panics. He gets a small scratch and pretends to be more seriously wounded so that he might not have to leave the trench, but Paul comes to get him.
He seems to be going crazy like a dog with rabies, crouching in the corner and nearly foaming at the mouth. This means that the entire story is told through his eyes. The point of view shifts on the very last page of the book to a 3rd person, unnamed source.
The reason for the shift is to give a short account of Paul's death. His death comes as a surprise, a tragic final shock in the last two paragraphs of the book. Tjaden is a bed wetter , and during training, Himmelstoss set out to break him of this habit, which he attributed to laziness.
Albert Kropp kruhp The best student in Paul's class, he joins Paul in rebelling against Himmelstoss' bullying. Albert is promoted to lance corporal, then threatens suicide after his leg is amputated at thigh level. Taking comfort from his companions, he resigns himself to an artificial limb.
Leer lair Paul's mature schoolmate and math whiz who titillates his comrades with details of sexual intercourse, which the others have yet to experience. In the summer of , Leer bleeds to death from a hip wound. In bed 26 at St. Joseph's, his rapid decline and death from a leg amputation is Paul's first eyewitness experience with personal loss. Haie Westhus HY-ee VEHST-hoos A nineteen-year-old peat digger, Haie prefers a military career to a lifetime of manual labor but dies of a back wound, never to achieve his ambition to be a village policeman.
Detering DEE-tuh-rihng An Oldenburg peasant who hates to hear horses bellowing from pain and is plagued by worries about his wife, who must tend their farm alone. Filled with longing for home, when cherry trees are in bloom, he deserts. After his capture, he is sent before a field tribunal and never heard from again. Kantorek KAHN-tow-rihk The hometown schoolmaster, a chauvinistic sloganeer, who fills his students' heads with impassioned speeches about duty to the Fatherland and sends them letters that depict them as "Iron Youth.
Corporal Himmelstoss HIHM-muhl-shtahs A former postman and wartime drill instructor caught up in an illusion of power, Himmelstoss demonstrates bullying and tyranny, incurring wrath for humiliating two bed-wetters.
He is a resourceful, inventive man and always finds food, clothing, and blankets whenever he and his friends need them.
His interest in analyzing the causes of the war leads to many of the most critical antiwar sentiments in the novel. Tjaden is a wiry young man with a voracious appetite.
He bears a deep grudge against Corporal Himmelstoss. Read an in-depth analysis of Kantorek. A noncommissioned training officer. Before the war, Himmelstoss was a postman. He is a petty, power-hungry little man who torments Paul and his friends during their training. Paul refuses to allow himself to get too close to his dying mother, let alone the rest of his family and others from home. He feels betrayed by his elders, who have pushed Paul and the German youth into fighting for a cause they have no stake in.
The saving grace for Paul is that he does bond with his fellow soldiers--at least while they are alive. Camaraderie, to him, is the one good thing that has come out of the war, and his intimacy with Kat as the two cook a goose borders on the homoerotic. Paul also exhibits increasingly anti-nationalistic sentiments as the novel progresses, and his recognition of the arbitrariness of war allows him to grow closer to the Russians in an adjacent prison camp, and to the Frenchman he kills in a shell-hole.
Paul occasionally comments on the impotence of words in describing the brutality of war. He also laments how civilians will never be able to understand the soldier's plight. We may assume that Remarque felt the same way, but decided that by writing about WWI, he might overturn these theories and relate his own alienated war experiences. Although Kantorek, the former schoolteacher of Paul and his friends, figures in only one present-tense scene, he casts a long shadow over the novel.
He represents nationalism, the ideology of unswerving dedication to one's own country that swept Europe before and during WWI, at its worst.
His patriotic sentiments and bullying forced Paul and his classmates--what he proudly calls the "'Iron Youth'"--into volunteering for the war. Paul gains some measure of revenge when he sees that Kantorek has been enlisted in the war; at least Kantorek must now fight and possibly die for the war he has helped promote. Like Kantorek, Himmelstoss is in just a few scenes, but he is an important representative figure.
As Paul's friends see it, Himmelstoss epitomizes the way men with little power otherwise--Himmelstoss was a postman before the war--exploit whatever power they gain in the military.
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