Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

I'm pretty sure this was assigned reading at some point in school, but I remember nothing of my reading then. Reading it now, I know it is one of the great novels of our time, perhaps the greatest war novel. It is a prophetic account of the turning point in human consciousness, the turning that we need to take up now and strengthen and fulfill: the recognition of how harmful, destructive forces work in us and need to be consciously faced and dismantled. Paul, the book's young protagonist, loses that battle, but by telling his story with such compassion and such unflinching honesty Remarque gives readers the opportunity to search their own souls and to wonder how such senseless war can be stopped there, at the root of our being.

Today, we know so much more than 100 years ago about trauma and how our bodies and brains respond to the kind of relentless threat and danger the young soldiers were pushed into. We know that merely talking about trauma does not heal it, much less pushing it aside and ignoring it, as the next generations tried to do. We know also about how vital human connections and love are to our survival, how comradeship became something to live for and to die for, much more than the senselessness of nationalism. All of this is demonstrated in Paul's raw, brave testimony. He could not find healing, except in the death he welcomed in the end, but we who have inherited his world have to go further.