Dopo il folgorante esordio di “Niente di Nuovo sul Fronte Occidentale” che fece conoscere al mondo le qualità letterarie e la spiccata vena antimilitarista del giovane Erich Maria Remarque [1898-1970], l’autore proseguì la sua attività di scrittore pubblicando questo “La Via del Ritorno” un romanzo che ha come protagonisti giovani tedeschi colti nel passaggio tra il "cessate il fuoco" della I Guerra Mondiale e il loro difficile reinserimento nella vita quotidiana e sociale di una Germania appena uscita sconfitta e sull’orlo di una crisi economico-politica. Lo sbandamento individuale e collettivo di questi ragazzi di uno stesso plotone che per anni hanno vissuto come fratelli la guerra, le battaglie, il pericolo quotidiano di morire o di rimanere feriti e mutilati è il fulcro principale di quest’opera che emoziona e angoscia e colpisce profondamente chi la legge anche e soprattutto per i toni misurati dell’autore che risulta così quanto mai efficace e incisiva, echeggiando a lungo nell’animo dopo la fine della lettura.

W twórczości Remarque’a jest coś, co z każdą jego kolejną książką, po którą sięgam, we mnie dojrzewa i za każdym kolejnym razem wywołuje większe zdumienie i podziw.
(4.5)

This has to be the most underrated book I have ever read. This is a masterpiece and I cannot understand why it flies under everyone’s radar. Every single page was gut wrenching. It’s nearly 100 years old but still not outdated. It is still such an important piece of literature and in my opinion should be required to read. Remarque is becoming one of my favorite authors. There’s no one like him. An masterpiece.

The Road Back is a remarkable novel by one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. It has the authenticity and often brutal insight of a man who had personally endured and survived the mechanised slaughter of the First World War. The novel describes the adjustments, frustrations and struggles the veterans of that war experienced as they attempted to reintegrate themselves into post-war German society. There is a strong sense of comradeship amongst the men he writes about. A thread throughout the novels is that although the soldiers can understand civilian life, the civilian population cannot comprehend what the survivors and slain had suffered in the trenches, and are ungrateful and indifferent towards them. There is an element of resentment that the sacrifices made had been in vain and that, after the war had ended, the soldiers who had fought it had been abandoned. Remarque includes a variety of characters, each with their own priorities and burdens. For instance, one soldier prioritises the luxury of food and courts a butcher's daughter, another still regards the men he has killed as trophies that he still maintains a proud tally of, still unable to see the enemies he has shot as men like himself, whilst one of the officers seeks out an old battlefield and despairingly communes with the phantoms whose brief lives ended senselessly in the trenches. There are many very poignant moments and Remarque gives the reader a very vivid impression of the many ways the First World War ruined a generation, both during the conflict and in the years that followed it.

An enervating and emotional account of how a group of German soldiers who served on the Western front lines during World War I come home and have to adapt themselves to a new life.

The interesting aspect that Ludwich Birkholtz (the protagonist) and his comrades all joined the army in their last year in high school. When they come back, some years later, they all are faced with existential questions and deep trauma. The choices they make (or don't make) have important implications for their further life.

With pretty straightforward prose Erich Maria Remarque is able to set out for us, readers, how this time period worked on the people involved. How they all had their own destinies - some killing themselves, others ending up in the loony bin, still others becoming successful businessmen - and how each had to transcend himself to overcome their former life in the trenches.

A really underappreciated work by Remarque which is sort of strange since The Way Back is the sequel to his infamous All Quiet on the Western Front. Having read both of them consecutively, I can definitely recommend both books, but recommend The Way Back as the more interesting and fulfilling of both works. Also, this latter book deals with themes that are seldom treated in war books, while the first one is pretty basic with regard to its treatment of front line events.

Read it!

Отрежњујуће.

"Повратак" је својеврсни наставак најбољег (анти-)ратног романа "На Западу ништа ново" и у њему се показује девастирајући учинак рата на преживеле војнике, али и на цело друштво.

Младићи који су практично као деца из школских клупа отишли у рат, глава испуњених високопарним идеалима погибије за отаџбину, из њега се враћају (они који су имали срећу да се врате!) као цинични, резигнирани, огрубели мушкарци, који су искусили све одвратности те бесмислене кланице и грубости ратног живота. Ж��вот у рату је сведен на основне инстинкте, размишља се чопоративно, нагони су ти који управљају понашањем.
Када се све то заврши, повратак у "цивилни живот" нимало неће бити једноставан. Навикнути на ратне околности, очекујући да ће се њихово ратовање "за отаџбину" вредновати, суочиће се са тим да су црноберзијанци и мешетари из позадине сада најугледнији чланови друштва.
Нема ту више места за херојске речи, идеали су изневерени, никога више није брига за ратнике-повратнике (изузев на речима) и то ће за многе од њих бити болно отрежњујуће, често их водећи ка менталним поремећајима (данас се то зове ПТСП).
У том смислу, апсолутно је ремек-дело сцена у којој директор барокним говором дочекује своје преживеле ученике. Одговор једног од војника/ученика саже��е сав презир и резигнацију (додуше, не баш пристојном реченицом, али врло ефектно).

Дирљиво је видети и њихов сусрет са породицама које их још увек сматрају пристојном децом, примерним ученицима, који не говоре "ружне речи". Јаз који је настао, нико више неће моћи да премости.

Све је ово написано врло живо, опипљиво, види се да је Ремарк ово морао дубоко проживети.

Да се ја питам, ово би се читало у средњој школи, упоредо са учењем о "херојским" историјским подвизима и биткама. Можда би се нека млада врућа глава отрезнила.
Штета је само што то никада неће бити популарно.

3.5*

The last combats and skirmishes… Peace is nearing… However death still keeps doing its dire work… And the dread doesn’t let go.

“Gas shells!” shouts Willy, springing up.
We are all awake now and listening intently.
Wessling points into the air. “There they are! Wild geese!”
Moving darkly against the drab grey of the clouds is a streak, a wedge, its point steering toward the moon. It cuts across its red disc. The black shadows are plainly visible, an angle of many wings, a column of squalling, strange, wild cries, that loses itself in the distance.
“Off they go,” growls Willy. “Damn it all – if only we could pull out like that! Two wings and away.”

The war is over and the road back home lies ahead… For those who have managed to deceive death and survive.

The wide, grey square is much too big for us. Across it sweeps a bleak November wind smelling of decay and death. We are lined up between the canteen and the guard-room, more space we do not require. The wide, empty square about us wakes woeful memories. There, rank on rank, invisible, stand the dead.

The war is over but its echo is long and sorrowful: horrendous memories, nightmares, madness, nervous breakdowns, psychological traumas, suicides, alienation…

The things here are stronger – the things that differentiate us from one another are too powerful. The common interest is no longer decisive. It has broken up already, and given place to the interest of the individual. Now and then something still will shine through from that other time when we all wore the same rig, but already it is diminished and dim. These others here are still our comrades, and yet our comrades no longer – that is what is so sad. All else went west in the war, but comradeship we did believe, in; now only to find that what death could not do, life is achieving – it is driving us asunder.

The gory wave of war retreats and on the shore of peace crippled bodies, crippled minds, crippled souls and ruined fates are left… And generals are already readying new wars…

Ďalší skvelý počin od tohto pána. O generácii zničenej vojnou písal už v Na západe nič nové, ale mám pocit, že tu sa to prejavilo ešte viac, keďže tu reálne rozoberal psychické stavy vojakov po návrate z vojny. Bolo to dobré a silné a niekedy fakt kruté a niekedy veľmi smutné. Ale hlavne to bolo reálne.

I heartily recommend this novel. Here is why:

Khizr Kahn’s speech at the Democratic National Convention and Donald Trump’s response to it has focused attention on the concepts of “homeland,” “patriotism,” and “sacrifice.” In these contentious times thoughtful debate about them is otiose. Literature may help us more to understand the concepts. With a book in hand a reader can damp down the discourse on social media and quietly contemplate the writer’s story. Now, there have been some very good novels and short stories collections about America’s misadventures in Iraq (Fobbit by David Abrams, Redeployment by Phil Klay, and Flashes of War by Katy Schultz). These works, however, are too contemporary; they lack perspective. The French philosopher Philippe Aries in his book The Hour of Our Death writes that we need a millennium to understand fully some concepts and ideals. We need not go so far back as that to find works to help us define these three terms. I suggest, instead, we seek out works to read from the Fin de Siecle and the interstices between the wars. After all, the social, economic, and geopolitical issues we argue over today have roots in this period of history. A twentieth-century novel that deserves a fresh look is Erich Maria Remarque’s The Road Back.

The Road Back is the sequel to Remarque’s first and most famous novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Both books were written more than a decade after the end of World War I. By then the public’s attitude about the conflict had shifted. The war no longer was a “great crusade”; instead, it was a source of carnage and waste. This notion gained credence through the poetry of the soldiers who fought, the fiction of Ford Maddox Ford, Frederic Manning, and Siegfried Sassoon (he was a poet too) and the memoirs of Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, and Vera Brittain. This notion certainly is clear in All Quiet on the Western Front. The novel was successful in part too, I think, because it tells the story of Great War from the perspective of the Axis side. Its protagonist, Paul Baumer, is an idealistic German soldier fighting for his country, not some savage slacked on the blood of the poor Belgiums.

The Road Back, on the other hand, takes the story out of the trenches and transfers it to civilian life. It recounts the travails of a cadre of soldiers adjusting to life after the armistice. Ernrst Birkholz, the protagonist, suffers from PTSD (shell sock back then). He is haunted by the memory of a soldier he killed:

The crash of the explosion tears the air, splinters twanging—a cry goes up, long-drawn, frantic with
Horror. …The Englishman is lying clear in the open field; his two legs are blown off at the knees, the blood is pouring out; the bands of his puttees, far unrolled, trail out behind him like loose ribbons; he is lying on his belly; with his arms he paddles; his mouth is wide open, shirking. He heaves himself around and sees me. Then he props himself on his arms and rears his trunk like a seal; he shrieks at me and bleeds, bleeds.

The war intrudes into the quotidian activities of Ernest and his friends. At a party given by his uncle Karl “the famous member of our family [who] has a villa and was chief paymaster during the war,” Ernst embarrasses himself during dinner. The aroma of “crisp, grilled chops” revives memory of a meal he shared with his comrades. Just a few minutes after the main course is served he realizes that “There I sit, just as we did then in Flanders, absent-minded, both elbows on the table, the bone in my two hands, my fingers covered in grease, gnawing off the last scraps of the chop. But the others are eating cleanly with knife and with fork.” In a more severe incident, Ernst and his comrades meet up in a tavern with a noncommissioned officer whom they knew from the war. One of Ernst comrades savagely beats the man because he believes that the officer was responsible for the death of his very close friend. Alienation and violence pervade their lives. As Ernst observes later on about life in peacetime:

We are like those abandoned fields full of shell holes in France, no less peaceful than other ploughed lands about them, but in them are lying still the buried explosives, and until these shall have been dug out and cleared away, to plough will be a danger both to plougher and ploughed.

The Road Back is a story of soldiers gamely trying to assimilate into a society ambivalent towards them. Since the novel does not describe overmuch the carnage the men lived through, the episodes it does recount are all the more powerful. A reader needs not possess detailed knowledge of Weimar Germany to enjoy the book. (The novel itself, for instance, makes only passing reference to the communist revolt of 1918 led by Rosa Luxemburg.) A reader’s critical distance from the events depicted in the novel—first published in 1931—contributes far more to the appreciation of the book. Based on what we know occurred in the decade following the publication of The Road Back, the words “homeland” “patriotism,” and “sacrifice” take on for us a chilling context. We are impelled to draw on these feeling when we hear political leaders and pundits speak these words today.

WW1 has come to an end. German soldiers, young and less young, go back home and resume their former lives... supposedly.


1. THE STORY :

=> A neverending demobilization :

Back in Germany, it dawns on the soldiers that their relatives have carried on with their lives during the war, and aditionally, that they have done admirably without them. Those hoping for a warm welcome, help and support, or some token of gratefulness only meet with torpid indifference.

As a whole, the civilians can't care less about the horrors witnessed and performed by those enlisted. The soldiers' families put up with them, as long as they do not tell them about the last 4 years in the frontline. Germany craves nothing but forgetting a strenuous and thankless conflict. On the one hand, the heroes do not recognize their hometowns, one the other hand, their inhabitants do not recognize them.


=> Poverty and haggling :

Come peace, soldiers have to get used to bargaining again in poverty-ridden Germany. They get used to bartering their medals, pilfer food in the countryside. As life goes on, the fellows realize the mockery of the ideals and objectives they fought for. What with Kaiser Wilhelm's fleeing overseas, the newfangled German Republic, the ambiant logocracy...

'Should I tell you that all learning, all culture, all science is nothing but hideous mockery, so long as mankind makes war in the name of God and humanity with gas, iron, explosive and fire?'

n  - The Way Back - Erich Maria Remarque (transl.)n


2. THE STRENGTHS

=> In this sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, it is striking to meet not that many characters from the prequel... You cannot help noticing how many of them are missing from the scenery, because they have never made it past the trenches.


=> The wide range of characters displayed by Remarque allows him to sketch several possible paths for soldiers surviving war :

- The hospital for severely burned or gassed patients,
- Venereal diseases caught in the brothel,
- Suicide,
- The mental institution,
- Familial ties frayed : adultery, new marriage, parents unable to recognize their child within the soldier, and the soldier within the child,
- Denial of the past war,
- Commitment with political parties, trade unions, and other forms of associations not to face the ever-increasing solitude of the survivors,
- Reenlistment.

=> The same as in All Quiet on the Western Front, the hero-narrator stands out because of the almost naturalistic attention he bears to nature, to the here and now. Present time, fleeting instants conveyed by unadorned, limpid writing. Ultimately, this is the resource in which the narrator finds a manner of personal salvation of sorts and the former soldier, some semblance of peace.


Fond musical :
Symphonie triste - Jean Sibelius

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La première guerre mondiale est terminée. Des soldats allemands, jeunes ou moins jeunes, regagnent le pays et, pensent-ils, leur vie d'avant.


1. LE SUJET :

=> Une démobilisation qui n'en finit pas :

À leur retour, les soldats réalisent pleinement que leurs connaissances ont continué leur vie et que, pour la plupart d'entre eux, les civils se sont bien accommodés de leur absence. Ceux qui espéraient un accueil, une forme de reconnaissance, une entraide et un soutien se heurtent à une indifférence hébétée. Les civils prétendent passer sous silence les abominations dont les soldats ont été témoins ou acteurs. Le retour à la vie civile est éprouvant. Très peu espèrent se faire comprendre de ceux qui n'ont pas tutoyé la mort dans les tranchées. On est prêt à les souffrir, aussi longtemps qu'ils passent sous silence leurs doutes et leurs horreurs et qu'ils barrent d'un trait quatre années d'une vie pour eux innommable. Dans une Allemagne qui a soif d'oubli, les soldats se sentent vite de trop. Portant l'habit militaire, encore pleins de leurs habitudes prises au front, ils ne reconnaissent pas leur village et n'en sont pas reconnus.


=> Misère et marchandages :

Avec la paix, les soldats redécouvrent les mille négociations et trafics de la vie civile. Dans la misère de l'Allemagne vaincue, on revend des médailles, on se lance dans le trafic de provisions, on survit par la maraude et on ruse. Chemin faisant, les anciens camarades s'aperçoivent de la dérision de tout ce pour quoi ils se sont battus. La fuite du Kaiser Wilhelm, et la logocratie ambiante leur ouvre vite les yeux.

'Dois-je vous raconter que toute l'instruction, toute la civilisation, toute la science ne peuvent être qu'une effroyable dérision aussi longtemps que les hommes se feront la guerre avec les gaz, le fer, la poudre et le feu au nom de Dieu et de l'Humanité ?'

n  - Après - Erich Maria Remarque trad. Raoul Maillard et Christian Sauerwein, p.297.n


2. LES GRANDS POINTS FORTS

=> Dans ce récit qui se place à la suite d'À l'ouest rien de nouveau, on retrouve de loin en loin certains des ses personnages : Paul Bäumer, Stanislaus Katczinsky, Tjaden...
Le lecteur n'en mesure que mieux le nombre d'absents.

=> En choisissant de faire figurer une bande de camarades soldats, Remarque dresse un éventail des destins d'anciens soldats revenus de la guerre :

- L'hôpital pour les grands brûlés, les gazés
- La contraction de maladies vénériennes après la fréquentation de bordels de campagne
- Le suicide
- La maison de force
- Des relations de couple ou familiales qui se délitent : adultère, nouveau couple noué pendant l'absence, parents incapables de reconnaître l'enfant dans le soldat et le soldat dans l'enfant,...
- Le déni du passé de la guerre chez certains soldats
- L'engagement dans les causes politiques, les syndicats ; toutes sortes d'affairement pour ne pas affronter la solitude du survivant.
- Le rengagement dans l'armée

=> Comme dans À l'ouest rien de nouveau, le héros-narrateur se distingue par l'attention presque naturaliste qu'il porte à la nature, au présent. Le moment biologique, l'impression instantanée s'élèvent à l'éternité, portés par une écriture simple et limpide. C'est dans cette ressource que l'homme trouve une forme de salut personnel, modeste, et l'ancien soldat, une forme de paix.


Fond musical :
Symphonie triste - Jean Sibelius

POVRATAK-E.M. REMARK
✒️"Zar ovaj komad mokroga, prljavog trav- njaka preda mnom zaista obuhvata godine moga detinjstva, koje su tako poletne i blistave u mome sećanju? Zar je ovaj prazni, hladni trg zaista onaj tihi kutak koji nazivasmo zavi- čajem i koji nam je tamo u bujici užasa jedini bio nada i spas od davljenja? Zar to nije bila neka druga ulica, nego baš ova siva sa ružnim kućama, čija se slika u šturim razmacima iz- medu smrti i smrti dizala iznad jama kao razuzdan i setan san? Zar nije bila mnogo svetlija i lepša, mnogo šira i potpunija u mojim mislima? Zar sve ovo nije više istina, zar me je krv moja slagala, zar me je sećanje moje obmanulo?"