While reading Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, I was impressed by the author’s description of what it was like for the protagonist, Paul Bӓumer, to go on leave from the western front. After the intensely visceral images of trench warfare, in which soldiers die with regularity and without purpose, Paul has some difficulty returning to his village. There is one passage in particular that seems to illustrate how difficult it can be for a soldier to re-integrate into the civilian population. The scene follows Paul’s return to his parent’s home. When he recognizes his sister in the window and she cries out to him, Paul becomes paralyzed. The passage reads:

 “She pulls a door open and calls: ‘Mother, mother, Paul is here.’

I can go no further – mother, mother, Paul is here.

I lean against the wall and grip my helmet and rifle. I hold them as tight as I can, but I cannot take another step, the staircase fades before my eyes, I support myself with the butt of my rifle against my feet and clench my teeth fiercely, but I cannot speak a word, my sister’s call has made me powerless, I can do nothing, I struggle to make myself laugh, to speak, but no word comes, and so I stand on the steps, miserable, helpless, paralysed (sic), and against my will the tears run down my cheeks.” (158)

I am very interested in the way Remarque initiates this shift into a stream of consciousness. The repetition of the sister’s cry creates what could be called a loop that the protagonist becomes stuck in. It suggests the movement of the real into the imaginary, the protagonist’s movement from the presence of his family home into the necessarily alienating space of his own thoughts and memories. On multiple occasions, Paul discusses what a soldier must do to survive the realities of the War. For instance, he describes the transformation of soldiers headed to the front as one in which they “reach the front zone and become on the instant human animals” (56). Conversely, it is as if, in the instant Paul crosses the threshold of his childhood home, he becomes a real human person again, and must confront all the emotional trauma that he has mentally partitioned over the course of his tour. Remarque is offering an interesting look into how PTSD can manifest, specifically when soldiers return to the home front.