The enemy

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The enemy is a collection of stories by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque . The enemy is both the name of the collection and the name of one of the stories.

The individual texts - sketches that alternate between narration and reportage - were created in the first half of the 20th century and first appeared in the American magazine Collier’s in the 1930s. Since the original manuscripts of some texts have been lost, the German versions of individual stories, such as Der Feind and Schweigen um Verdun , are based on the translation from English. The texts were collected and published in German in 1993 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch (KiWi).

These early works by Remarque are of particular importance because they already contain central elements of his later bestsellers, such as In the West, nothing new : the question of what war makes of people; the absurdity that enemies who were about to kill themselves become friends as soon as they get to know each other; the quick forgetting or fading out of the brutality of the war just a few years after the end of the war.

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In The enemy are a total of ten stories included Remarque:

(All quotations are taken from the 2014 edition of Der Feind .)

Jürgen Tamen

The First World War is raging. A group of German soldiers sit in their shelter at the front while food is being distributed. When a soldier reports of a wounded dog in a nearby trench, Jürgen Tamen leaves the relatively safe shelter to save the dog. The narrator and Tamen begin to become friends. The reader learns of Tamen's longing for home: First he turns so that he can sleep with his head in the direction of Germany, then he tries to flee towards home, but is caught and brought back to the front. While he was on guard in the coming weeks, he was killed by a grenade. His comrades bury him facing Germany.

The young teacher

A young teacher hangs mentally between his past as a front soldier in the First World War or his time as a wounded man in a hospital and his current position as a village teacher in a small north German community. He has made himself comfortable in his "heath loneliness" and enjoys the peace and the simplicity of the life that he now leads.

The enemy

The enemy consists of two parts. Part one describes a front vacation. Ludwig Breyer enjoys the peace and warmth of a week in August. While walking through the village in which he is, he enters a prison camp. In it he sees French soldiers - without weapons, of course. Suddenly he becomes aware that the “enemies” are only human beings, people who only become enemies through weapons.

In the second part, Breyer reports on his most formative war experience: German and French soldiers face each other in trenches. Since their section of the front is relatively calm apart from sporadic, predictable artillery fire, something like a friendship develops between the actually warring soldiers. They carefully begin to exchange small presents such as cigarettes, and even crawl through open fields without shooting at each other. This peace is over when a new major is assigned to the German group. When a French soldier comes out of cover at the appointed time to deposit presents in the no man's land between the fronts, the major orders a fire. Since the major is not allowed to find out about the fraternization, the soldiers have no choice but to shoot their former exchange partner. Now the peace is over, the "hostilities" are "properly continued", twelve men die by the next morning alone, including the major.

Silence around Verdun

“Silence around Verdun ” is a melancholy-romantic description of the landscape on which the trench warfare of the First World War raged and the treasure graves who collect the metal of weapons and projectiles on abandoned battlefields in order to sell them.

Karl Broeger in Fleury

Two hopeful young men, albeit not yet made, are driving in a car along the western border of Germany. You ate well and don't seem to be worried at the moment. Eventually they arrive at a kind of marketplace, "Yesterday's death streets have turned into boulevards with respectable post-war visitors."

The two men decide to tour the area. While you wander over the former battlefields, Karl Broeger is transported back to his time as a soldier. Automatically he crouches down, changes his gestures and speaks of war. Even after leaving his former front section, he apparently cannot completely put aside the memory and continues to look tense out of the window.

Joseph's wife

Sergeant Josef Thiedemann returns physically unharmed from the war to his wife's farm. Mentally, however, he was battered, as he was locked in a shelter by fire and barely survived. Although he remembers his farm and where everything can be found, he doesn't seem to recognize anyone. He is also apathetic and listless. Several doctors examine him, but nobody can change anything about his condition.

One day a former comrade of Josef zu Thiedemann comes to the farm. He still remembers exactly where Josef was buried back then. Joseph's wife decides to visit this place again with her husband. But even when he arrived at the former front, Josef's condition did not change. Only when a dud buried in the ground explodes nearby, Josef throws himself screaming on the ground and remains there for several hours. Finally he wakes up as if from a dream, recognizes his wife and returns home restored with her.

The story of Annette's love

The story shows the relationship between Annette and her childhood friend Gerhard. The boys, including Gerhard, are sent off to the front with enthusiastic jubilation. Annette expects letters that tell of great deeds and victorious battles or at least about everyday life as a soldier. However, Gerhard writes about their shared childhood experiences. When he comes home on leave from the front and now looks like Annette had imagined a decent soldier, she married him without further ado, she was seventeen, he was nineteen. Just four weeks later, however, Gerhard falls, Annette is a widow. Finally she realizes why Gerhard wrote so much about memories of his youth but never about acts of war. Only now does she understand him and really love him.

The strange fate of Johann Bartok

Johann Bartok has been married for five months when the war breaks out. He is drafted and hands over his plumbing business to his wife and assistant. It doesn't take long before Bartok is captured and put on a ship whose destination is unknown. He and his fellow inmates gain control of the ship, but are caught by a warship and sentenced as mutineers. Bartok has now had to do backbreaking work as a prisoner on a plantation for 15 years. While many of his comrades die, Bartok survives and returns home. However, he notes that his wife, who was told Bartok had died, married his former assistant. Apparently resigning himself to this, he decides to start all over again.

" I dreamed the night - - -"

December 1917, Gerhart Brockmann is a patient in a hospital. He dreams of returning home healthy. He particularly raves about the singing lesson - he used to be a teacher. Again and again he talks about his favorite song "I dreamed the night" that his class could even sing in three voices. Time goes by and it is becoming increasingly clear that Brockmann will never leave the hospital. Shortly before his death, a teacher who was also in the hospital organized a group of students who would sing him his favorite song for the last time. Brockmann dies shortly afterwards.

On road

A man is on the move as a tramp looking for work. Shortly before he died from exhaustion, a farmer helped him out with some food and a tip that workers were wanted nearby to lay tracks. After the man has regained his strength, he takes on the job. Over time, he befriends one of the workers, a closet owned by a man named Heinrich Thiess. It turns out that Thiess also leads a vagabond life and never stays in one place for long. After the husband of the woman with whom Thiess is having an affair falls ill and will soon die, the great man sets off again. Soon after, the first tramp moves on.

German edition

  • Erich Maria Remarque: The enemy . Narratives . Edited by Thomas F. Schneider, from the English by Barbara von Bechtolsheim ; Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1993.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A citizen of the world from Osnabrück. Der Spiegel, February 22, 1993, accessed November 14, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Erich Maria Remarque: The enemy. Stories. Ed .: Thomas F. Schneider. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2014, ISBN 978-3-462-04629-8 .