While examining
the First World War literature there are some titles and authors that always
emerge, no matter which country you’re from. Remarque’s Im Westen nichts
Neues is what we mean by this simple introduction. But one should never
forget that the result of the conflict had great echoes on literature also long
after the end of the war and relevant impact in the so called Entre-deux-guerres
period. And the name of Erich Maria Remarque was not mentioned by chance since
today reading suggestion is his novel Drei Kameraden first published in
1936 and written during the exile in Switzerland. This is not a book about the
Great War but it’s a novel about what came after it and it’s generated from a
kind of ghost image, from a perennial trauma shaping the minds of those who
spent the youth buried in the European trenches. This is the reason why we
consider for all purposes “Three Comrades” still a World War One novel. On the
contrary, we do not consider for instance the recent 14 by Jean Echenoz
a World War One novel. The novel by Echenoz represents simply the use of a war
subject in today literature and we are able to collect similar examples in
comics, arts, films while in Remarque’s case we’re still, with both feet, in
the climate originating from the conflict.
We all know about the dreadful economic situation that Germany had to
face after the Treaty of Versailles. And the story that Remarque outlines in this
book is about three comrades that try to survive among the shocking
unemployment, the plague of alcoholism and the rising of new extremisms by
opening a garage for car repair in a German city. Robert, the protagonist,
falls in love with Patrice, a beautiful and mysterious woman that eventually
will fall ill with tuberculosis. This sentiment becomes a kind of handhold in
order not to plummet like all the world around him and his two friends, an
entire world that is rapidly collapsing into another dark tunnel. Patrice will
try uselessly some cures in Switzerland and the three friends will sell their
garage and will go to Switzerland in a last desperate attempt to help her to
survive. This popular novel still works as a kind of warning for us. What we
understand is that a second parallel tragedy flows beside the one occurred in
the European trenches between 1914 and 1918: it is the tragedy of the survivors
and of their lives fed by internal and continuous flash-backs of death, getting
bigger and bigger inside. We can read Drei Kameraden as a cruel
persistent image of death (the one of Patrice) after the mass death (in the
battlefields), in the scenario of the rising Nazism.
