Modern medicine knows more about post-traumatic stress disorder, but in Remarque's day it was unchartered water. His point of view — similar to the common soldier of any nation — provides the reader with insights concerning the shocking events that led to the alienation and displacement of his entire age-group. Remarque's words brought swift reactions in postwar Germany and positive responses from critics.
Although the German government — especially the Third Reich — banned and often burned Remarque's book because it dared to criticize the government and militarism, western critics were largely positive about his novel. Their words predating World War II — a time when military leaders were optimistically predicting the end to international aggression — addressed the poignance of the World War I German soldier's naivete and vulnerability, particularly during the aftermath, when the massive destruction of innocence produced a generation of drifting, traumatized men. Whether the survivors were German or American, British, Russian, or French, their post-traumatic stress could be seen across cultures and languages. Later criticism of Remarque after World War II dealt with the realism, existential alienation, and war profiteering outlined by Remarque's novel.
Despite Remarque's words and the millions of readers who have read his novel through the years, the modern era has seen great cataclysms that redefine the inhumanity of war with technological innovations that Remarque's generation could never have imagined. World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Israeli Seven-Day War, Russia's attack on Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf War — all were fought with even more terrible weapons, including the atomic bomb, biological exterminators such as anthrax and nerve gas, and computerized missiles capable of sniffing out targets with little or no danger to the programmer. Instead of the hand-to-hand combat and the trench warfare of the past, today's modern wars can kill millions at the push of a button. More than ever, Remarque's characterization of war as a dehumanizer has much to say against this backdrop of a civilization creating efficient and impersonally fired weapons of mass destruction.
