Nationalism In Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front

How do you get someone to pick up a gun and execute another who has done him no wrong? It is surprisingly easy, just convince them that they are doing it for their country. Convince them to embrace nationalism. The concept of nationalism pops up somewhere in the early-to-mid-1800s. This word came to mean a devotion to one’s country. For some people, that devotion turned fanatical. Nationalism became the way to justify wars and mass executions.
Hundreds of thousands of people died in wars fought in the name of nationalism. If war is such an awful thing, why would anyone desire it? Erich Maria Remarque’s war novel All Quiet on the Western Front gives an example of nationalism in Germany as a reason to become a soldier. The narrator of this novel introduces Kantorek, his schoolmaster. Kantorek was the person who had convinced the narrator’s class to enlist. Kantorek taught the men that “duty to one’s country is the greatest thing” (Remarque 929). Hundreds of Kantorek’s existed. Each one preached to the men of their countries about the glory and goodness of war. These men enlisted out of love for their country. This love sent them to the front lines of a war that few walked back from. The soldiers were watching friends be shot and shooting people who,
British soldier, Wilfred Owen composed “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The poem describes a gruesome gas attack during the First World War. He describes the grotesque sight of watching a man, who was too slow to put on his mask, perish. He also cites a phrase, “The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori” (Owen 940). This Latin phrase means sweet and proper it is to die for one’s country. Owen refutes this, deeming it a lie. From his perspective dying from something as brutal as a gas attack is neither sweet nor proper. Nationalism here is a devotion so strong it pushes people to accept the idea that death in the name of one’s country is