In Memoriam.

“I am aware that I, without realizing it, have lost my feelings — I don’t belong here anymore, I live in an alien world. I prefer to be left alone, not disturbed by anybody. They talk too much — I can’t relate to them — they are only busy with superficial things.”

Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front

Remarque’s World War One novel, published in 1929, was such a powerful expression of the human toll of combat that when Hitler later rose to power and started purging the German culture of literature that was harmful to his ambitions, All Quiet…was high up on the book burning list. The last thing Hitler needed in that moment was for the German people to know anything about the physical and psychological torture of war. Filling their heads with blind nationalism was far more useful.

Remarque himself had already fled Germany before the SS came looking for him to answer for the crimes of his brutal honesty, so they had to settle for executing his sister in his place. I highly recommend you not let her death and his exile be in vain, and go read the book if you haven’t done so already.

It’s taken me a lot of years and a lot of books to start to unpack what it means to me to be a combat veteran. Reading books including the one quoted above has been the single most significant therapy I’ve found, and one from which a lot of other therapies have come as a product.

I’ve also started to talk more with my fellow veterans and compare notes on our experiences…