Baumer

In All Quiet on the Western Front, the average age of the soldiers is 19.

N-n-n-n-nineteen.

I read Erich Maria Remarque’s great World War I novel when I was 22 and, incidentally, in the military. The relationships between Paul Baumer and his classmates/platoon-mates was very much like mine with my friends, there. Even if we weren’t going through even close to the same kind of warfare, the similarities, the understanding and recognition of how you connect with people in such situations...I felt a kinship with them.

Paul Hardcastle’s single Nineteen was released in 1985. It heavily sampled from a documentary about the Vietnam War which said that was the average age of soldiers. It was a favorite of my friends and I. Most of us were a little older than that, but we knew what it was to be 19.

The standard assessment of Germany’s saeculum is that it is aligned with the rest of Western Europe. That means the Crisis ended with World War II, making The Great War some Second- or Third-Turning aberration that wasn’t total enough. I’ve thought lately that the Crisis is a better fit, especially since that makes World War II a Second Turning war for Germany. Second Turnings are a time when spiritual and religious matters have larger influence, and what the Nazis did can be seen as a spiritual takeover.  

But going in that direction makes me not quite as close to Paul Baumer and his friends, in terms of Turnings or generational archetypes. And that’s hard to accept, so far.