Review: Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque
From the acclaimed author of All Quiet on the Western Front comes Three Comrades, a harrowing novel that follows a group of friends as they cope with upheaval in Germany between World Wars I and II.
The year is 1928. On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship is the only refuge from the chaos around them. Then the youngest of them falls in love, and brings into the group a young woman who will become a comrade as well, as they are all tested in ways they can have never imagined.Written with the same overwhelming simplicity and directness that made All Quiet on the Western Front a classic, Three Comrades portrays the greatness of the human spirit, manifested through characters who must find the inner resources to live in a world they did not make, but must endure.
“The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.”—The New York Times Book Review
Review:
Dear readers,
If I remember correctly we were briefly introduced to this book in high school, but were encouraged to read it on our own and I actually never did. I never read his other famous work “All Quiet on the Western Front” either. I am not planning to read “All Quiet” any time soon but my mom recently told me that she really liked “Three Comrades” and I decided to try it.
It did not matter much to me whether to read the book in Russian or English translation, however several English reviews said that the translation was horrible, so Russian it was. I have no way of knowing whether the Russian translation was better than English one, but I do know that I really enjoyed the book and the translated writing was very engaging to me. Over 500 pages on my kindle just flew by.
If you are not familiar with the book and you are expecting a Romance, please do not! I cannot stress hard enough – do not look for a happy ending in the love story. The love story between Robbie a/k/a Robert and Pat was beautiful and poignant though.
Of course even though the love story is one of the two central storylines, the friendship between Robbie and his two other friends Otto and Godfrid is front and center as well. These three still young men went together through the hell of the First World War and survived and many of their friends did not and many of those who survived deal with their traumas in different way. Robbie and his friends try to fight through the day by running an auto mechanic shop and even sell some cars and sometimes participate in car races.
I liked all of the main characters so much, I wished that they and quite of few secondary characters would make it through, but because the book realistically portrays a horrible situation in post First World War Germany it all felt very bleak. I mean I loved that the characters were fighters. I understand that “All Quiet” is mostly about the horrors of war and people actually fighting there, but I thought that the writer portrayed the traumas of war here really well too even if fewer pages were devoted to it. The things Robbie occasionally remembered for example – chatting with soldiers from his unit and next day all three of them were dead.
And just overall how well and to the point the Germany of 1928-1929 was drawn – massive, massive unemployment, so many people just not having enough to eat for days because they could not buy food, suicides after not being able to find a job, relationships destroyed because of no financial means to support each other.
It is all very bleak but as we all know very realistic. I thought the beauty of the love story against the bleak background was very well drawn and the feeling that they cannot have this happiness, this beauty, because of the world around them being so bleak.
Highly recommended.
Grade: A
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Thank you for this review. I read ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and think it’s a great book, but for some reason I’d never thought to look for any of Remarque’s other books. ALL QUIET is one of those books I recommend to people who say they never read fiction because it’s made-up stories and they’d rather read nonfiction to get the “true” story. Nonfiction may tell you how many soldiers were in each army and where they were positioned, or the impact of new technology on the battlefield, but there are times fiction is what grabs you as it tells you what it felt like to be one of those soldiers. As you say ALL QUIET is about the horrors of war, but it is not unrelenting horror. It tells about the war from the POV of a young soldier, not as a statistic about thousands of soldiers. It is about barely having started out in life, only to face the its end. It is about the alternate boredom and fear, the camaraderie, the humor, the hunger, the desperation for dry socks and boots without holes. I highly recommend it and now will go look for THREE COMRADES.
@Susan/DC: Yep agree about great fiction doing this. I just need to be in the mood for All Quiet. Hopefully one day.
When was this book published? Was it a contemporary at the time of its publication or was it a historical even then?
Hi Janine the writer did a contemporary for him story not a historical . It was apparently published in 1936 so just a few years after events in the novel took place.