“Comrade, I did not want to kill you.
If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too.
But you were only an idea to me before,
an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response.
It was that abstraction I stabbed.
But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.
I thought of your hand grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle;
now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship.
Forgive me comrade.
We always see it too late.
Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us,
that your mothers are just as anxious as ours,
and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony
– forgive me comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front
Today is Armistice Day, November, 2012. It’s a long time since the armistice was first signed – on 11th November, 1918. Few people alive today have memories of that war.
Nonetheless, many of us live in the shadow of that war. We have family members who fought in World War I, who were injured, traumatised, perhaps even died. These experiences are part of the story of our family and shape our own experience. On a larger scale, and in many countries, the war also played a role in the story of the country in which we live. Erich Maria Remarque, in his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, strips back the rhetoric of war-time ‘heroism’ to reveal the human experience of the young soldier.
The themes of war are also the themes of peace and for this reason I chose the extract above from Remarque’s novel. It is a theme I have touched on before at this time of year. For it seems to me that it applies as much in the office or at home as it does on the battlefield. How often are our colleagues (in Finance, IT, Sales, whatever…) ‘an abstraction’? How often do we take a stab at the same ‘abstraction’ when we speak to our spouses, siblings, sons and daughters from a place of anger or frustration?
On this Armistice Day, 2012, we remember those who fought in World War I and in subsequent wars. Let us remember, too, those closer to home. And whether our opponents in war or our colleagues or loved ones, let us take a moment to see beyond our abstractions and to connect with our ‘enemies’ from a place of recognition of our shared humanity.