First World War

The First World War is a remembered but divisive presence: its trenches and aftermath surface in barroom disputes, personal testimony, and arguments over whether collective political action can succeed. Rather than recounting a continuous military campaign, the narrative makes the war a measure by which characters judge desertion, defeat, and the unsettled years that followed.

Mobilization and an Interrupted Life

A grey-haired former senior teacher recalls that he had been teaching before the war and was dependent on morphine when it began. His account of mobilization is hesitant and self-correcting: he first says he was not called up, then clarifies that he was called up but feared he would have a fit. The authorities took away his syringe and morphine; after two days, while he still had some drops left, he was sent to an asylum and later released. He says the school subsequently dismissed him. The compressed story makes the war’s approach an abrupt interruption to an already precarious life, not a passage into military service.

His recollection is deliberately personal rather than heroic. The details are the confiscated drugs, the short period before admission, and the loss of his teaching post; the war enters through the institutions that handled him and the work he could no longer keep. His account does not offer a general explanation of wartime policy, but it places military mobilization beside illness, exclusion, and the vulnerability of an individual who could not meet its demands.

Arras, the Trenches, and Conflicting Memory

Years later, Georg recognizes Franz Biberkopf as someone he had known from fighting at Arras and Kovno. Franz focuses on the armband Georg has placed before him and insists that its colors cannot, by themselves, establish the worth of a political cause. When Georg tells him that he has been deceived, Franz presses him to explain what he meant by Arras. Their exchange turns a shared past into a test of credibility: Franz challenges Georg’s phrasing, brings up their supposed wartime companions, and asks where they were after the fighting and after 1918.

In Franz’s account, he and Georg left the trench, followed by Öse; he broadens the charge to say that people also deserted at home when events began. Georg’s account gives the failure a different meaning. He says that in 1918 and 1919 the leaders betrayed the people and that Rosa and Karl Liebknecht were killed; he argues that people must stick together and points to Lenin and Russia as an example of solidarity. The passage presents neither speaker as an impartial chronicler. The war is remembered through an argument between former comrades, and their disagreement concerns not only what happened but what its failure ought to mean.

Defeat and the Postwar Years

Franz resists Georg’s attempt to make the war a warrant for renewed collective struggle. He insists that the hoped-for action failed because there was no discipline or command and everyone was set against everyone else. He also challenges the idea that the men had been actively shaping events after the armistice: four years after 1918, he says, he was in Berlin, where he and others experienced inflation, paper banknotes in millions and billions, shortages of meat and butter, and the need to steal potatoes from farmers. In this recollection, the distance from Arras is measured by everyday deprivation rather than military geography.

The Revolution and the republic become objects of Franz’s contempt: he depicts revolutionary talk as bluster and presents the postwar situation as a mess. Georg counters with betrayal and the need for solidarity; Franz answers that he will not follow that political tune again. Although he wears an armband, he says he does not know whether its movement will accomplish anything. His stated alternative is peace and the possibility of work. The First World War therefore remains present in the scene, but its legacy does not settle the argument: each man uses the same failed past to support a different political conclusion.

Narrative Significance

The war’s narrative force lies in its return as disputed memory. References to Arras, Kovno, the trenches, and 1918 are interwoven with a later Berlin conversation, so the past emerges piecemeal through questions, corrections, and competing explanations. The ordinary details of inflation and food shortages pull the discussion away from martial abstraction and toward the conditions in which the speakers actually lived afterward.

This contrast also gives the war more than one human scale. The former teacher remembers being called up, losing access to morphine, and being sent to an asylum; Franz and Georg turn their wartime and postwar recollections into a dispute over failure, responsibility, and political solidarity. Across these accounts, the war is not a settled episode with a single lesson, but a past whose consequences and meaning remain contested.