FACING THE FACE OF THE ENEMY: LEVINASIAN MOMENTS IN "ALL QUIET ON THE

WESTERN FRONT" AND THE LITERATURE OF WAR

Author(s): Richard Middleton-Kaplan
Source: Modern Fiction Studies , Spring 2008, Vol. 54, No. 1, Levinas and Narrative
Special Issue (Spring 2008), pp. 72-90
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26286659

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 FACING THE FACE OF THE

m enemy: levinasian moments

IN ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN

§/
FRONT AND THE LITERATURE

OF WAR

Richard Middleton-Kaplan

Emmanuel Levinas's concept of the face of the Other, as well a

his related idea of the call and command to ethical action emanatin
from that face, has profound implications for many academic dis
plines. Although Levinasian ethics have been applied to a variety
literary texts, one literary subgenre remains largely unexplored—
odd phenomenon since its subject was of vital importance to Levi
nas—and that is the literature of war. In this essay I show how
Levinas's idea of the face-to-face encounter resonates with particular
poignancy and historical force in war literature.
After suggesting that the face-to-face ethical encounter with the
Other has always already been present in the literature of war, I will
discuss Levinas's philosophy of the ethically demanding face-to-face
encounter in terms of its relevance to combat. I will then explore
Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front as a
text par excellence that embodies Levinas's formulation. After briefly
contrasting Levinas's conception of the face-to-face encounter with
Max Picard's, I will return to Remarque and then describe a teaching
encounter when a student who is also a combat veteran virtually

MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 54 number I, Spring 2008. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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 Middleton-Kaplan 73
dismissed Levinasian ethics as absurd and uninformed with respect to
battlefield realities. Finally, emerging from that classroom discussion, I
will offer in conclusion what I see as the value of Levinasian concepts
in understanding the literature of war—and in contemplating war itself.
We shall see that the literature of war illustrates, with striking clarity
and profundity, the transformative power of the command to ethical
action that one experiences face-to-face with the Other.
Literature about war presents a pointed challenge to Levinasian
ethics. How, if at all, can Levinas's theories apply in the face of battle,
to a soldier fac(e)ing the enemy? Levinas claims we are ordered not
to kill by face of the Other, particularly by the eyes; the traditional
military order "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes"
stands in stark contrast, as recognition of the eyes of the Other
signals that killing should commence immediately. Levinas writes in
Difficult Freedom, "To look at a look is to look at something which
cannot be abandoned or freed, but something which aims [vise] at
you: it involves looking at the face [visage]" (8). But what if that
something aims at you not just with its face but with a gun? In battle,
the soldier faces a conflicting set of commands: the face's command
not to kill the Other and the military command to kill the enemy.
How might these conflicting orders and obligations be resolved? It
was this type of conflict that drove the ethicist Philip Hallie to the
brink of suicide.
Why use the lamp of Levinas to illuminate these conflicts? Be
cause his formulations bring into sharp focus the ethical contours of
the face-tQ-face encounters that have always been present (though
only faintly visible) in the literature of war. The face of the Other
was present in the first great narrative of world literature, The Epic
of Gilgamesh, when the potential rivals Enkidu and Gilgamesh be
came close comrades instead of fierce foes; although they do battle
before consecrating their friendship, they approach one another as
respectful equals because the harlot tells Enkidu to go to Gilgamesh
so "he may see your face" and to "gaze at his face." It is present in
Walt Whitman's poem from Drum-Taps, "Vigil Strange I Kept on the
Field One Night," when the speaker, commanded by "One look I but
gave which your dear eyes return'd with a look I shall never forget"
(329), stays beside a fallen comrade through death and through the
night. It is present in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage
when youthful Henry Fleming callously separates himself from the
cheery-voiced man who selflessly leads Henry back to his regiment:
"As he who had so befriended him was thus passing out of his life, it
suddenly occurred to the youth that he had not once seen his face"
(79). The failure to register the face of the Other represents Henry's
ethical failure to say "Here I am" and to reciprocate a human rela

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74 Facing the Face of the Enemy

tionship. It is present in Bob Dylan's anti-war song "John Brown,"

when the disfigured soldier recalls that of all the terrors of battle,
'"the thing that scared me most was when my enemy came close /
And I saw that his face looked just like mine"1 (47).
The face of the Other is as pervasive in the literature of war
as the fog in London. Oscar Wilde claimed that the Impressionists
taught us to see the London fog that had always already been pres
ent;1 Levinas teaches us to see the encounter with the face of the
enemy—always already present in war literature—in all of its ethical
dimensions. For that matter, "Was the face of the Other not always
there—before philosophy and before theology—making its claim,
its accusation, without any authority?" (Kigei xx). Wilde might be
distressed to know that we have learned to see this from a philoso
pher rather than from a poet or painter, but perhaps Levinas may
be considered a poet of ethics, a painter who renders with boldness
and beauty the transformative power of the ethical encounter with
the Other's face.
A painfully apt example is Tadeusz Borowski's story "This Way
for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman," in which a female prisoner
transforms the narrator through a face-to-face encounter. The narra
tor, a prisoner in Auschwitz given the task of unloading the incoming
transports, is ordered by an SS man to carry the corpses of "squashed,
trampled infants, naked little monsters with enormous heads and
bloated bellies" (Borowski 39) and then to hand them to the newly
arrived female prisoners. The women run in horror, and the narrator
screams at them to take the corpses from him. In the midst of this,
a woman steps forward—a woman who is apparently not the mother
of any of the dead infants, since her hair is grey—and says, '"You
mustn't shoot, I'll carry them.'" She then "takes the little corpses out
of my hands and for an instant gazes straight into my eyes." Despite
the fact that the narrator shouts at her and in some ways might be
seen as her oppressor in that moment, the grey-haired woman looks
into his face and offers pity to him. '"My poor boy,'" she says. It is a
rare moment of humane, ethical behavior in a story of unrelenting
inhumanity, and it utterly transforms the narrator. Seen through the
prism of Levinasian ethics, the scene's importance comes into focus.
We can see with new clarity the fact that the woman's encounter with
the narrator's face spurred her to an ethical response and that the
narrator's response to the compassion in her face is the turning point
that makes him ask a fellow prisoner, "'Henri, are we good people?"'
(40). From this moment forward, the narrator metamorphoses from a
dehumanized creature who sees fellow prisoners as insects and body
parts into a man who sees his fellow sufferers as human beings and
who can no longer stifle the nausea that represents his revulsion at
what surrounds him.

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 Middleton-Kaplan 75

An ever better example of the Levinasian face-to-face ethical

encounter can be found in what is widely regarded as the greatest war
novel (or anti-war novel), Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.
Before closely examining that novel through the prism of Levinas, a
brief review of his ideas about the face of the Other is in order.
"The irreducible and ultimate experience of relationship appears
to me in fact to be ... in the face to face of humans, in sociality, in
its moral signification," Levinas explains in Ethics and Infinity (77).
The face of the Other summons us toward human relationships and
toward the ethical. It speaks and orders us—or rather, it issues a
"commandment," with all the awful Biblical weight ofthat word: "The
first word of the face is Thou shalt not kill.' It is an order. There is a
commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to
me. However, at the same time, the face of the Other is destitute; it
is the poor for whom I can do all and to whom I owe all" (Ethics 89).
As Richard A. Cohen explains, "The 'otherness' of the other person
arises precisely as the moral imperative that pierces the self with
moral obligation, with service to the other" ("Introduction: Human
ism" xxvii). Moreover, this obligation is infinite and absolute: "one
is never quits with regard to the Other. ... At no time can one say:
I have done all my duty" (Levinas, Ethics 105). That obligation also
belongs uniquely to the experiencing self: "My responsibility is un
transferable, no one could replace me" (Ethics 100).2
The face of the Other also interrupts the violence of the self.
The unchecked expansion of the self, or Ego, constitutes a form of
violence, violating the sacred selves of others. Recognizing the "self
[moi]... which is not a myself [moi-même]" in the face of the Other
forces the recognition of "the impossibility of killing. Consciousness
is the impossibility of invading reality like a wild vegetation that ab
sorbs or breaks or pushes back everything around it" (Difficult 9). To
absorb or break or push into the Other—to say nothing of destroying
the other—is to do violence to that Other.
This violence becomes a kind of war waged on the Other's sov
ereign self. As Bernhard Waidenfels puts it, "The totality, which forces
everybody into certain roles, is based on violence, on a general war
which does not end when the individual's striving for self-preserva
tion makes use of rational means" (66). How much more so, then,
in an actual war, when armies invade not just the self of the Other
but the Other's nation, land, and home? How much more so in an
actual war with individuals forced into the role of soldiers striving for
self-preservation and forced by circumstance to engage both rational
and irrational means?
Poised against this violence is the face of the Other, for murder
is only possible "when one has not looked the Other in the face"
(Difficult 10). The face of the Other, if truly looked into, forbids not

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76 Facing the Face of the Enemy

just murder but also war, even war on the grandest scale; in Cohen's
words, "Moral force, however, the proximity of the face-to-face, the
height and destitution of the other's face, is the ever patient coun
terbalance to all the powers of the world, including nuclear power"
("Translator's Introduction" 14). With this in mind, we are now ready
to turn to Remarque's novel, in which the protagonist does come
face-to-face with the enemy/Other in the context of war.

All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front, originally published in German

in 1928 as Im Westen Nichts Neues, shares with Lêvinas a deep
seated humanism and a fierce opposition to the violence of war. It
also shares, partly for those very reasons, the distinction of being
an object of Hitler's hatred: Remarque was forced into exile in 1931,
and the novel was burned and banned by the Nazis in 1933.
The novel is written in first-person from the perspective of Paul
Bäumer, a student who enlists with his schoolmates in the German
Army in World War I. Paul recounts his experiences on the front and
on leave (based in part on Remarque's own experiences as a soldier
in the Great War). An epilogue tells us that Paul died on the Western
front in October 1918—just before the long-rumored armistice and
the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on November 11, 1918.
Precisely because some of the fighting in World War I was hand
to hand—and therefore face to face—Remarque's novel provides a
Levinasian ethical framework for analyzing encounters between en
emy combatants. In one scene, after enduring in a trench a night of
relentless bombardment, Paul and his comrades absorb a charge by
a French regiment. As the French rush toward the German trench,
Paul's fellow soldiers meet them with a barrage of machine-gun fire
and grenades. As the enemy soldiers fall, Paul observes, "We rec
ognize the smooth distorted faces, the helmets; they are French."
Paul sees one of the falling French, "his face upturned, fall into a
wire cradle" (112). Then he experiences a truly Levinasian moment
of encountering the face of the Other:

The moment we are about to retreat three faces rise up

from the ground in front of us. Under one of the helmets a
dark pointed beard and two eyes that are fastened on me.
I raise my hand, but I cannot throw [a grenade] into those
strange eyes; for one mad moment the whole slaughter
whirls like a circus around me, and these two eyes alone
are motionless; then the head rises up, a hand, a move
ment, and my hand-grenade flies through the air and into
him. (113)

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 Middleton-Kaplan 77

A reader cannot escape the recurrence of the words "face" and "faces"
in this episode. When these faces rise up, they stop Paul's hand as if
they had commanded him not to kill. In particular, as he encounters
them not just face-to-face but eye-to-eye, it is "the two eyes that
are fastened on me" that arrest his own violence.
Levinas accounts for just such a function of the eyes when he
writes in Difficult Freedom, "those eyes, which are absolutely without
protection, the most naked part of the human body, none the less
offer an absolute resistance to possession, an absolute resistance
in which the temptation to murder is inscribed: the temptation of
absolute negation. ... To see a face is already to hear 'You shall not
kill', and to hear 'You shall not kill' is to hear 'Social justice'" (8-9).
It is not surprising that present-day soldiers are trained to aim for
the belt; the soldier who looks into the enemy's eyes risks perceiving
the enemy as a human being rather than an object.
As Jill Robbins describes it in Altered Reading: Levinas and
Literature, "Levinas suggests that there is a language of the face—a
language of the eyes, before all rhetoric, before the duplicity in sign
relations" (18). Robbins refers to a "rhetoricity of the face" (19), and
it is precisely this rhetoricity, this language of the eyes, that speaks
to Paul as the French soldier's face addresses his face.
Of course, the above passage does conclude with Paul throw
ing his grenade. However, a crucial shift takes place that makes this
killing possible: "then the head rises up, a hand, a movement, and
my hand-grenade flies through the air and into him." Only when Paul
stops seeing a face—and instead sees disconnected body parts, a
head, a hand, but quite pointedly not a face—does he respond with
the self-protective mechanism of extruding violence toward the Other.
The shift from "face" and "eyes" to "head" and "hand" illustrates
Levinas's contention that "murder is possible, but it is possible only
when one has not looked the Other in the face" (Difficult 10). In this
case, Paul must look away from the face and substitute for it the
abstract, depersonalized "head."
Having passed through this momentary recognition of the face
of the Other, and consequently through the momentary ethical rela
tion with that Other, Paul and his comrades unleash the full force
of their savage violence. "We have become wild beasts," he writes,
in a passage characteristic of the atavistic impulses portrayed in
works of literary Naturalism. "No longer do we lie helpless, waiting
on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save
ourselves and to be revenged" (113). No longer will they sacrifice
themselves for the Other, because in place of the Other they have
substituted things—head, hand, movement. Violence treats things
(which do not have an identity) as things, failing to recognize faces

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78 Facing the Face of the Enemy

as faces, but instead reducing faces to things, de-fac(e)ing them.

Prior to that objectification, Paul was stopped and pierced by the
face of the Other.
Here we might pause to ask why Paul's brief look into the face
of the Other does not stop him from throwing the grenade, or why
the substitution of body parts for the face is so powerful that it over
comes Paul's momentary recognition of the Other. The answer is that
the Levinasian ethical impulse Paul experiences is just one impulse
among many that he experiences in the terror and confusion of the
moment. As the military historian Sir John Keegan points out in The
Face of Battle, soldiers in the Battle of the Somme in World War I
were motivated to participate in combat by a wide range of feelings:
"sense of mission, mood of self-sacrifice, local as well as national
patriotism, there were other elements in play. Self-confidence and
credulity were certainly present" (272). In actual combat, the soldier
"confronted with the threat or reality of extreme personal danger . . .
will centre on the issue of personal survival" (47). As an example,
Keegan describes the situation of a hypothetical German Guardsman
in the Franco-Prussian War:

he may still have felt some sense of belonging, possibly

to his battalion, probably to his company, until confronted
by some dramatic personal threat; then it must only have
been the circle of his most immediate comrades which
would have retained for him any extra-personal identity
and only their survival, so much bound up with his own,
for which he would have striven. (48)

In short, Paul's ethical impulse must war with other impulses for pri
macy. He responds to the dramatic threat of extreme personal danger
by acting to save his own life—and the lives of his comrades. By doing
so he follows another ethical injunction with which Levinas was fully
acquainted: the injunction to preserve life (above all his own).
As we shall see, Paul does not become entirely deaf to the ethi
cal command echoing from the Other. He will hear that command
clearly after a more sustained encounter with the face of the enemy
(in the form of French soldier Gérard Duval). Before that, however,
Paul finds himself standing guard over a group of Russian prisoners.
"It is strange to see these enemies of ours so close up. They have
faces that make one think—honest peasant faces, broad foreheads,
broad noses, broad mouths, broad hands, and thick hair" (Remarque
190). Brilliantly restrained, the comment "it makes one think" does
not reveal to us what it makes one think. Here another Levinasian
formulation applies. "The face enters our world from an absolutely
foreign sphere, that is, precisely, from an ab-solute, which is in fact

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 Middleton-Kaplan 79
the name of the completely foreign" (Levinas, Humanism 32). In
deed, this is what the Russian soldiers do, fighting in a foreign land
against Paul and his comrades who find themselves also on foreign
soil. Confronted with this inscrutable foreignness, Paul attempts to
read it by scanning the prisoners' broad facial features.
Although Paul does not tell us what those faces make him think,
we can infer that he has begun to think past the category "Russian
enemy" and to recognize a bond of common humanity, as when he
remarks with surprise, "They look just as kindly as our own peasants
in Friesland" (190). Once one sees a face rather than a thing or a
cultural or national category, an ethical relationship with the Other
becomes possible. As Levinas puts it in Humanism of the Other, "I
find myself facing the Other. He is neither a cultural signification nor
a simple given" (30). This is exactly the position in which Paul finds
himself when facing the Russian soldiers and in which he later finds
himself with the French soldier Gérard Duval.
Paul continues to contemplate the prisoners, observing the
following:

I see their dark forms, their beards move in the wind. I

know nothing of them except that they are prisoners; that
is exactly what troubles me. Their life is obscure and guilt
less;—if I could know more of them, what their names are,
how they live, what they are waiting for, what their burdens
are, then my emotions would have an object and might
become sympathy. But as it is I perceive behind them only
the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life
and the pitilessness of men. (193)

At first in this passage, Paul sees only dark forms and beards, not
faces; he sees what Levinas calls the "cultural signification" of pris
oners, but he does not see human beings (Humanism 30). Perhaps
something from within the dark form or behind the beard commands
him, but he clearly feels compelled to know more and thereby to
humanize them. Paul recognizes the stages of ethical relationship,
realizing that first his emotions would have "an object" but that then,
in an emotional move that replaces the "object" with a human being,
those emotions "might become sympathy"—sympathy by definition
being something one does not feel for an object. In the final sen
tence, Paul recognizes his failure to discern faces behind the cultural
significations and to achieve this level of sympathy. In Levinasian
terms, Paul fails to establish sympathy because he fails to see faces.
He sees not suffering men but "only the suffering of the creature."
As his thoughts then turn to the "pitilessness of men," we are left to
wonder if he includes himself in that category and whether in that
phrase he excoriates himself for his own failure to feel empathy.

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80 Facing the Face of the Enemy

The challenge that Paul fails is delineated by Levinas in Hu

manism of the Other: "The challenge to self is precisely reception
of the absolutely other. The epiphany of the absolutely other is face
where the Other hails me and signifies to me, by its nakedness, by
its destitution, an order. Its presence is this summons to respond"
(33). Even looking on the destitution of the Russian prisoners, Paul
finds their absolute Otherness too great to overcome. He cannot, or
does not, answer the summons. Even so, he continues to listen for
it. Thinking of the prisoners' "childlike faces and apostles' beards,"
he remarks, "Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a
recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us. And yet we
would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free" (194).
Whatever the innocence in the prisoners' faces and the holiness in
their beards commands, the exigencies of war issue a different set of
commands. Contemplating their common humanity is a luxury Paul
has because the Russians are penned up.
Paul's awareness that he will have to shoot at the enemy leads
him to recognize the danger of seeing the enemy's human face: "I
am frightened. This way lies the abyss" (194). He knows that if he
sees the enemy as human, or as innocent and holy, he will not be
able to function as a soldier. That way "lies the abyss" because that
way lies death; if he cannot shoot into the eyes of the enemy, he
will surely perish on the battlefield. Paul knows he must abandon his
ethical, common bond with the Other, and yet at the same time he
does not wish to sacrifice that altogether:

It is not now the time but I will not lose these thoughts, I
will keep them, shut them away until the war is ended. My
heart beats fast: this is the aim, the great, the sole aim,
that I have thought of in the trenches; that I have looked
for as the only possibility of existence after this annihila
tion of all human feeling; this is a task that will make life
afterward worthy of these hideous years. (194)

If Paul's determination to restore human feeling after the war seems

noble, his concession that such a restoration can only occur after the
war reveals that for him, sympathy is at odds with self-preservation.
Here the challenge to Levinasian ethics once again presents itself, for
of what value is the ethical command of the face-to-face encounter if it
must be suspended or deferred during wartime, which is surely when
it is most necessary? How can sympathy for the Other be achieved
if the annihilation of sympathy is its precondition?
The following passage captures the essence of what Paul experi
ences, though fleetingly, in his encounter with the faces of the Russian
prisoners of war: "He who looks upon a human face is moved to the
very core of his being; his emotions, his understanding, his will are

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 Middleton-Kaplan 81

affected, and even to the very depths of him, where his emotions,
intelligence and will coexist in that dark formlessness which we call
presentiment or foreboding, he feels the face which he looks upon.
His whole being is plowed up" (Picard 3). Although this passage may
seem typically Levinasian, it was not written by Levinas at all, but
rather by Max Picard in a fascinating, impressionistic, rhapsodic 1930
study titled The Human Face. Picard's name remains curiously absent
from discussions of Levinas's view of the face of the Other—curious
because Picard was part of the same small circle of phenomenologists
in Paris at that time, and because his ideas about the face resemble
Levinas's in many respects. For that reason, before continuing with
All Quiet on the Western Front it is important to pause to consider
what differences, if any, separate Picard's notion of the face from
Levinas's. If the differences prove insignificant, then this essay—and
many other articles about Levinas—could as well be about Picard, or
perhaps should be about Picard.

Picard's and Levinas's Views of the Human Face

At first glance, several passages in The Human Face read as

though Levinas might have written them. For example, in Levinas
we find, "The face signifies the Infinite" (Ethics 105) and that "The
dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face" (Totality
78). For him, the face contains the trace of the Divine. Similarly, for
Picard, "Man's face is in the image of God" (6). Picard then speculates
about how Infinity comes to take up residence within the domicile of
the face: "Sometimes the Deity itself wishes to appear in a human
face, and not just an image of itself. Then the following occurs: The
Deity sends an angel down to the human face, as one would send a
quartermaster ahead for billeting. The angel opens the human face
and enters therein. And he waits there in the human face for the
Deity" (8). Although this fanciful flight points to a realm quite differ
ent from that of Levinas, the two philosophers nevertheless share a
belief that the face registers a trace of the Divine.
Picard also sees, like Levinas, the encounter with the face of
the Other as a crucial moment: "When two humans look upon each
other's faces, then, for a moment, it is as if they had forgotten all
they ever knew. . . . When two human faces contemplate each
other, then it is as if the soul remembered and could look back upon
its divine origin" (4). In that moment of ultimate forgetfulness and
contemplation, even time evaporates:

Occasionally, a human face suddenly presents itself to us

and it is then as if the presence of this face brought time
to a standstill. The human face then stands there where

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82 Facing the Face of the Enemy

once God stepped out of eternity and into the temporal.

It follows: presence always gives man strength because
man when he is present stands there where God once
stood. Wherever God once stood, there the power of God
emanates forever more. (121-22)

The suspension of mundane time, the strength derived from the

Divine, the human being standing in God's place—all of these might
suggest a close correspondence between Picard's ideas and Levinas's.
Looked at closely, however, this passage reveals a crucial difference.
In Picard's formulation, neither person is called on to do anything
with respect to the Other. They experience and emanate the power
of the Divine, but they are not commanded to do anything with that
power.
For Picard, the human face exists simply to testify to God's
existence: "it seems to me," Picard writes, "that all eternity exists
but to suffice for the presentation of God's being in human guise.
Unending is the being of God, and the human face must last forever
to make manifest God's being in its fullness" (13). The face, then,
as conceived by Picard, exists for no purpose other than to assert
God's existence.
In another crucial difference from Levinas, Picard does not even
recognize the possibility for true face-to-face encounters. Something
always intrudes between the faces, whether it is eternity (4) or the
Deity itself. For example, in this passage Picard views the Divine
as forming a barrier between two faces: "formerly each face stood
apart from all others. It stood alone, dependent upon God and not
connected with other human faces. But God looked from one face to
another as they stood before Him with their images, and the glance
of God as it went from face to face bound them together" (11). Here
even when the Divine binds the two faces together, the Divine stands
between them, preventing a direct connection.
Most importantly, Picard does not see God as commanding
either face to ethical action, or to any action at all, nor does he see
one face commanding the other. Picard finds it sufficient that "Man's
face is the image of God. And the image of God is like a call to the
spectator: the whole being of the spectator is called together and held
together" (3). Nothing more is required of the human being than to
stand as spectator witnessing the mystery of God in the face of the
Other. Levinas does not let us off so easily. Unlike Picard, Levinas
does not allow us to stand as spectators on the sidelines of theology,
ethics, theodicy, philosophy, or history.
Max Picard remains an important philosopher of the face—not
least because he would later write a biography of Hitler's face, or
rather of the image of that face.3 But as this foray into his thought

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 Middleton-Kaplan 83

makes plain, Picard's theories offer no purchase on the battleground

with respect to the possibility of ethical conduct when facing the
enemy. For that, we must follow the steps that Levinas took beyond
Picard. Those steps lead us back to Paul Bäumer.

Return to All Quiet on the Western Front

Soon after his attempt to steer clear of the abyss of human

sympathy vis-à-vis the Russian prisoners, Paul is again tempted by
that same abyss. This occurs as he is huddled in a shell-hole under
heavy fire. Suddenly, "something heavy stumbles, and with a crash
a body falls over me into the shell-hole, slips down, and lies across
me—". This foreign body literally enters Paul's world from a foreign
sphere—and lands on him. Prior to this, while on a risky patrol Paul
had promised himself that if an enemy soldier were to hop into his
shell-hole, he [Paul] would be the first to strike. True to his promise,
he does: "I do not think at all, I make no decision—I strike madly at
home, and feel only how the body suddenly convulses, then becomes
limp, and collapses" (216). Levinas's pronouncement that murder is
only possible when one does not see the face of the Other pertains
here, as Paul sees only a body, not a face.
The soldier does not die, but falls back gurgling and gasping.
With his "eyes glued on him," Paul finds that "I cannot any more lift
my hand against him" (216). If, as Levinas says, the "nakedness of
the face is destitution and already supplication ... [that] is an obliga
tion" (Humanism 32), Paul tries to avoid this obligation by avoiding
seeing the wounded soldier's face: "I dare not look again at the dark
figure in the shell-hole. With an effort I look past it and wait, wait"
(217). The words "figure" and "it" substitute for face, allowing Paul
to deafen himself to the command the soldier's face would speak to
him. When Paul awakes the next morning, he tries to maintain this
detached refusal to see the face of his enemy: "The figure opposite
me moves. I shrink together and involuntarily look at it" (218).
As the wounded man gurgles and groans, "dying, but. . . not
dead" (218), a remarkable shift occurs. Paul moves closer to the
wounded man and begins referring to him as "he" rather than "it." We
find an explanation for this shift in Levinas, who posits that a wound
causes an opening of a relationship: "Opening is the stripping of the
skin exposed to wound and outrage. Opening is the vulnerability of
a skin offered in wound and outrage beyond all that can show itself,
beyond all that of essence of being can expose itself to understand
ing and celebration. . . . Uncovered, open like a city declared open
by the approaching enemy, sensibility beneath all will, all act, all
declaration, all taking stands—is vulnerability itself" (Humanism 63).

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84 Facing the Face of the Enemy

We must not dismiss Levinas's language of wounds, invaded cities,

and encroaching enemies as so much metaphor and rhetoric; these
words pertain quite literally to the opening of a relationship resulting
from Paul thrusting his bayonet to open the other man's flesh. At
this point, the threat is not so much the threat the wounded soldier
poses to Paul's life as the threat his vulnerability poses to Paul's
morality. The soldier's vulnerability threatens Paul for reasons that
Levinas illuminates: "The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting
us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids
us to kill" (Ethics 86). Indeed, Paul has an open invitation to finish
off his enemy, but he does not do so. Rather, he moves beside the
wounded man.
"Then he opens his eyes. He must have heard me, for he gazes
at me with a look of utter terror.... The body is perfectly still, without
a sound, the gurgle has ceased, but the eyes cry out" (Remarque
218-19). This is again the cry of "those eyes, which are absolutely
without protection," the eyes that offer "the temptation of absolute
negation" (Levinas, Difficult 8), the eyës that cry out, "You shall not
kill." Paul remarks, "The eyes follow me. I am powerless to move so
long as they are there" (219). This is the face of the Other signifying
"an irrefutable order—a commandment—that arrests the availability
of consciousness" (Levinas, Humanism 32). It arrests Paul's ability to
raise his hand against his enemy every bit as much as the angel of
the Lord arrested Abraham's hand when he raised it to slay Isaac.
War experiences are, as Stéphane Mosès explains in the intro
duction to his study of Levinas, "encore des modalités de l'intériorité,
c'est-à-dire du rapport de moi à moi, même si la presence de l'autre
se profile déjà ... à l'arrière-fond" ("still modalities of interiority, that
is to say they concern the relationship between me and myself, even
if the other's presence already emerges ... in the background"; 15).
Yet here we see Paul forced out of that interiority. Called to respond
to the face of the Other, Paul reassures the dying soldier that he will
not kill him: "I bend forward, shake my head and whisper: 'No, no,
no,' I raise one hand, I must show him that I want to help him, I
stroke his forehead" (219). Levinas writes, "If I am alone with the
Other, I owe him everything" (Ethics 89-90), and Paul, alone with his
enemy in the shell-hole, responds accordingly. Paul opens the man's
collar, positions his head more comfortably, scoops water out of a
puddle and helps the man drink it, and bandages him while gently
whispering, "'I want to help you, Comrade, camerade, camerade,
camerade [sic]—'" (220).
Paul's actions here could not be better described than by Cohen's
gloss on Levinas's concept of suffering: "To suffer for others is to serve
them: to provide for their concrete material needs for nourishment,

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 Middleton-Kaplan 85

clothing, health, shelter, and employment; to assuage their pains,

anxieties, and fears; to respect their freedom and dignity; to care for
the other's requirements before protecting or catering to one's own
various social identities" ("Introduction: Humanism" xxxiv). This is
precisely what Paul does. Paul attends to the soldier's material needs;
he assuages his pain, anxiety, and fear; he respects his dignity; he
slakes his thirst before his own; and he ignores their social identities
as enemy combatants. Jn short, Paul does answer the command to
say "Hineni"—"Here I am"—when face-to-face with the Other.
Late that afternoon, the wounded man dies. Not knowing
what to do, Paul feels that "I must do something" (221). Again the
words echo Levinas who, as B. C. Hutchens observes, "Nowhere . . .
emphasize[s] what someone must do," but does insist "that one must
do something" (51).
Paul stabbed his enemy physically, but as the man lays dying,
no longer merely a cultural abstraction, Paul comments, "he has an
invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts"
(221). In the wake of the man's death, Paul fully recognizes the
Levinasian principle that the face of the Other makes murder mor
ally impossible. Addressing the dead man he now calls "Comrade,"
Paul reflects, "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" (223). Now stabbed by memory and remorse,
Paul experiences the way in which the face of the Other "puts the
self into question. The other disturbs, upsets, and overwhelms the
self-relation of the self with a moral obligation to respond that cuts
deeper—is more important—than cultural formations or the ontologi
cal configuration of being" (Cohen, "Introduction: Humanism" xxx).
"Cuts," "stabs"—these apt words capture the feeling of a man who
stabbed another man and now finds his own conscience stabbed.
Spurred by his pierced conscience to ethical action, Paul resolves
to write to the dead man's wife, to help her, to help his parents and
his child. He opens the man's tunic and takes out the pocket book
that has his name inscribed. He takes out the man's wallet and finds
pictures and letters; the pictures are of a woman and a little girl. He
thinks, "I must do everything, promise everything in order to save
myself; I swear blindly that I mean to live only for his sake and his
family." Here he seems to be following the Levinasian injunction that
to suffer for others is to serve them, although that is undercut by
his desire to save himself. The purity of Paul's intention is further
undercut by his confession that "deep down in me lies the hope that
I may buy myself off in this way and perhaps even get out of this; it
is a little stratagem" (225).

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86 Facing the Face of the Enemy

Despite this selfish impulse, Paul does recognize his ethical

obligation, and he does finally register his enemy as a face and as a
name: "I have killed the printer, Gérard Duval. I must be a printer, I
think confusedly, be a printer, a printer—" (225). What follows next
is the novel's clearest expression of anti-war sentiment:

"Comrade," I say to the dead man, but I say it calmly,

"to-day you, to-morrow me. But if I come out of it, comrade,
I will fight against this, that has struck us both down; from
you, taken life—and from me—? Life also. I promise you,
comrade. It shall never happen again. (226)

If the novel were to end here, or if Paul were to fulfill that promise,
then indeed his suffering, and perhaps Gérard Duval's suffering, would
not have been useless. Perhaps by truly seeing the face of the enemy
and tending to the dying man's comfort, Paul has already reversed
the pain that is evil and the suffering that is useless.
Levinas asks us, "Is not the evil of suffering—extreme passiv
ity, helplessness, abandonment and solitude—also the unassumable,
when the possibility of a half opening and, more precisely, the half
opening that a moan, a cry, a groan or a sigh slips through—the
original call for aid, for curative help, help from the other me whose
alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation?" (Entre Nous 93).
Indeed, it does seem that Paul, however humanly and imperfectly,
did answer the call of the face of the Other. He did transcend interior
ity. He did step into the breach of a half opening, responding to the
helpless cry and groan of the enemy. He succeeds in "becoming a
suffering for the suffering (inexorable though it may be) of someone
else" (94). It appears that he has demonstrated the possibility of
enacting Levinasian ethics with respect to the face of the Other, even
when that Other is an enemy on a savage battlefield.

All Restless on the Academic Front

When I presented Levinas's theories to a class I was teaching

on the literature of war and attempted to relate those theories to
Paul's encounter with Gérard Duval, one student, a combat veteran
of the current Iraq war, scoffed. His implication was that Levinas
had no actual knowledge of what happens when a soldier looks into
an opposing soldier's face on the battlefield. Recently returned from
combat operations in the Iraqi desert, he found it patently absurd
that a soldier would feel an ethical obligation or surge of sympathy
when face-to-face with an enemy resolved to kill him. Slightly agitated
and entirely skeptical, he asked, "Did Levinas ever actually fight in a
war?" I started to respond, but before I could complete a sentence,

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 Middleton-Kaplan 87

a Bulgarian-born student named Plamen Pencheff entered the fray.

"It doesn't matter if he was ever on the battlefield or not," Pencheff
said. "Levinas was from Lithuania. In his lifetime he would have seen
his country run over by Poland, Russia, Prussia, Nazi Germany, the
Soviet Union..."
Pencheff later reminded me that Levinas did see battle first
hand. He was "mobilized to the front»" and he was in the Tenth Army
captured by General Rommel's forces, thereby joining "the hundreds
of thousands of French soldiers who fell en masse into the hands
of German soldiers" (Malka 65). Even if Levinas was not, like Franz
Rosenzweig, a philosopher/soldier "in the trenches [of the Balkan
front in World War I], writing out his manuscript of several hundred
pages on army postcards which are dispatched home one by one"
(Glatzer ix), Levinas knew the soldier's reality well enough.4
But what difference does it make if we know that Levinas ac
tually saw battle? I would submit that it makes this difference: We
therefore know that he has come face-to-face with the Other as his
enemy—and with Death. We therefore know that his writing about
wounds and war and groans and cries is not merely metaphorical. We
therefore know that he was not a naïve, abstract philosopher bliss
fully disconnected from the grimmest possible human (and inhuman)
realities, as the veteran in my class implied.
And yet, even before the end of the chapter in which Paul Bäumer
cares for the dying French printer Gérard Duval, Paul's idealism
evaporates as if it were morning mist. The same cynicism—or is it
practicality?—expressed by my student/war veteran overtakes Paul.
By the time he reconnects with his unit, he accepts their reassur
ance that he needn't lose any sleep over his face-to-face encounter
with Duval:

And now I hardly understand it myself anymore.

"It was only because I had to lie there with him so
long," I say. "After all, war is war."
Oellrich's rifle cracks out sharply and dry. (229)

That rifle crack brings the chapter to a sharp, dry end. If one can
render suffering not useless only by responding to the suffering of
the Other, then suffering again becomes useless here when Paul turns
away from the call of the Other and can no longer even hear it or
understand what it means to hear it. What had blossomed with the
promise of human sympathy shrivels and dies. It is a bitter conclusion
to a chapter that had resounded with such fervent idealism.
We are left, then, to conclude that Gérard Duval's suffering was
useless. So was Paul's. The official Army report on the day he dies is,
of course, "All quiet on the Western Front" (296), suggesting that his

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88 Facing the Face of the Enemy

death goes unnoticed, that whatever shot killed him does not make
a discernable sound within the overall din of destruction. Useless too
was the suffering of the millions of young men like Paul.
At last we have reached the point where Levinas and Remarque
diverge. Remarque's novel leaves us with an overwhelming sense of
useless suffering, wasted lives, pointless war, senseless slaughter.
That is his theme, and that propels his novel as a vehicle of anti-war
thought and sentiment. The novel rages against useless suffering
by portraying it without compromise and without comfort. But while
Remarque keeps our gaze focused on that useless suffering, Levinas
turns us toward the possibility of rendering suffering not-useless.
Here the lamp of Levinas illuminates the darkness of Remarque's
vision and the luminousness of the Levinasian lamp's own light. In Au
delà de la guerre: Trois etudes sur Levinas, Mosès contends that for
Levinas war embodies the experience of pure being that burns away
the fripperies of illusion. Mosès states that for Levinas, "la vérité de
l'être se dévoile-t-elle précisément dans la guerre" ("the truth of being
unveils itself precisely in war"; 8) and that war is the rule rather than
the exception in human relations. Building on Mosès's observations,
I hope that I have shown here, by using Levinas to shed light on the
greatest of (anti-) war novels, not just that war constitutes the rule
of human relations, but that the face-to-face encounter as recorded
in war literature throws into exceptionally sharp relief Levinas's ideas
about infinite ethical obligation to the other. For it is in war, in its ex
traordinary and dire reality and extremity, that such ideas are finally
removed altogether from the abstract metaphoric realm and where
the face-to-face encounter with the other has most at stake.
What Paul Bäumer achieved for a few hours in the shell-hole
face-to-face with Gérard Duval, Levinas calls on us to achieve in ev
ery moment. Where Remarque leaves us with death in the foxhole,
Levinas points our steps toward a path—a demanding path, but a
path nevertheless—that might lead out of the trenches of war toward
life, bringing us at last face-to-face with peace.

Notes

1. See "The Decay of Lying."

2. See also Levinas, Humanism of the Other: "The uniqueness of the
Ego is the fact that no one can answer in my stead. . . . The Ego is
infinitely responsible in face of the Other" (33).

3. Picard's text was originally published as Hitler in uns Selbst in 1946,

and is available in English as Hitler in Our Selves.

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 Middleton-Kaplan 89
4. Stéphane Mosès argues that the war experience fundamentally in
fluenced the development of Levinas's philosophy, just as it did for
Rosenzweig. See the essay "De Rosenzweig à Levinas: philosophie de
la guerre" in Mosès' Au-delà de la guerre. Rosenzweig's unrelenting
exposure to death from 1914-1918 led him to develop a critique that
accused Western philosophy of neglecting the basic human fear of
death. In the major philosophical work he wrote from the trenches,
The Star of Redemption (1920), Rosenzweig responded by develop
ing his own counter-philosophy emphasizing life.

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