A Time to Love and a Time to Die

A Time to Love and a Time to Die Review

Ernst Graeber is a German soldier on the Eastern Front in 1943, fighting a war that is already being lost, in conditions that Remarque describes with the same flat, precise refusal of sentimentality that made All Quiet on the Western Front devastating. The Eastern Front of 1943 is different in every respect from the Western Front of 1917 — the scale, the cold, the ideology of the German occupation, the specific brutality of a war whose German prosecution was organized around racial annihilation rather than merely territorial conquest. Remarque does not obscure these differences. He gives his German soldier full humanity without giving him ignorance.

Ernst receives three weeks’ leave and returns to his German city to find it bombed beyond recognition. The city of his childhood — the streets, the buildings, the institutions that defined his formation as a person — has been reduced to rubble by Allied bombing, and the rubble is still smoldering. His parents are missing, presumed dead. Everything he is returning to has been destroyed. In the ruins, he meets Elisabeth Kruse, a girl he barely knew before the war, whose father has been taken by the Gestapo, and they fall in love with the urgency of people who understand that they have three weeks.

The love story is Remarque at his most direct: the courtship, the marriage, the brief domesticity of rented rooms and shared meals in a city that is more ruin than city — all rendered with the precision and warmth that the context makes heartbreaking. Ernst and Elisabeth marry knowing that the three weeks will end and that what comes after them is almost certainly Ernst’s death. They do it anyway. The novel is not a refutation of this logic but an examination of it: the choice to love in full knowledge of the consequences is the only form of freedom available to people whose larger choices have been made for them by the historical machinery of the Third Reich.

The title’s Biblical echo — from Ecclesiastes, “a time to love and a time to die” — is not ironic but exact. Remarque is not saying that love and death are accidentally concurrent in this novel; he is saying that the situation of the young German soldier in 1943 is precisely the situation Ecclesiastes describes: all things in their time, and this is the time for both. The ending, in which Ernst is killed immediately upon returning to the front — shot by a prisoner he had just released, in one of those moral ironies that war produces without design — is not a twist but a completion: the time for dying has arrived.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Remarque’s most morally ambitious novel, and the one that demanded the most courage to write: the claim that the ordinary German soldier was a human being deserves its place in the literature of the Second World War.

The Moral Courage of the Subject

To write, in 1954, a novel that asked readers to grant full humanity to an ordinary German soldier on the Eastern Front of the Second World War was an act of genuine moral risk, and A Time to Love and a Time to Die is the book in which Remarque took it. The literary and cultural climate of the postwar years had little appetite for German protagonists who were neither monsters nor martyrs, and the novel’s central proposition — that Ernst Graeber is a human being caught in what his country has done, deserving of neither absolution nor erasure — was uncomfortable on every side. Remarque’s achievement is to hold this balance without flinching in either direction. He gives Ernst full interiority and full humanity, and he never once allows that humanity to function as an excuse for the war Germany was waging. Ernst sees the executions, registers the machinery of occupation, understands at some level the nature of the regime he serves. His humanity is not innocence; it is the more difficult thing, the humanity of a man who is implicated and knows it.

Love in the Ruins

The three weeks of furlough that give the novel its structure are among the most affecting passages Remarque ever wrote. Ernst returns to a city bombed beyond recognition, his parents missing, his childhood landscape reduced to smoldering rubble, and in this devastation he finds Elisabeth and falls into a love that both of them understand to be conducted against a deadline. The courtship, the marriage, the brief domesticity assembled out of rented rooms and shared meals in a ruined city — Remarque renders all of it with a tenderness that the surrounding destruction makes nearly intolerable. The title, drawn from Ecclesiastes, is not ironic but exact: this is the time for both love and dying, and the two are not sequential but simultaneous. The novel’s abrupt ending, in which Ernst is killed almost immediately on his return to the front — shot by a partisan he had moments earlier chosen to free — is not a twist but a completion. The historical machinery does not wait for private stories to resolve. It collects what it is owed, and the time for dying arrives on schedule.

A Furlough Between Horrors

The novel’s tenderness is sharpened by its frame: Ernst Graeber’s love for Elizabeth blossoms during a brief furlough from the Eastern Front, a stolen interval of ordinary life he knows he must surrender. Douglas Sirk filmed it in 1958, and Remarque himself appeared in a small role as the anti-Nazi Professor Pohlmann, lending the adaptation a personal stamp.