Character guide

Paul Bäumer

major

Also known as Bäumer, Paul

Paul enlisted with his whole school class after a teacher's patriotic lectures, and now fights as a common soldier whose only real roots are the friends beside him. He is caught between the older men, who have wives and trades to return to, and his own generation, whom he calls a waste land — too young to have taken hold of anything before the war swept them away. His plain, unsentimental voice is what makes the early chapters cut: he notices the boots, the beans, the dying friend, and tells it straight.

Katczinsky

major

Also known as Kat, Stanislaus Katczinsky, the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky, Katczinsky—a

Kat is the older soldier in Paul's section — a cobbler in civilian life, a scavenger and strategist at the front, able to conjure a hot meal or a dry billet out of nothing. He treats the war as a job to be worked rather than a cause to be believed, and his calm competence is the closest thing the young men have to a home. When he faces down the sergeant-cook over the beans, you see exactly why the others follow him.

Albert Kropp

supporting

Also known as Kropp, little Kropp, Kropp and Tjaden, Suddenly Kropp

Kropp enlisted alongside Paul and shares his trench, his rations, and his habit of asking what the war has actually done to their class — counting the dead, the wounded, the mad. He refuses to be intimidated, trading barbs with Himmelstoss and laughing over half-remembered schoolroom questions that no longer mean anything. His clear-eyed bitterness gives the novel one of its most articulate voices of protest.

Tjaden

supporting

Also known as the stingy Tjaden, Only Tjaden, The Tjaden

Tjaden is the squad's resident scrounger and complainer, a thin, mousy man whose chief passions are food and revenge on Himmelstoss. His open contempt for the former postman — spitting out 'dirty hound' to his face — is one of the novel's first acts of defiance, and it costs him. He is also, in the quieter passages, a barometer of how much the men have come to value a cigar, a full plate, and a day without shells.

Corporal Himmelstoss

supporting

Also known as Himmelstoss

Himmelstoss is the strictest disciplinarian in the camp and proud of it, a small man with a waxed moustache who makes Paul scrub floors with a toothbrush and stand at attention in the frost. His persecution of Kropp, Tjaden, and Paul teaches them something the front will only confirm: that authority can be as dangerous as artillery. When he finally reaches the trenches, the men's contempt for him becomes a quiet test of what the war has and hasn't changed.

Franz Kemmerich

supporting

Also known as Kemmerich, Franz, Suddenly Kemmerich

Kemmerich is one of Paul's schoolmates, wounded early and lying in a clean hospital bed while his leg rots and the doctors quietly give up on him. His boots — good ones, scarce ones — become the object of Müller's practical attention, and the men's matter-of-fact talk about who will inherit them is the novel's first hard lesson in how the front reorders sympathy. His death is not a plot twist but a threshold: after Kemmerich, Paul stops expecting the war to make sense.

Haie Westhus

supporting

Also known as Westhus, Haie

Haie Westhus is the group's gentle giant, a former peat-digger whose massive frame makes him invaluable in the trenches and whose simple longings reveal what the war has cost men like him. He spins an elaborate fantasy of staying in the army after the war—trading the backbreaking, poorly paid labor of the moors for regular meals, clean underwear, and the easy authority of a village policeman. His dream is both comic and devastating: he cannot imagine a civilian life better than the one the army has given him, and that quiet desperation is precisely what Remarque wants readers to feel.

Müller

supporting

Müller is the squad's relentless pragmatist, the man who asks the uncomfortable follow-up question and who has already calculated that Kemmerich's fine boots will be wasted on a dying man. His fixation on the boots is not cruelty but a survival logic the front has taught him: only facts are real, and good boots are scarce. He embodies the moral arithmetic the war forces on young soldiers—sympathy and self-interest operating side by side—and his clear-eyed practicality makes him both admirable and unsettling to Paul's narrating eye.

Kantorek

minor

Also known as Territorial Kantorek

Patriotic schoolmaster who shamed his students into enlisting.

Leer

supporting

Leer is part of the tight cluster of young men—Paul, Kropp, Müller—whom Kantorek's patriotic lectures herded straight from the classroom into the barracks. He shares their peculiar homelessness: too young to have wives or trades to return to, too old to be children, they are a generation whose lives were severed before they began. Leer's presence in the group matters because he is one of the faces of that lost cohort, and Paul's reflections on their shared rootlessness give the novel its defining elegy for the young men of twenty.

Mittelstaedt

minor

Also known as Hullo Mittelstaedt

Former classmate who later becomes a training officer.

Detering

minor

A homesick soldier who longs for his farm and family.

Ginger

minor

A cook who begrudges the soldiers their rations.

Boettcher

minor

A soldier in the company with a minor role.

Joseph Behm

minor

Also known as Behm

A reluctant recruit who is among the first to die.

The Kaiser

minor

Also known as Kaiser, the Kaiser

German emperor mentioned as a distant authority figure.

Sister Libertine

minor

A nun who cares for wounded soldiers in a hospital.

Berger

minor

A young soldier who dies in a futile attack.

Bertinck

minor

Also known as Bertink

A brave company commander respected by his men.

Josef Hamacher

minor

Also known as Josef

A soldier with a head wound who gets a special pass.

Lewandowski

minor

Also known as Johann, Johann Lewandowski

A Polish soldier who visits his wife in a hospital.

Sergeant Oellrich

minor

Also known as Oellrich

A non-commissioned officer in the company.

Franz Wächter

minor

Also known as Franz

A soldier mentioned briefly in the narrative.

Tiedjen

minor

A soldier mentioned briefly in the story.