# All Quiet on the Western Front — Character guide

> Key figures in All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.

- [Paul Bäumer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/paul_baumer.md): 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 
- [Katczinsky](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/katczinsky.md): 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 
- [Albert Kropp](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/albert_kropp.md): 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 bar
- [Tjaden](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/tjaden.md): 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 
- [Corporal Himmelstoss](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/himmelstoss.md): 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, Tja
- [Franz Kemmerich](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/kemmerich.md): 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 practi
- [Haie Westhus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/haie_westhus.md): 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 o
- [Müller](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/muller.md): 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 no
- [Kantorek](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/kantorek.md): Patriotic schoolmaster who shamed his students into enlisting.
- [Leer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/leer.md): 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 o
- [Mittelstaedt](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/mittelstaedt.md): Former classmate who later becomes a training officer.
- [Detering](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/detering.md): A homesick soldier who longs for his farm and family.
- [Ginger](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/ginger.md): A cook who begrudges the soldiers their rations.
- [Boettcher](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/boettcher.md): A soldier in the company with a minor role.
- [Joseph Behm](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/joseph_behm.md): A reluctant recruit who is among the first to die.
- [The Kaiser](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/the_kaiser.md): German emperor mentioned as a distant authority figure.
- [Sister Libertine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/sister_libertine.md): A nun who cares for wounded soldiers in a hospital.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters