Leer

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.