# Leer — All Quiet on the Western Front character guide

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

**Role:** supporting

**First appearance:** 0002-i

## Snapshot

One of the twenty-year-old volunteers swept up with Paul and Kropp, Leer belongs to the generation the war cut off before it could take root.

## Who they are

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.

## Relationships

### [Albert Kropp](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/albert_kropp)

_friendship_

Kropp and Leer are fellow soldiers and friends, often sharing in the grim humor and hardships of war.

### [Albert Kropp](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/albert_kropp)

_friendship_

Kropp and Leer are fellow soldiers and friends, often sharing in the grim humor and hardships of war.

## In the story

### [Chapter VII](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/chapters/vii)

Comrade; appears in the scene with the poster and the women by the canal.

### [Chapter XI](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/chapters/xi)

Wounded in the hip by a shell fragment and bleeds to death.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters/leer
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_se/characters