The Black Obelisk, a novel by Erich Maria Remarque The Black Obelisk is a 1956 novel by Erich Maria Remarque about the year 1923.
The action is set in the fictional provincial town of Werdenbrück, in which the protagonist Ludwig Bodmer tries to survive and find himself during the postwar economic inflation and mental turmoil. Readers easily discern the author himself in him.
The name of the town can be translated as an “evaporating”, or “disappearing bridge”.
Indeed, the lives of the novel’s characters are like a bridge that is about to vanish; it seems to be suspended between two chasms—the First and Second World Wars. People have not yet recovered from one war, and another, even more terrible, is hanging over them like a dark shadow. Although they still don’t understand it. The germs of the coming Nazi catastrophe are already here, declaring their revanchist and misanthropic claims loudly, but thus far frightening few people and even causing skeptical irony and laughter.
People are preoccupied with economic rather than political issues; they are mostly absorbed in the search for “daily bread” and entertainment. Ideas are pushed to the sidelines. Their place is taken by material goods, which are in short supply.
The five symbolic centers of this “suspended” time in the novel are a maternity hospital, an adjacent insane asylum, a Catholic church on its territory, a brothel, and a cemetery.
You can’t help but get the impression that people are born to grow up, go crazy or indulge in debauchery—which are basically the same thing—and finally die. On their way to the cemetery they go into the church from time to time without really believing in what they are taught there.
For me, the key image in the novel is a morning Mass at the Catholic church filled with the asylum patients who, like silent stone statues, do not understand what is going on. Although physically present, in fact they are absent, either thinking about nothing or having their thoughts in some worlds unknown to us. Next to them are healthy people—clergymen, doctors and orderlies; but there is a chasm between them—that of misunderstanding. Is there any chasm between them and God? No one knows. This is one of the most powerful symbols of the interwar period of the twentieth century, clearly echoing another of Remarque’s wartime symbols: a Bible lying amid the ruins of a bombed church, whose pages are only flipped over by the wind (in the novel, A Time to Love and a Time to Die).
According to the “revelations” of the protagonist’s beloved, the insane Genevieve (“Isabelle”), the priests nailed Christ to the Cross and locked Him in churches so as not to let Him out and prevent Him from agitating people with His preaching. But even if they were to free Him, they would have crucified Him again, just as they did 2000 years ago.
“He would like to get out, but they hold Him prisoner. He bleeds and bleeds and wants to come down from the cross. But they won’t let Him. They keep Him in their prisons with the high towers, and they give Him incense and prayers and do not let Him out... There are so many prisoners. And those outside are afraid of them. But the One up there on the cross—He’s the One they’re most afraid of... All those who make use of Him and live on Him. They are innumerable… They must let Him go. But He is too dangerous for them. He is not like them. He is the most dangerous of all—He is the kindest… They would have to kill Him again; the same people who now pray to Him. They would kill Him, just as countless people have been killed in His name. In the name of justice and love of one’s neighbor.”1
Let’s respond to these “crazy words”. There is a lot of bitter truth in them. It is true that there is a lot of Pharisaical hypocrisy and self-justification among Christians, much inconsistency between their words and way of life, and evil is often justified and disguised beneath the Gospel’s good words. But this by no means justifies the personal unbelief of the people who see all this, nor does it prevent them from becoming righteous Christians. Do the sins of others allow me to sin myself? On the contrary, seeing other people’s sins allows me to avoid them.
All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not (Matt. 23:3), the Lord told His disciples about the Pharisees.
Non-believers think like this: “If there are many sins and hypocrisy among believers, then we will not be believers—we will live our own way. That is, we will be the same as sinful believers, only without faith in Christ.” By doing so, they justify their unbelief, allowing themselves to live according to their passions, without fighting them in any way and blocking their own path to conversion and salvation. These people forget that the very concept of sin or evil is unthinkable without the Most Holy God. A true awareness of sin brings you to humility, repentance, and Knowledge of God. But in order for all this to happen you should not see sin in others, but in yourself, becoming horrified by your fallen and disastrous state.
Unfortunately, this does not happen to either “Isabelle” or Ludwig. For him, the Church is just an earthly human organization that preaches something that does not exist and has never existed—a historical anachronism, which, however, you can make use of to earn extra money.
He is not a militant atheist who fights with God, but an aggressive atheist-pacifist. After the First World War, for him, as for many participants and victims of the war, God as a living and personal Being died;2 that is, He ceased to exist and evoke any response in their souls and hearts. They had lost faith in Him.
Why did this happen? Because their consciousness, minds and feelings could not contain faith in a loving God and all the horrors of war they had experienced. That’s the main cause.
During the war years, death became such a common and habitual phenomenon that it actually became identified with life, superseding it. Life became being toward death, in the words of Remarque’s contemporary, the philosopher Martin Heidegger.3
During the war, the masses of people became accustomed to killing and dying, to death, to not appreciating life, realizing its fragility, transience, dependence on unpredictable chance and blind or indifferent fate. The pre-war world of an unclouded childhood and a strong family, order and prosperity, love, faith and hope collapsed never to return, and life would never be the same again. If before the war, death was viewed from the perspective of life, then after the war life was viewed and understood from the perspective of death. The coordinate system of murder and death took the place of that of birth and life.
If life is death, all that remains is to die, trying to make it as pleasantly and painlessly as possible. Let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die (1 Cor. 15:32), and, “Let us enjoy the time that remains for us. Less of it is left than we want anyway.” That’s what people who have lost faith always say.
In such a murderous life, there is no place for God, Who is the way, the truth, and the life (Jn. 14:6), Righteousness and Holiness; there are no supports, no guarantees, no order. There is only the chaos of meaningless human thoughts, desires and feelings; there is only the burden of human passions.4
Therefore, everything is allowed here, there is nothing forbidden and nothing blessed, there is no good and evil, truth and falsehood, fear and hope. All certainty collapsed along with faith in God. Everything came to naught and destroyed itself. Everything became rotten, decayed, dilapidated and relative.
Poor people still believed in the reality of the world around them, still clung to life, giving it some meaning, but there had been nothing left for a long time—no reason, no purpose, no meaning, no law. Each one of them was just a fleeting flash of consciousness in the darkness, which they illusorily regarded as life.
This truth was known only by the insane and schizophrenics, who had lost their selves, which had been shattered into several pieces like broken mirrors. Only they considered that there were neither themselves, nor others, nor the world around them. There was nothing and there had never been anything. This is the terrible truth of nihilism, the true religion of the twentieth century.
Therefore, the most reasonable and sober–minded people are the insane. They are not afraid to look into the eyes of the gloomy abyss of Nothingness. They are the “holy fools” of our age. Meanwhile, most of those who complacently consider themselves sane in fact are madmen who, so as not to learn the truth, keep those who know it in insane asylums. Humanity has gone mad.
Once the world was perceived as one sacred living body, then as a Temple of God, then as a machine or a theater; and following the First World War it finally turned into a madhouse. The Second World War confirmed this completely.
Ludwig and his colleagues are people whose childhood and youth were suddenly cut short by the war. They got used to the killing and deaths of their own and others, and felt their equality and brotherhood in the face of death. During the war, they were developed as personalities, as comrades-in-arms, and became themselves.
And then the war ended. They suddenly lost their footing, their existential context, and the ground of their being. After the shameful defeat, they became the “lost generation”,5—lost to a “normal” peaceful life. They are pathologically doomed to continue fighting, killing and dying in their dreams and in reality, because they simply cannot do anything else. War makes military people hate war, but at the same time they cannot live without it.
Faith in Christ, repentance and humility, mercy and forgiveness could have helped them. But they have gone too far, becoming too soaked, too transformed by the war to trust the love of God.
The complex of the defeated, the revenge complex, is very strong in them. The seeds of hatred and revenge fall into the hearts of the lost and defeated people like prepared soil, sprouting many lethal shoots.
The symbol of the gathering universal darkness in the novel is a black obelisk, which no one buys throughout the novel. It is not a monument to anyone in particular, but to all distraught humanity. Only at the very end, before his departure from the town, does Ludwig manage to sell it to prostitutes to perpetuate the memory of their colleague, nicknamed “Iron Horse”, who died at “work”. This fact further reinforces the absurdity of what is happening.
Chaos and darkness are unnatural to humans. That was always the case as long as they believed in God. Humans are beings of order and light. Therefore, despite all the trials and disappointments that befall them, they strive for order and light. For Vicar Bodendieck and the sister nuns, these are embodied in God; for the atheist doctor Wernicke, in science and patient care; for Ludwig, for a while, in poetry; for Heinrich Krol, in nationalism bordering on Nazism; for some, in Communism. And we know which idea would prevail, subjugate them, and very soon triumph in Germany in the 1930s, dooming this country and its people to the catastrophe of World War II.6
Remarque, like his protagonist, has no recipe for overcoming the crisis he described, which inexorably escalates into disaster. All he (like his protagonist) was able to do was save himself and avoid participating in the madness surrounding him, first leaving the city and then the country. He did not find the strength for active resistance, nor for the feat of confession, much less martyrdom. He just escaped.
If he had stayed, he would surely have become a soulless cog in the German military machine, like Ernst Graeber in the novel, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, who realized the criminal nature of Nazism, but continued to do his job as a soldier.
All of Ludwig’s friends who remained in Werdenbrück died—some in the war, others in concentration camps. Many Nazi henchmen survived and were set up for life after war, doing much better than the surviving victims of the regime. The town itself changed beyond recognition after the bombing and reconstruction.
The last lines of the novel are filled with bitter disappointment and aching pain.
“Everything was destroyed, then rebuilt, and you won’t recognize anything now... Only two buildings have remained completely intact—the insane asylum and the maternity home, mainly because they stand outside the town. And they immediately turned out to be overfilled, and they are still so. They even had to be enlarged significantly.”
The cup of unbelief in God had been drained to the end. The old world was gone. And it was replaced by a new world. People continued to be born and go crazy without drawing conclusions from past tragedies, even forgetting them.
Without faith in Christ, there is no Truth and no Life in human hearts. Without Him our existence turns into a mess.
