Life & Wisdom Quote by Erich Maria Remarque

Remarque’s knife twist here is how quickly a compliment curdles into an accusation. “They” are “more human and more brotherly” than “we” are - a simple moral inversion that flatters the out-group only long enough to expose the speaker’s own camp as emotionally stunted. Then comes the retreat: “it seems to me,” “perhaps,” “merely.” Those hedges don’t soften the claim; they dramatize the narrator’s discomfort at having stumbled onto an ugly truth about solidarity. He wants to believe in decency as a choice. Remarque keeps dragging him back to decency as a symptom.

The subtext is cruelly pragmatic: brotherhood may not be the highest human virtue but a survival tactic, a social technology engineered by need. If people “feel themselves to be more unfortunate,” they cling together because isolation is a luxury item. In Remarque’s world - shaped by World War I’s industrial trauma and the humiliations of postwar Europe - misfortune isn’t just personal hardship. It’s the shared atmosphere of a generation ground down by trenches, shortages, and a state that can mobilize bodies faster than it can care for them.

The line also sneaks in a rebuke to comfort: prosperity doesn’t automatically make people kinder; it can make them less attentive, less reliant, more self-satisfied. Remarque isn’t romanticizing suffering. He’s showing how inequality distorts empathy on both sides: the unfortunate are forced into intimacy, while the fortunate can afford distance and mistake it for dignity.