#Three Comrades

[allthedesiredusernamesaretaken]

" I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was. " ― Erich Maria Remarque,  Three Comrades

[malleusmaleficent]

In Three Comrades, by Erich Maria Remarque, the protagonist is a jaded, bitter and sad man. He lives in the Weimar Republic, Germany between the wars, when times were desperate and anxiety and fear were building to a level that was palpable.

However, he has some unusual friends that provide him platonic love and support. They're not his only friends, but they are the ones whose friendship most affected me.

Prostitutes. Sex workers that work in and around the shitty, run-down bar he goes to every day to spend his day's wages. They all have tragic stories: a widow whose husband died in debt and so left her penniless, a handicapped single mother that was missing an arm, a young woman raised by abusive parents. They generally don't like men, but they like the protagonist because he's never once made any advances on them or insulted them.

If he buys them a drink it's not to make them drunk and therefore an easier lay. No, if he buys one of them a drink, it's because they're upset and need someone to talk to. The sex workers aren't the titular 'Three Comrades', but they're his comrades, too.

The sex workers are all people, and they are never treated with anything but utmost respect both by the protagonist and by the author. They have thoughts, feelings, wants and dreams, and the protagonist and author both address these things with sincerity. It's crazy that this book written by a man in the 50s treated this subject matter with such delicacy.

I read this book in sixth grade and it certainly impacted my views on sex workers. It wasn't assigned reading, honestly the book is so difficult that even some college students would struggle with it. I read it simply because I knew the book was written by the author of All Quiet on the Western Front. I went into it expecting another war story, instead what I got was a deeply thoughtful story about love, loss, friendship, and the every day pains of being alive.

Had I known it was a romance story going into it, I never would've read it. But I did, and it's the book that most defined who I am now. More than ten years later and the protagonist still is so much like me it almost hurts to read sometimes. And it helped me learn, before society at large had the chance to inculcate a bias in me, that sex work is work and that working in that field isn't a moral failing. That the people working in that profession are people too, with thoughts that should be taken just as seriously as anyone else's.

It's not just "that's someone's daughter"-- no, that's someone's own person, and they should be treated as such.

Talk about book bans bum me out because you know that the entire point of them is to rob children of experiences like mine with this book. They don't want kids to be exposed to material like this before they have the chance to preemptively put biases in their head.

[academia-void]

"Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life, they are exploited and then shoved aside."

-Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

[petya-in-a-cup]

Hi i know maybe like NO ONE else but my boyfriend cares about the three comrades but ill show these to you anyway

[okayclaryfray]

i'm a simple girl

I happily buy books that will 100% shatter my soul and bury my hope, I love to write and I hate to write, I get too attached to characters and storylines and end up crying after any book, sad or happy, I'd rather have books for company, and if you dare interrupt me while I'm reading, you've chosen death.

[vera-gemini]

I found Three Comrades in french (look at those covers ! Those books are from the 1970s)

For some reason, it’s in two volumes

[peacysecretoff]

can't get the image out of my head for real

[nastyacitrus]

One afternoon her temperature dropped with inexplicable suddenness. Pat waked up and looked at me a long time.

"Give me a looking-glass," she whispered then.

"What do you want a looking-glass for?" I asked. "Rest, Pat. I think you're over it now. You have hardly any temperature".

"No," she whispered in her threadbare, burnt-out voice. "Give me the looking-glass”.

I walked round the bed, took the looking-glass and let it drop. It broke in pieces. "Sorry," said I, "to be so clumsy. It just dropped out of my hand and now it's in a thousand pieces."

"There's another in my handbag, Robby".

It was a tiny chromium mirror. I wiped my hand over it to dull the surface, and gave it to Pat. Laboriously she rubbed it clean and looked into it intently. "You must go away, darling," she whispered.

"Why? Don't you like me any longer?"

"You mustn't see me any more. That isn't me any more".

— “Three comrades”, by Erich Maria Remarque

[speeedyquick1245]

It was a big mistake for me to finish reading The Three Comrades, watch All Quiet on the Western Front and get into 1917 all in the same week. I don’t regret it though. 

[litandlifequotes]

… there existed only glory and melody and love, so that one simply could not realize that, at the same time as this music was, outside there ruled poverty and torment and despair.

Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque

[malleusmaleficent]

Blame me, condemn me; I couldn't, I simply could not say No, could not say that I had never been there; not yet....

We were standing by the window, the mist pressed and broke in waves against the panes -- and I felt that behind it lurked again the secret, the hidden, the past things, the damp days of horror, the desolation, the filth, the shreds of a wasted life, the perplexity, the misguided frittering away of strength in an aimless existence; but here, before me in the shadow, disconcertingly near, the quiet breathing, the unseizable present,-- warmth, clear living,-- I must hold it, I must win it.

"Rio--" said I. "Rio de Janeiro -- a harbour out of a fairy tale. The sea swings in around the bay in seven sweeps and the city mounts white and shining above it...." I began to tell of the hot cities and endless plains, of the yellow floods of the great rivers, [...] of the cry of the jaguar by night, as the river boat glided through the sultry, vanila-and-orchid-scented putrefaction of darkness. I had heard it all from Lenz, but now it almost seemed as if it had been I myself, so curiously intermingled were the memory and the desire to lend some glamour to the petty and obscure nothingness of my life, in order not to lose this incredibly lovely face, this sudden hope, this blessed flowering, for which alone I was much too little. Later I could explain it all, later when I should be more, when everything was more secure-- later, but not now.

"Manaos," said I. "Buenos Aires..." and each word was a plea and a vow.

- Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

God, isn't that so fucking tragic? That agonizing feeling that you are utterly inadequate, that your existence is so miserable it can't possibly allow for someone so wonderful to be in your life. That in order to stave off the misery of your life from reaching your burgeoning crush, you have to spin fantastic tales so that they don't learn how desperate and empty you really are. Each lie a vow to be a person worthy of the fantastic life you have fabricated, one day. All for them, so that you grow into a life worthy of the person you're falling in love with.

This book is so brutal, it's like pulling teeth. For me it is anyways, I empathize with the protagonist to a painful extent.

Despite the pain, I can't possibly recommend it enough. It changed my life.

[anna-scribbles]

vive la résistance and happy halloween!

[speeedyquick1245]

I really enjoyed the movie adaption of The Three Comrades. :)

Feel free to leave the film title and year in the tags! :)

[petya-in-a-cup]

Going to see a Three Comrades play tomorrow so I leave you off with this

[okayclaryfray]

Erich Maria Remarque books

I've read all Remarque's books and they are all undeniably great,every single one of them shattered my heart to pieces. Even though the endings were bitter and sad, I liked them because Remarque's unfortunate endings are a reminder that, no matter what, his books are close to reality, and sometimes in reality no matter how much we sacrifice and deserve a good ending, we never get one, because life isn't a happy and fair fairy tale.

[vera-gemini]

I hope it doesn’t count as a spoiler… I am currently reading Three Comrades, and the narrator remembers Leer, Müller and Kemmerich

And we learn that Kat had a sick wife at home and A CHILD HE NEVER GOT TO KNOW I’M GONNA CRY WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO UUUSSSS

I also cried like a baby in The Road Back when Ernst wished that Haie, Kat and Paul were with him