Points Summer Book Club

Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.

This passage from Chapter Two is haunting because it identifies how the war has permanently stunted the growth of the young men who entered it in their formative years. Just before this passage, Baumer says that unlike the older men, he and his comrades came in without ties to the future -- no wives and children yet, and no careers. The world was theirs to make -- and the experience of the war has desolated their souls. They have to somehow build something on the ruin. The reader knows what that generation in Germany came home to: mass unemployment, hunger, chaos. And from that came Hitler.

Curious: why do you suppose these soldiers "are not often sad"? Could it be that they've had to cultivate a sense of detachment from everything so as not to go mad?