All Quiet on the Western Front Characters

Meet the Cast

Paul Bäumer

Paul is the guy. This is his book, his story, and his journey. He's the protagonist and, until the last paragraph, the narrator. Paul isn't a famous war hero. He's not a high-ranking, superstar off...

Stanislaus Katczinsky (Kat)

Top DogKat is the leader of the pack in almost every way. He's forty, mature, strong, and has a distinctive sixth sense in identifying trouble, which the other men admire greatly. The dude also kno...

Tjaden

Revenge Is A Dish Best Served ColdWhen we first meet Tjaden, he's in ecstasy over the excess food rations made available by the death of so many soldiers. This scene underlines a couple of key face...

Müller

 When we first meet Müller, he seizes the opportunity to take Franz Kemmerich's soft leather boots with him when Kemmerich is about to die. Müller has no shame about showing his more base, s...

Albert Kropp

Kropp Til You DropAlbert Kropp is the resident philosopher of Paul's company.  This guy is a thinker, and he asks some of the biggest questions in this novel.Here are a couple of Kropp's musin...

Detering

Detering is, in essence, a total sweetie-pie. He spends the entire novel missing his wife and his farm back in Oldenburg. He also has a soft spot when it comes to animals: his biggest emotional out...

Corporal Himmelstoss

Big Boss HimmelstossHimmelstoss doesn't get a lot of screen time (page time?) but he's both profoundly memorable and profoundly thematically important.The reason? He's a total jerk.You'd think that...

Kantorek

Bad TeacherIn a novel about war, you'd expect "evil" to take many forms. An enemy soldier, perhaps. A personified bomb. Death itself. Maybe a rat in a foxhole.You probably wouldn't, however, to exp...

Franz Kemmerich

Kemmerich is the first soldier whose death is detailed. In fact, we hardly get to see him alive: we first encounter him when he's in the hospital. Watching Kemmerich's last hours makes a huge impre...

Josef Behm

Behm didn't want to join the war, but he allowed himself to be persuaded by authority figures (teachers and parents) to enlist. His inability to say "no" costs him his life early in the novel. He d...

Lieutenant Bertinck

Bertinck is the company commander and an all-around good guy. He loves his men, allows them to eat extra rations when Ginger the cook tries to withhold them, and he dies saving his company from the...

Gerard Duval

Duval is an enemy soldier, a French man, who crawls into the shell crater in which Paul is hiding during a bombardment. Paul stabs him with his knife and spends hours staring at the man who slowly...

Heinrich Ginger

Ginger is the camp cook who argues against the men having extra rations when he cooked for a hundred and fifty soldiers and only eighty return alive.

Josef Hamacher

Josef is a sharpshooter the men encounter at the Catholic Hospital. When Paul tosses a bottle to quiet the loudly praying nuns, Jospef takes blame. The men are shocked by his boldness, until they l...

Haie Westhus

Haie represents an interesting demographic: the men whose civilian life is so hardscrabble that military service is a step up.Okay, so Haie doesn't actually think that life during wartime is prefer...