Psicologia e potere in Im Westen nichts Neues. Una lettura del romanzo di Remarque a partire da Freud.

In 1915, a few months after the outbreak of the 1st World War, Sigmund Freud writes the essay Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod, in which he reflects about the reason why war is still possible in a cultural advanced society like the western one and about the relation of modernity with the “evil”, violence and death. This article takes the move from this essay to analyse Erich Maria Remarque's novel Im Westen nichts Neues (1928-29) from an innovative point of view. Remarque himself argues in many interviews and articles that his book should neither be considered a historical report about the 1st World War nor only an antiwar-novel about the dramatic experience of a lost generation, but rather a genuin psychological novel. As a matter of fact, Im Westen nichts Neues tells about the human all too human mechanisms of violence and power by illustrating soberly the trauma of a generation thrown into a sort of “state of exception”, a state situated outside and at the same time inside civil society. Aim of this article is to expound how Freud and Remarque in their works about the 1st World War look from a very similar (and still sensitive) point of view at the complex relation between culture and war, civilisation and violence, psychology and power in the western modern society.