#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

[yestergaze]

Margaret Sullivan and Robert Taylor starred in the MGM drama, Three Comrades (1938) along with Franchot Tone and Robert Young. The screenplay was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edward E. Paramore, Jr. For her performance, Sullavan was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Critic Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times said of Sullivan, " ...Hers is a shimmering, almost unendurably lovely performance". About the movie itself, he said "It is a superlatively fine picture, obviously one of 1938's best ten, and not one to be missed."

[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

[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 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

[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. 

[azaleasdawn]

Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.

Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades