All Quiet on the Western Front; Day One Discussion

Authority in Germany: they either love and fight for it to the death or German's dispise it and fight against authority tooth and nail.

•  Represented by Himmelstoss in the story; was a postman but used his military position as drill sargent to give himself the illusion of power and authority in his life. 

It was a story of survival, not death; Paul Baeumer and his classmates enlist in the armed forces. They go through training and are quickly sent out to the front lines of the war. Paul speaks of losing their identities, the war washing away the children they had been before. Yet, how the war managed to prevent them from forming adult identities outside of it's constrictions. They did  not have wives and children, they no longer had a connection to who they were. They had become soldiers and that had become their identity.
Paul goes on leave and visits his childhood home, stays with his family. But he doesn't belong there, where the war is not a present statement in the streets. Where the war which has become him is hidden, the true war. These civilians do not understand, nor should they have to. It is Paul who is changed, Paul who no longer belongs in this place of lost identity. He belongs in the war, fighting, being the soldier he has become.
Paul watches as his friends pass, week by week. A pair of boots is the symbol of this passing, first sent from Kammerich as he lay dying in a hospital. Then down from Mueller as he bleeds to death on the field. Those boots showed how they had lost themselves, how the soldier who knew of survival and tactfulness saw a good pair of boots. They felt grief, but they knew it was inevitable, those boots were useful to them, to the soldier.