All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque

Other authorsA W. Wheen (Translator)
Hardcover, 1987

Status

Available

Call number

F Rem

Call number

F Rem

Barcode

5083

Collection

Publication

Ballantine Books (1987), Edition: Reissue, 304 pages

Description

Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. Paul Baumer is just 19 years old when he and his classmates enlist. They are Germany's Iron Youth who enter the war with high ideals and leave it disillusioned or dead. As Paul struggles with the realities of the man he has become, and the inscrutable world to which he must return, he is led like a ghost of his former self into the war's final hours. All Quiet is one of the greatest war novels of all time, an eloquent expression of the futility, hopelessness and irreparable losses of war.

Original publication date

1928: Serialised
1929

User reviews

LibraryThing member katiekrug
”The war has ruined us for everything.” (page 87)

I am a realist, both in everyday life and (as a former student of political science) in my thinking on international affairs, as well. So I don’t buy into the whole “If only our leaders knew what war was like, there would be no more war”
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argument. There will always be war, plain and simple, like it or not. And some wars are good and useful (yes, I said it). So with all that out in the open, all I can say with regards to All Quiet on the Western Front is “Wow.”

I’ve read other books about war (fiction and non-fiction), seen movies, talked with veterans, etc., etc., etc. But I have never experienced anything like this book. It is real and visceral and haunting and so beautiful. Remarque brings a poetic rhythm to his description of life in the trenches of World War I (the War to End All Wars – HA!). He writes movingly of the sense of loss, of comradeship, of universality amid the everyday horror and terror.

"At once a new warmth flows through me. These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed. They are more to me than life… they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades. I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness; I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.” (page 212)

The narrator, a 20-year old German soldier, leads us through life at war – the stretches of boredom punctuated by intense fear during an attack, the hunger and deprivation, the pain of bullets and shrapnel and gas, the reality of death and suffering, the discomfort and alienation at going home, the sense after a while, that the only place one will ever belong and feel right is at the front. Remarque is strongest when describing the narrator’s growing sense of futility and common cause with all the young men of his generation, whether friend or foe. The war connects them in ways no one else could understand though they may stand on opposite sides.

The novel is full of dichotomous passages that use beautiful prose to describe unspeakable things:

”No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged. We crouch behind every corner, behind every barrier of barbed wire, and hurl heaps of explosives at the feet of the advancing enemy before we run. The blast of the hand-grenades impinges powerfully on our arms and legs; crouching like cats we run on, overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God only knows what devils; this wave that multiplies our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance.” (page 114)

An elegiac, haunting testament to the horror of war that deserves to be read, pondered and re-read even if it changes nothing.
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LibraryThing member brenzi
“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades---words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
Our faces are encrusted, our thoughts are devastated, we are weary to death; when the attack comes we shall have to strike many men with our fists to waken
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them and make them come with us---our eyes are burnt, our hands are torn, our knees bleed, our elbows are raw.” (Page 116)

Some books write their own reviews. This is one of them. This classic WWI story, told from the point of view of a young German soldier named Paul, tells the heartbreaking story of one man’s experience on the front. Raw, emotional, and heartbreaking, it’s quite possibly the best war story I’ve ever read. Quotable passages can be found on every page as the young soldier relates the grisliness of combat. Remarque chose to use static, short sentences to tell the story that is almost poetic in this brief novel. A somewhat autobiographical novel, he concentrated on the horrors of war and the soldier’s alienation from civilians in the book. When he gets a chance to go home on leave he writes:

“What is leave?----A pause that only makes everything after it so much worse. Already the sense of parting begins to intrude itself. My mother watches me silently;----I know she counts the days;----every morning she is sad. It is one day less. She has put away my pack, she does not want to be reminded by it.” (Page 155)

The stress and revulsion of being left in No Man’s Land with the first enemy that he has killed in hand-to-hand combat is almost too much for him:

“By noon I am groping on the outer limits of reason. Hunger devours me, I could almost weep for something to eat, I cannot struggle against it. Again and again I fetch water for the dying man and drink some myself.
This is the first time I have killed with my hands, whom I can see close at hand, whose death is my doing…But every gasp lays my heart bare. This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts.” (Page 189)

It is this agonizing thought process as he is at the front that makes this book so heartbreaking. It could only have been written by someone who had experienced war firsthand.

I continually found myself comparing this book with Vera Brittain’s autobiography, Testament of Youth, which I read earlier this year, and which searingly told the story of WWI from a Brit’s point of view. The soldiers in both books experienced the same horror. And both books showed the folly of war and why we should avoid it at all costs. Both are books about peace by demonstrating what makes war so horrifying. Very highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member cmbohn
The tagline on the book cover reads: The Greatest War Novel of All Time. I think 'The Greatest Anti-war Novel of All Time' would be more accurate. After finishing this book, it's no wonder to me that the third Reich banned this book. War is not presented as something heroic or glorious or
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patriotic, but as something ugly, dehumanizing, and very, very bloody.

Paul Bäumer enlists with a group of classmates after hearing over and over again from his schoolmasters about how their duty is to fight in this glorious war for their country. But it doesn't take more than a day at the front for Paul and his friends to realize that glory is the last thing on their minds. All they think about is survival. And when they are deep in the trenches, it is kill or be killed, over and over and over again.

The violence is almost non-stop, and it is incredibly graphic. Nothing is tidied up. So the men who forget their gas masks on time, the horses who are shot and scream for hours before someone can get to them and kill them, the man suffering alone on the battlefield, gurgling and crying and moaning for days, the miserable death of a comrade after his leg is amputated and the efforts to secure his boots before someone else does - it is all here, and it gets hard to take.

There are a few brief respites. Paul often stops, at least when he can, to ask himself what will happen to them all when the war is over.

Albert expresses it: "The war has ruined us for everything."
He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war."

I had seen the movie, so I knew how the book ended, but the movie had to leave out much of the horror of the war. It captured very well the sense of isolation, the comradeship. But it's hard to make a war movie unless you make it violent.

I chose this book for book club, and I'm sure that some of the women will have found it too much to take. It is brutal. But there are exquisite parts in there, even some humor, and while I had to occasionally put the book down so I could breathe, it was a great book. So I recommend it, but with the caution that it is very strong stuff. And yet it is poetic at the same time. 5 stars
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LibraryThing member baswood
[All Quiet on the Western Fron by Erich Maria Remarque
I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently,
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uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another. I see the best brains in the world inventing weapons and words to make the whole process that much more sophisticated and long lasting. And watching this with me are all my contemporaries, here and on the other side, all over the world - my whole generation is experiencing this with me. What would our fathers do if one day we rose up and confronted them, and called them to account? what do they expect from us when a time comes when there is no more war? For years our occupation has been killing - that was the first experience we had. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us.

It has been said that All quiet on the Western Front is one of the finest anti-war books ever written and I can believe it. Paul (the hero of the novel) has volunteered along with all his class mates to join the German Army soon after the start of the first world war, they are marched down to the recruitment office by their school master in a blaze of patriotic fervour. When Paul writes the above paragraph he is recovering in a military hospital from shrapnel wounds, he has survived at or near the front line for three years, but most of his class mates are dead. He is now one of the veterans but all he can look forward to is a return to duty once he has been passed fit. He knows nothing else but the war, and a bit like the opening scene in the film Apocalypse Now: when he is at war he wants to be home, but when he is home he wants to be back at the front. He is speaking now for a generation of young men and this is the powerful message coming off the pages of this book along with a sense of complete dislocation. How can his generation survive the war? How can they survive after the war?. To make this point the readers are taken through the horrors of front line trench warfare.

Those horrors are brought to life by the reader seeing them through Paul’s eyes. Erich Maria Remarque chose to write his novel in the first person; he was himself conscripted into the German army at age 18 and was wounded in the arm and leg by shrapnel. Having seen action himself he was able to provide a first hand account of the horrors of fighting a modern war from the point of view of an infantryman on the ground, and he does not hold back. The deafening noise of the guns, the flying metal, the gas attacks, the field hospital are all vividly described along with the state of mind of young men put in impossible situations. For many of them death and probably an agonisingly slow death at that, was waiting for them just up ahead, but the war machine had done its job and they stuck to their task, there was nothing else to be done.

Paul has questions that cannot be answered, but this does not stop him thinking aloud to us the readers. Those questions still cannot be answered as we now know that the war to end all wars: didn’t do that. Paul carries on following orders, witnessing the horrors around him with only a sort of gallows humour camaraderie with his immediate group of friend to support him. I am pleased to have picked this book off my shelf to read, it makes sobering reading and I found it to be quick read. A short sharp shock while reading and lots to ponder about afterwards. An important book and a five star read.
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LibraryThing member Cait86
I am not sure whether my humble writing skills can accurately reflect this masterpiece of a book. All Quiet on the Western Front is hideous, but hideous in a positive way. Books about war should not be sweet and cheery, but should realistically portray the horrors that man inflicts upon himself.
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Remarque spares the reader nothing - he hits us in the face with the gritty details of life in the trenches, waits for us to recover, and then hits us again. Never have I seen such honesty in a book.

You know when you watch an action movie, and all through the fight scenes or the chase scenes, your heart races? That is the reaction my body had while I was reading All Quiet on the Western Front. That's right: this book had the ability to evoke a physical reaction from me. This is a rarity for me - I generally do not cry while reading, nor do I laugh out loud. Reading tends to be an intellectual experience, not a physical one. Remarque's writing is just so honest, so blatant, that I could feel my heart pounding, my forehead breaking out in a sweat, and my stomach churning.

So, if this book had the power to cause my body to react in a negative way, then why should we read it? The answer - because war is around us every day, it forms huge parts of our past, it exists in our present, and that pattern can only lead us to believe that it will occur in our future. We should not hide from the destruction it brings; instead, we should learn from writers like Remarque, who had first-hand experience in World War I, and who strives to share it with others.

All Quiet on the Western Front is written from a German perspective, and one of its greatest lessons is that every soldier, whether German, French, Russian, Canadian, British, or American, is the same. No civilian ever really wants a war, and yet it is the civilian who fights. When the narrator, Paul, kills a French soldier, he has the ultimate realization:

"Why don't they keep on reminding us that you are all miserable wretches just like us, that your mothers worry themselves just as much as ours and that we're all just as scared of death, and that we die the same way and feel the same pain" (153).

All world leaders should read this book; in fact, all people should read this book. It is a vivid portrayal of the things we do to each other - and the regret that we feel.
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LibraryThing member gbill
“All Quiet on the Western Front” is a standard in anti-war fiction, describing the horrors and idiocy of war from the perspective of an author who knew what the hell he was talking about. Remarque was a German veteran of World War I who at the age of 19 was wounded severely in combat along the
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Western Front. What sets this book apart is his insight into the psychological damage done to the young soldiers - the disillusionment, extreme stress, and social detachment, which I like to think of as the war within. This book is emblematic of the “lost generation”, the one that came of age during WWI, and its truth and message was so compelling that the Nazis banned and publicly burned the book as they geared up their war machine for WWII.

Perhaps the entire book can be summarized by this quote towards the end, which I love:

“And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must all be lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me.”

But here are some others as well:
On bravery:
“There was, indeed, one of us who hesitated and did not want to fall into line. That was Joseph Behm, a plump, homely fellow. But he did allow himself to be persuaded, otherwise he would have been ostracized. And perhaps more of us thought as he did, but no one could very well stand out, because at that time even one’s parents were ready with the word ‘coward’; no one had the vaguest idea what we were in for. The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy.”

On disillusionment:
“And that is why they let us down so badly.
For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress – to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs.

We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”

On education:
“’What is meant by Cohesion?’
We remember mighty little of all that rubbish. Anyway, it has never been the slightest use to us. At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood – nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn’t get jammed, as it does in the ribs.”

On war:
“Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.”

“He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?”

“’But what I would like to know,’ says Albert, ‘is whether there would not have been a war if the Kaiser had said No.’
‘I’m sure there would,’ I interject, ‘he was against it from the first.’
‘Well, if not him alone, then perhaps if twenty or thirty people in the world had said No.’
‘That’s probable,’ I agree, ‘but they damned well said Yes.’
‘It’s queer, when one thinks about it,’ goes on Kropp, ‘we are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now who’s in the right?’
‘Perhaps both,’ say I without believing it.”

“And every full-grown emperor requires at least one war, otherwise he would not become famous. You look in your school books.”
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LibraryThing member EBT1002
"I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest
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brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me."

This is a summary of Paul Bäumer's experience of war. This comes near the end of this exquisite and brutal novel of trench warfare during WWI and it illustrates Remarque's and translator A.W. Wheen's approach to the use of language. Straightforward but with layers, the anger (and other emotions) seething just below the surface of the narrative. Remarque describes what Paul sees, what he feels, what he hears, all so compellingly that the reader is transported into the trenches. We walk along the roads to abandoned and destroyed villages, and we witness the random deaths and agonizing injuries. It's all so sensual.

Certainly this novel is intended to expose the horrors and senselessness of war. The soldiers' terror, horror, rage, despair, and numbness come through with gut-wrenching power. But their love for one another is beautifully wrought, as well, and without sentimentality:

"We sit opposite one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a goose in the middle of the night. We don't talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have."

There really isn't much I can write about this classic German novel. It must speak for itself. It is beautiful, painful, and well worth reading.
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LibraryThing member detailmuse
…monotonously falls the rain. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up in the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich’s grave; it falls in our hearts.

At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette
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in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood -- nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn’t get jammed, as it does in the ribs.

{About guarding Russian prisoners-of-war:} A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. {…} I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians. They bow to me and then light the cigarettes. Now red points glow in every face. They comfort me; it looks as though there were little windows in dark village cottages saying that behind them are rooms full of peace.

This classic (anti-)war novel is narrated by 19-year-old Paul Baumer, a German soldier serving in the trenches near the front during WWI. It’s brutal, thoughtful and illustrative not only regarding battle and the dead but how the living are forever changed.

I can envision where it inspired other war novels -- that first quote above reminds me of the opening of The Things They Carried -- and while Catch-22 remains my favorite (hilarious, heartbreaking, imaginative, complex), this is outstanding and so much more accessible. Recommended for everyone.
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LibraryThing member mcrombie
Reading “All Quiet on the Western front” completely changed my view on not just World War 1, but war all together. The author was able to describe the carnage of warfare with great detail. As I read the book I began to feel the loneliness, pain, and depression the soldiers felt while fighting
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the war. Even when the main character was given a 17 day vacation where he returned home to his family I still got the same feeling of hopelessness I got from when they were fighting on the front.
Overtime all of the main characters friends slowly died off and as the book went on it gave off more of a depressing feeling. Even though the book made me depressed and fearful about war it was still a surprisingly good book. It took me a long time to really get into reading the novel, but when I began to understand what was happening it became a lot more fun to read.
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LibraryThing member lyzard
Based upon Erich Maria Remarque's own wartime experiences, this account of life and death in the trenches of WWI is a powerful and upsetting work. Told, for the most part, from the perspective of young Paul Bäumer, one of a group of friends who signed up at age eighteen, the novel describes not
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only the physical horrors of the conflict but the profound emotional and psychological trauma suffered by the combatants. As the soldiers play the lottery of life and death, Paul experiences a revelatory moment in which he realises that the war has already killed the young men who existed before it, whether or not they continue to live and breathe and fight... As Remarque well knew, he had only to describe what he and his comrades experienced for his book to have all the grim impact he desired. Consequently, he employs in his novel a clipped, journalistic style which becomes more detached, less emotional, as the horrors of his story escalate. The young soldiers have no control over their situation, and can only react in the moment; and the novel's stop-start, fragmented narrative reflects this. We follow the young soldiers as they learn to let go of what mattered to them before the war, and as their battle, not for victory, but merely for survival, strips life down to its most crudely elemental aspects: eating and sleeping, sex and excretion. Even in the midst of the nightmare there are occasional flashes of pitch-black humour---such as when the soldiers find an up-side in the slaughter of most of their unit: they have enough to eat for once, the rations having been ordered pre-battle; though they must still cut through the red tape before they dine. While there is no narrative arch, as such, to All Quiet On The Western Front, Remarque uses Paul's personal revelation as an emotional framework; in particular in his illustration of the necessity for men in these conditions to don the armour of cynicism and disconnection; but also how the unexpected can tear through such armour and rend the mind as well as the body. One of the book's most disturbing scenes - and, interestingly, presented as such - finds men who have remained stoic through the dismemberment and death of their comrades going almost mad when they must listen to the agonised screams of wounded horses. For Paul, however, his moment of devastation comes not at the front, but when he returns home on leave---and finds himself dissevered from everything that once made up "Paul Bäumer": his family, his home, his books, his dreams; driving home his bitter sense that he, and those like him, are simply dead men walking.

    We recognise the smooth distorted faces, the helmets: they are French. They have already suffered heavily when they reach the remnants of the barbed wire entanglements. A whole line has gone down before our machine-guns; then we have a lot of stoppages and they come nearer.
    I see one of them, his face upturned, fall into a wire cradle. His body collapses, his hands remain suspended as though he were praying. Then his body drops clean away and only his hands with the stumps of his arms, shot off, now hang in the wire.
    The moment we are about to retreat three faces rise up from the ground in front of us. Under one of the helmets a dark pointed beard and two eyes that are fastened on me. I raise my hand, but I cannot throw into those strange eyes; for one mad moment the whole slaughter whirls like a circus round me, and those two eyes alone are motionless; then the head rises up, a hand, a movement, and my hand-grenade flies through the air and into him.
    We make for the rear, pull wire cradles into the trench and leave bombs behind us with the strings pulled, which ensures us a fiery retreat. The machine-guns are firing from the next position.
    We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we do not defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down...
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LibraryThing member jeff.maynes
One of the great strengths of All Quiet on the Western Front is its bluntness. It describes life as a German soldier serving in World War I in frank and unyielding terms. War is hell, as the saying goes, and Remarque does not shy away from it. It's an affecting book for it. What's more, is that
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Remarque is blunt about the soldier's life, including the mundane details (from food, to sex, to bowel movements). He does not fall into the trap of simply portraying the hell of combat, but he provides a powerful and well-rounded picture of the war experience. It's worth reading for that alone.

Many war novels, however, share this strength. Indeed, Remarque's influence is felt in war novels of all stripes, which do not shy away from blunt description of the horrors of war. It is the novel's other strengths which make it a compelling read, even for the modern reader who is familiar with this mode of description for war and combat. What Remarque does so well is that he not only captures the externalities of war, but the internal consequences to, what it does to the life of a soldier. This theme runs through both All Quiet on the Western Front, and its even better sequel, The Road Back. Remarque is not only interested in how a soldier copes with the situation he finds himself in, but how he fits into the society he defends.

One way in which Remarque expertly develops this theme is through the narration of Paul, the main character. On one hand, Paul gives us a frank and honest description of what happens to him and his fiends. On the other, he is an insightful commentator. He not only describes what is happening to him, but he understands it. It reads as if he were writing a letter to all those at home, trying to help them understand what this war is like, and what war does to people, but also to cope with it himself. His observations are keen, and help us to understand how war affects the people who fight it, including those who survive it. The final passages of the novel, where Paul finally comes to terms with the inescapable death that looms over the battlefield, is among the most powerful in the novel. It is cliche to point out that "war is hell," but those of us who are fortunate enough to have never experienced it firsthand can probably never really understand the force behind these words. When given only a description of brutality, it confirms the truth of the cliche. Yet, when given Remarque's insight into the experience of serving, and suffering in that hell, we can, at least in the smallest part, understand it. It brings it home, and covers the distance we put between our comfortable armchairs and the horror of what we read.

The most powerful passage in this respect occurs late in the book, when Paul finds himself in a crater with an enemy he has just stabbed. In the prior chapters, Paul has found himself out of place with his family and with normal life, and he reminds us that he is at home with his fellows who serve. It is only in the context of war that he can feel that he is in his rightful place. It seems to be a sort of shield, part of the coping with conflict that he needs to do to stay sane and sharp. When he is alone, out in the middle of the battlefield, stranded in this crater with a dying man, he lacks that buffer and that protection. His guilt is palpable, as he apologizes to the dying man, tries to save him, and ultimately looks into his past. It is a moment when everything that he has built up in the novel, all of his knowledge of the different shells that fly past, of how to obtain and protect food, is stripped away and he has to come to grips with the up close and personal horror of not only death, but his own role in it. One cannot put the novel down during these scenes, and I suspect that it is an image which will linger with me long after I've moved on to other novels.
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LibraryThing member bcrowl399
I've heard so much about this book over the years. It lived up to its reputation. It was so well written. The beauty of the book is that it could have been any war in any place and any group of soldiers. The horrors are the same. Remarque has a beautiful eloquent style. I would like to read more of
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his books.
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LibraryThing member santhony
Surprisingly, this is one of the few novels concerning World War I that I have found worth reading. It is widely acclaimed as "The Greatest War Novel of all Time." It may seem trite in this day and time to label a novel as "anti-war". However, this novel was written in the years immediately after
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World War I, a time when in many circles, war was deemed to be a glorious endeavor and romanticized, especially by those non-particpants with little actual knowledge of events on "the front". While the American Civil War should have opened the eyes of potential combatants to the certainty of mass carnage presented by new technology coupled with classic military theory and technique, the European powers nevertheless stumbled blindly into the abyss.

This is a VERY short novel, verging on novella. While it comes in at 295 pages, they are small pages with large type and wide spacing. It can easily be read in a single afternoon. As such, there is very little story development, apart from numerous vignettes involving Paul Baumer, a young German private, and his compatriots in the trenches. Again, the prose, while somewhat mild in current times, would have been shocking to the readers of the day. An example:

Haie Westhus drags off with a great wound in his back through which the
lung pulses at every breath.... We see men living with their skulls blown open;
we see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their
splintered stumps into the next shell hole; a lance corporal crawls a mile and
a half on his hands dragging his smashed knee after him; another goes to the
dressing station and over his clasped hands bulge his intestines; we see men
without mouths, without jaws, without faces; we fid one man who has held the
artery of his arm in his teeth for two hours in order not to bleed to bleed to death.

Such things just were not discussed in polite company. It's all here: the blood and guts; the horrifying injuries, amputations and pre-antiseptic gangrene; the rats; the putrifying and spoiled food which was eaten anyway by starving troops; the dysentery; the ignorance of the German people who cling to the ideal of glorious warfare. But through it all shines the humanity of Paul and his childhood friends, as they succomb one by one.

After several succeeding wars, many of which became unpopular, and hundreds of books and movies which spotlight the actual conditions faced by front line troops, this novel has lost much of its originality and shock power. Though it must be said, it was the first and it remains powerful even to this day.
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LibraryThing member ecataldi
I feel that it's very fitting that this book is often lauded as the greatest war novel of all time. To me it also read as the greatest anti-war novel (besides Slaughterhouse Five) because after reading this dark, chilling, DEPRESSING account of what it's like going to war, why on earth would you
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ever want to enlist?? One very interesting thing I noticed while reading this, is that patriotism or fighting for your country never came up. At all. They weren't protecting the fatherland, they joined because it was expected of them, they didn't have any deep desire to show off their patriotism. All Quiet on the Western Front showcases several young German men on the front lines during World War I. They're fighting in the trenches, enjoying the little things in life (food, companionship, and cigarettes) and wondering where on earth their youth went. Two years of seeing the unimaginable, suffering every malady, and losing friend after friend has them questioning everything from why they are there to what they plan on doing if they are lucky enough to survive the war. A fast paced read that everyone should read.
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LibraryThing member Ayling
All the way throughout school, they never told us to read this book. Perhaps if they had, we'd have been given a better education about WW1 and what life was like in the trenches.Every school pupil should read this in history class rather then waste time scribbling meaningless lesson notes into
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exercise books. The English translation at least is beautiful, graceful - it does not need to go into girsly detail - but the horrors of trench warfare are more real and more terrible in this book then in any war film. When I read this book, I became the narrator for a while and I shared his feelings. You will get more from this book, then in every gritty, grisly, muddy war flick filmed. It isn't a story of courage or men being heroes. It is a very real and human story - showing what it really must have been like.You can't walk away from this book unaffected though. It digs its way down under your skin. When I finished it, I felt so alone, so empty and sad - in a way that I will never forget. This book shouldn't be read to gain a better understanding about German history, it is human story - not a war story, or a history story. The main character could be English, German, French, anyone - the story, the feelings would probably still apply.
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LibraryThing member jayne_charles
Quite simply the most horrifying and moving account of life in the trenches of World War I that i have ever read. Underlines the fact that War is Hell whichever side you are on.
LibraryThing member DHBarry
I've returned to an old classic this week. Erich Maria Remarque's novel on World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front.

I've read this book before, but it was many years ago. Long before there was such a thing as Google. It never occurred to me, back then, to be curious about the author. But this
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time I let my fingers do the walking on the World Wide Web.

Remarque served as a conscript in the German army at age 18. In July of 1917, shortly after his 19th birthday, he was badly wounded by shrapnel. He spent the remainder of the war in an army hospital in Germany. His experiences in the trenches convinced him that war solved none of the world's problems, and he became a militant pacifist.

He knocked around for a bit after that, trying his hand at various literary projects. This book was not his first. He wrote it in 1927, but wasn't able to get it published until 1929. In 1931 he left Germany for Switzerland, deeply opposed to the aggressive nationalism pervading Germany, and in 1933 the Nazi party banned his work. He was declared an enemy of the state by Joseph Goebbels. Unable to do much but say harsh things about him in the press, the Nazis instead persecuted his family, executing his sister on trumped-up charges in 1943.

Remarque never returned to Germany. He left Switzerland for the United States in 1939, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1947. In 1949 he returned to Switzerland, where he stayed for the remainder of his life, writing books and screenplays.

All Quiet on the Western Front is neither his first work nor his last. It is not even his most financially successful novel, but it is the one that he is best-known for. I believe that this can be attributed in large part to the themes he explores in the book. This book isn't just another war story. Battle scenes are plenty, but they are not glorified. They are instead full of terror and gore and hunger and exhaustion. Remarque portrays the evolution of a soldier in intensive combat situations, from a young man with hopes and dreams and an idealistic outlook, to an old man in a young man's skin with no hopes or dreams and a vast sense of isolation. Remarque describes the fall into despair and loss that young soldiers in combat experience, and the difficulty they have in readjusting to civilian life. These are issues that soldiers the world over have been dealing with since time immemorial, from the Roman legionnaire fighting the Gaul in 53 BC to the US Army Ranger fighting the Taliban in 2011, and that is why the book remains topical even today.

Have you ever read a book as a youngster, and then again may years later, after decades have passed? Not surprisingly, its almost as if you're reading an entirely different book.

When I first read All Quiet on the Western Front, as I remember it, I quite enjoyed the book, but there were parts of it that I had only an abstract understanding of. At twelve, I had no memory of living anywhere but foreign lands. I'd seen the aftermath of war and violence, and witnessed more than one example of religious extremism. While my perception of the world at that time in my life was not as callow as that of most of my generation, I was a child still, and had no frame of reference with which to put these things into the proper perspective. As a result, it was almost as though I was watching a movie; one a child of such tender years certainly should not have seen, perhaps resulting in a few restless nights, but of no lasting consequence. My psyche was not irretrievably scarred.

Now, three decades later, on my second reading of this book, I realize that, while those and other experiences did no damage that could not be undone, they made a lasting and indelible impression, and it is the more subtle and emotive passages of Remarque's that evoke the most visceral reaction, scenes that had little effect on my twelve-year-old self.

"This is good, I like it. But I cannot get on with the people. My mother is the only one who asks no questions. Not so my father. He wants me to tell him about the front... I realise he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them."

For my part, upon my return home from my own trial by fire, neither of my parents asked any questions. My father because he already knew the answers, having gone through his own, and my mother because she instinctively understood the danger of giving such things voice. Even worse than the questions, however (for while my folks were wise enough to refrain, most others were not), was the sense of isolation, of dislocation. As Remarque puts it,

"A terrible feeling of foreignness suddenly rises up in me. I cannot find my way back, I am shut out though I entreat earnestly and put forth all my strength."

There is one particular scene in the book that I had forgotten, and because of this my reaction to it caught me all the more by surprise.

"I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and say to him: 'Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony...' "

In war, I fought an enemy I did not hate. It was necessary, for his leaders were evil men and had to be stopped. But had they not put him in my path, I would have caused him no harm, for often the citizens of another State are much like those of ours, even if their leaders be men of greed, corruption, and inhumanity. This is a truth I learned as a child, saw reinforced as an adult, and carry with me still.

I reread this book out of nostalgia more than anything else, remembering the enjoyment I derived from it in my youth. I probably will not read it again, for the memories it stirred up are disquieting and better left in the dimmer recesses. But I'm glad to have read it for the second time. I feel as though I did the author more justice this time.
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LibraryThing member BooksForDinner
Horrifying. Chapter six was nearly impossible to read. I am not a war book guy, but this novel really hit me. A beautiful telling of how an entire generation of people were completely changed by a type of war no one could have ever imagined.
LibraryThing member shefukul
The experiences of war are real. There is harsh truth (irony?) of Death protecting the soldiers (sheltering in coffins while it is shelling) or the new unpolished coffins lined up at the front for the dead. I liked the description of Earth being the sole supporter during the war. It protects you
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(lying on earth for protection) and most of the times just takes you away for ever. How about Himmelstones - ex-postman and the drill master - and his concept of 'self-learning'? The return to home for a leave and then back to the front is more agonizing than the fight at the front. There is a struggle to survive, struggle to find food, struggle to keep the rats off the food, struggle to die peacefully and struggle to find love. You miss Kat when he dies and you don't want to read (watch) the slow death of Kimmerich. But there is always the true Comradeship.
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LibraryThing member KimberlyJSmith
My 10th grade son asked if I'd read this book and with a bit of hesitancy, I picked it up and could not put it down. It's such a humanizing story. I loved it - a true classic.
LibraryThing member ggarfield
A Searing and Sobering Nightmare

Every once in a while there is a book that is so searing, so sobering that you know it will have to be read again to fully take in it’s impact. This is one of those books.

Remarque’s book chronicles a common soldier’s experience in WWI. It is about the violence
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of war, comradeship, disillusionment and the casualty that confronts even those who return, once young men, now old or dead. The graphic and nightmare-like scenes in the trenches are horrific. So too is the intense sense of loneliness for the protagonist on leave only to return to the front. The hospital scenes will cause most readers to gasp. What remains of the living after such an experience is haunting to contemplate, but worth doing; especially now. This work transcends nationality and it also transcends time. It is as relevant now as it was when it was published in 1929.

There is wisdom here. There is something for us to learn and think deeply about. It is an honest book and thus very tough to face. It is very much worth facing. Read it.
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LibraryThing member AlCracka
Hey guys, know what was a downer? World War I, that's what.

This book is miserable. It's one of the rare books - I should make a shelf for this - where sometimes I'd read for a while and then realize I was in a totally shitty mood because it had depressed the crap out of me. So that's a bummer of a
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book, man.

But: in my extremely scientific study of war books, comprising this, Farewell to Arms (not a war book) and Red Badge of Courage, this wins. So. Best war book ever, as long as we call Iliad a poem instead of a book? Sure, why not?

Also: written in present tense, btw. Weird, right? But done so effectively that I didn't even noticed until p. 270.
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LibraryThing member RajivC
If there is a book that defines a war novel, then this is it.

In my view, this is probably the best war novel ever written. It does help that Erich Maria Remarque was himself in the first World War, and was injured there. He knows what he is writing about.

The book in written in the first person
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and this gives it a sense of immediacy.

There is no dramatics, with descriptions of bravery and guns exploding. There is no invective that is hurled at the 'other side'. As he writes, they had never seen a Frenchman or an Englishman, so why would they, as soldiers, want to wage war against them?

He writes of alienation, of a transitory brotherhood, of a generation lost. The generation lost is more than the death incurred. It is also the loss of innocence when you see the fragmented remains of soldiers who died or watch your comrades die in your arms.

There is no glory in war.

Every politician must read this book. Maybe then, we would have less war.
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LibraryThing member Widsith
Man, I need a break. I've been reading about the First World War solidly since December and I've had enough now. There's only so many times you can go through the same sh*t, whether they're English, French, German, Russian – oh look, another group of pals from school, eagerly jogging down to the
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war office to sign up. Brilliant. Now it's just a matter of guessing which horrible death will be assigned to them: shrapnel to the stomach, bleeding to death in no-man's-land, drowning in mud, succumbing to dysentery, shot for deserting, bayonetted at close range, vaporised by a whizz-bang, victim of Spanish flu. It's like the most depressing drinking game ever.

I wish, after spending many months reading around this subject, that I could pick out some obscure classic to recommend (and perhaps I will still find some, because I intend to keep reading about 1914–18 throughout 2014–18), but I have to say that this novel, famously one of the greatest war novels, is in fact genuinely excellent and left quite an impression on me, despite my trench fatigue. Remarque has the same elements as everyone else – because pretty much everyone in this war went through the same godawful mind-numbingly exhausting terror – but he describes it all with such conviction and such clarity that I was sucker-punched by the full horror of it all over again.

The story is studded with remarkable incidents that linger in the mind: roasting a stolen goose in the middle of a barrage, for instance, or stabbing a Frenchman to death in a fit of panic while sheltering in the same shell-hole. The arrangements made to allow a hospital inmate to enjoy a marital visit with his wife, while the rest of the patients in the room concentrate on ‘a noisy game of cards’. I loved the moment where our narrator and his friends swim across a river to have a drink with some local French girls, arriving naked because they couldn't risk getting their uniforms wet. And back in the trenches, an infestation of huge rats, ‘with evil-looking, naked faces’, is described with more than Biblical loathing:

They seem to be really hungry. They have had a go at practically everybody's bread. Kropp has wrapped his in tarpaulin and put it under his head, but he can't sleep because they run across his face to try and get at it. Detering tried to outwit them; he fixed a thin wire to the ceiling and hooked the bundle with his bread on to it. During the night he puts on his flashlight and sees the wire swinging backwards and forwards. Riding on his bread there is a great fat rat.

There is also a fair bit of philosophising. While guarding a group of Russian prisoners-of-war, our narrator is overcome by the arbitrariness of the whole situation:

An order has turned these silent figures into our enemies; an order could turn them into friends again. On some table, a document is signed by some people that none of us knows, and for years our main aim in life is the one thing that usually draws the condemnation of the whole world and incurs its severest punishment in law. How can anyone make distinctions like that looking at these silent men, with their faces like children and their beards like apostles? Any drill-corporal is a worse enemy to the recruits, any schoolmaster a worse enemy to his pupils than they are to us. […] I don't want to lose those thoughts altogether, I'll preserve them, keep them locked away until the war is over. […] Is this the task we must dedicate ourselves to after the war, so that all the years of horror will have been worthwhile?

I found this quote and this resolution very moving, because Germany's post-war history rendered it so utterly futile. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 – just four years after this was published – they set about burning the book, which tended to be their first response to any problem. While Ernst Jünger's vision of a German people purified and hardened by the war was venerated (poor guy), Remarque's text was denounced as an ‘insult to the German soldier’. He took the hint, and sailed to the US in 1939. The German state, in what amounted to a fit of pique, cut his sister's head off instead and then billed what was left of his family for wear and tear to the blade.

So – as can't be said enough – f*ck them. The insights that Remarque and Barbusse and Sassoon and Genevoix and Manning found in extremis – of the essential commonality of human beings – are, we like to think, now accepted by society over the alternatives, despite what we sometimes have to infer from the content of our newspapers.

With all of that said, this is a novel. It is not a memoir. Remarque only spent a month on the front lines (whereas Jünger, who apparently had the time of his life, was there for years).

This 1994 translation from Brian Murdoch is excellent and reads entirely naturally; he also contributes a thoughtful and unassuming essay which – finally, a publisher that gets it! – is helpfully placed as an Afterword so as not to spoil the novel itself. All in all a very powerful and moving piece of writing: if I had to recommend just one contemporary novel from the First World War, so far this is probably it.
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LibraryThing member lostinalibrary
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure for those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men, who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."

Thus begins
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All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. It is the story of several young German men who are coerced into enlisting in WWI by their teacher, a man who 'was convinced [he] was acting for the best - in way that cost [him] nothing'.

This is a story about war from the perspective of the young soldiers, most of whom will never see twenty. It chronicles the horrors of the front, the disease, the deprivation, the endless and senseless drills by officers drunk on a little bit of power, the deaths from injuries which should have been minor, the terror during attack, and the boredom during the long hours of quiet. It is a world where a young man waits for a childhood friend to die so he can claim his boots. In the end, the only thing that matters is not honour or bravery, Fatherland or family; it is the love they feel for their comrades in arms.

These young soldiers quickly learn that they have more in common with the enemy soldiers than they do with the officers or their families back home, that there is no 'right' or 'wrong' in war, no 'heroes', just 'winners' and 'losers', and, most important, that, no matter the outcome, whether they live or die, their young lives are over.

Remarque, himself, fought in WWI and he tells this tale in a simple, straightforward way that gives it an even greater sense of truth.

All Quiet on The Western Front is considered the greatest war novel of all time; it is also the greatest anti-war novel of all time.
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Rating

(4363 ratings; 4.1)

Pages

304
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