Book of the Month–September 2014
All Quiet on the Western Front
By: Erich Maria Remarque
Considered by many the greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front is Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece of the German experience during World War I.
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… .
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.
Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another…if only he can come out of the war alive.
Publisher Description
Available as:
Regular Print (translated by A.W. Wheen)
Regular Print (translated by Brian Murdoch)
Audiobook
eAudiobook
eBook
Large Print
In other languages:
Im Westen Nichts Neues (German)
Na zachodzie bez zmian (Polish Translation)
Na zapadnom fronte bez peremen ; Tri tovarishcha ; Vozvrashchenie (Russian Translation)
Naewrop dan tawantok hètkan mai pianplang (Thai Translation)
About the Author
Erich Paul Remark was born in Germany on June 22, 1898. At 18, while studying at the University of Munster, he was conscripted into the German Army. On June 26, 1917, he sustained injuries while serving on the Western Front and spent the rest of the war in an army hospital. After he recovered he returned to school and became a teacher. He also worked as a journalist, librarian, stonecutter and test car driver. His first novel, The Dream Room, was published in 1920.
All Quiet on the Western Front was serialized in Vossische Zeitung, a German magazine, in 1928. The book was published in 1929. The author was now using the name Erich Maria Remarque. The middle name was added as tribute to his mother; the surname was changed to the original spelling of his French ancestors. The film based on the novel was released in 1930 and won'the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. The film was shown only briefly in Germany, as Nazis disrupted screenings by releasing rats and smoke bombs in theatres. The film was banned in the country for much of the next 2 decades.
The Nazis did not approve of the pacifism in Remarque’s works and he believed that his life was in danger. In 1932, the author and his ex-wife Jutta Zambona fled to Switzerland and subsequently to the United States. Remarque’s books were banned and publicly burned in Germany in 1933; his German citizenship was revoked in 1938. Remarque and Zambona remarried in 1939 to ensure that she would not be repatriated to Germany. The author’s sister, Elfriede Schultz, was arrested and executed after a 1943 trial in the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court). At the trial, the court president implied that she was being punished as a surrogate for her brother. Remarque and Zambona became American citizens in 1947. After they divorced a second time in 1956, Remarque married actress Paulette Goddard and lived with her until his death in 1970.
If you liked All Quiet on the Western Front, you may also enjoy:
Other books by Erich Maria Remarque:
Arch of Triumph
eBook
[Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-K1018-513 / CC-BY-SA]
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