all quiet on the western front everyman's library

Only the camaraderie of his diminishing circle of friends has any meaning for him.

Paul cannot imagine a life after the war and can no longer relate to his family when he returns home on leave. Remarque's elegy for a sacrificed generation is all the more devastating for the laconic prose in which his teenaged veteran narrates shocking experiences which for him have become the stuff of daily life. He also has an eye for the grimly comic: the consignment of coffins Paul and his friends pass as they make their way up the line for a new offensive the young soldiers joyfully tucking into double rations when half their company are unexpectedly wiped out. Remarque has an extraordinary power of describing fear: the appalling tension of being holed up in a dugout under heavy bombardment the animal instinct to kill or be killed which takes over during hand-to-hand combat. A few years after it was published in 1929 the Nazis would denounce and publicly burn Remarque's novel for insulting the heroic German army - in other words, for 'telling it like it was' for the common soldier on the front line where any notions of glory and national destiny were soon blasted away by the dehumanizing horror of modern warfare. In All Quiet on the Western Front he tells their story. On a calm October day in 1918, only a few weeks before the Armistice, Paul will be the last of them to be killed. In 1914 Paul Baumer and his classmates are marched to the local recruiting office by a sentimentally patriotic form-master. A few years after it was published in 1929 the Nazis would denounce and publicly burn Remarque's novel for insulting the heroic German army - in other words, for 'telling it like it was' for the common soldier on the front line.

All quiet on the western front everyman's library