All Quiet on the Western Front
First published 1928 · German · 295 pages
- Novels
- War
This novel follows Paul Bäumer, a young German who enlists with his schoolmates after being urged on by patriotic teachers. Sent to the Western Front in the First World War, he and his comrades learn quickly that training and slogans mean little amid shellfire, mud, hunger and fear. Told in the first person, the book describes ordinary routines of trench life, brief moments of friendship and rest, and the growing gap between the soldiers and the civilians at home. It is a quiet, unsparing portrait of a generation marked by war even when it survives, and remains one of the best-known antiwar novels ever written.
Quotes
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.
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
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.
We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.