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The masterpiece of the German experience during World War I, considered by many the greatest war novel of all time—with an Oscar–winning film adaptation now streaming on Netflix.

“[Erich Maria Remarque] is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank.”—The New York Times Book Review

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.

Review

“The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.”—The New York Times Book Review

From the Inside Flap

Paul Baumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I. Youthful, enthusiastic, they become soldiers. But despite what they have learned, they break into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. And as horrible war plods on year after year, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principles of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other--if only he can come out of the war alive.
"The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first trank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Erich Maria Remarque, who was born in Germany, was drafted into the German army during World War I. Through the hazardous years following the war he worked at many occupations: schoolteacher, small-town drama critic, race-car driver, editor of a sports magazine. His first novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, was published in Germany in 1928. A brilliant success, selling more than a million copies, it was the first of many literary triumphs. When the Nazis came to power, Remarque left Germany for Switzerland. He rejected all attempts to persuade him to return, and as a result he lost his German citizenship, his books were burned, and his films banned. He went to the United States in 1938 and became a citizen in 1947. He later lived in Switzerland with his second wife, the actress Paulette Goddard. He died in September 1970.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction by Norman Stone

For some years after the end of the First World War the memoirs of generals and statesmen dominated publication about it – none more prominently than Churchill’s great classic, The World Crisis (1923). Then, quite suddenly, ten years down the line, came the other side, the horror, the view from below. The British had lost almost a million men dead, the French over a million, and the Germans nearly two, mainly on the Western Front, where thousands of guns churned up the mud. War cripples hobbled the streets of Berlin, and are recorded in the bitter Twenties paintings of Georg Grosz and Otto Dix. Writers followed – in Great Britain, amongst the earliest books were Richard Aldington’s novel Death of a Hero (1929) and Robert Graves’s memoir Goodbye to All That (1929), the most famous of them all. I was given it as a Christmas present when I was fifteen and read it at a session. At the time, the mid- Fifties, there were men around, not even sixty, who had gone through the Western Front but you could never get them to talk about it. British critics did not attack ‘the system’, they tended to dwell on the incompetence of the generals. The French had a rather similar experience, in that the from-below story of 1914-18 surfaced with Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), which is brilliant black farce. Celine, who had volunteered in 1912, entered the War with the usual young man’s patriotism, and was badly maimed at an early stage; and he made a mockery of the whole business. But there is not really any French, let alone British or American, equivalent of the bitterness and edge that went into the paintings of Dix and Grosz. Two films come the closest – Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) which started off as a musical (1963) by Joan Littlewood based on the songs of the poor bloody infantry, and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957). On the literary side, the German Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) is in a class of its own. It appeared not long before the Wall Street Crash started a process that was soon to give Germany eight million unemployed, and the Chancellorship of Adolf Hitler. Not just the Nazis banned it; so did the Lord Mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, a Centre Party Catholic and later first Chancellor of West Germany. Official Germany would not accept any responsibility for the War. In 1923 the legal scholar Hermann Kantorowicz put in a memorandum to the Reichstag ‘War Guilt’ committee, showing that three quarters of the published documents from 1914 were false, and even the ‘good German’ Gustav Stresemann tried to stop him from getting a Chair, and suppressed the report.

This is all understandable, because Germany did face a war indemnity, ‘reparations’, designed to cripple her for two generations, and to suggest that she had caused the War counted as treachery. But so did criticism of the army (and the fourteen-volume official history, besides being incomplete, was almost free of it). Exposing the reality was left to a writer such as Remarque.

For Germans the War had ended in defeat and disillusion. It had been a four-year epic of sacrifice, and there had been spectacular successes, from the capture of Russian Poland in 1915 through Caporetto in 1917, when the Italian front imploded, to the March Offensive of 1918, which destroyed the British Fifth Army. German generals had a panache lacking on the Allied side, almost to the end, and it is notable in All Quiet on the Western Front that there is very little criticism or mockery of generals, let alone officers, who come off well – understanding and humane. The Germans shot far fewer of their own men than did the British. When the armistice happened, attempts were made to imitate the Russian Revolution in which Soldiers’ Councils had challenged the authority of their officers. Far from being revolutionary, the German Soldiers’ Councils voted for Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg to be their overall president (he declined). Even so, some 25,000 German prisoners of war did join the Red Army. The end of the War saw bitter political recriminations: the Left blamed the Right for starting it, and the Right blamed the Left for stopping it, for giving the fighting troops a ‘stab in the back’. This civil war was always latent in the Weimar Republic, and it flared up again when the Wall Street Crash ended properly democratic government (in 1930: thereafter governments ruled by emergency decree). The civil war culminated in the victory, in 1933, of the Nazis. It also resulted in the emigration of Erich Maria Remarque. All Quiet was one of the Nazis’ burned books.

Remarque was not a Communist or even, it seems, anything much. He was born (1898) into a skilled working-class family in Osnabruck, his father a printer, and attended Catholic schools. When he turned eighteen, in 1916, he was conscripted, and after some basic training (All Quiet is biting about that; the sadistic Corporal Himmelstoss is an archetype of military memoirs, where bright young men encounter maniacal and petty disciplinarians) he was drafted to Flanders. The British Offensive – we know it as Passchendaele, from the village the capture of which, after 400,000 casualties, allowed victory to be absurdly declared – was about to start, and Remarque was badly wounded on its first day, 31 July 1917, spending much of the rest of the War in hospital. He kept a notebook and recorded the men’s stories as he heard them. They form the basis for All Quiet.

There were two (at least) unique features of the Great War. For civilian conscripts, there was vast disillusion with everything that they had been taught by Authority; and then there was the sheer anonymity of the killing. Of Remarque’s class of twenty schoolboys in All Quiet, at least half get killed – the narrator, Paul Baumer, just a week or two before the armistice of November 1918 – five or more are wounded, and one ends up in a lunatic asylum. They are all caught up in the tremendous Materialschlachten, the industrial slaughter, that killed over nine million soldiers and maimed many, many more. This was an artillery war, and the guns multiplied in number, power and range; huge technical skill was involved (for instance, plotting by sound-range where, on a grid-map, an enemy gun was sited). Time and again, Remarque’s boys are knocked out by shelling. The ordeal involved is well-expounded in the last scene of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong (1993) where the hero digs himself out of a great mound of mud and corpses, such as these heavy shells threw up. They, rather than the legendary machine-guns, caused three-quarters of the casualties. It is extraordinary that the generals started out with an assumption that this would be a war rather like that of 1870-71, between France and Prussia – infantry charging in clumps, bayonets outstretched, cavalry sweeping forward, and fortresses holding out bravely under siege; and of course there was the widespread illusion that the war would be short, an illusion spread as much by bankers and economists as by generals. But artillery could smash even the stoutest fortress, cavalry were helpless targets for modern rifles, and the French learned in August 1914 just how vulnerable their charging infantry clumps were to shrapnel. Remarque’s schoolboys were confronted almost at once with a war that they had not imagined. And they had also been let down by men in authority. When the war broke out, Germany was vilified for the invasion of neutral Belgium (Germans became ‘the Hun’ in the British press) and over 1,300 of the most prominent academics signed a pompous Intellektuelleneingabe – ‘petition of the intellectuals’ – associating the great names of German civilization with tub-thumping nationalist nonsense, instead of appreciating that the War was a sort of suicide. On a less exalted level, schoolteachers, the pride of Prussia, shovelled their sixth forms into uniform, as happened with Paul Baumer’s class. Once they were at the front, what were they to make of these maniacal schoolteachers who had filled their heads with such useless nonsense as French irregular verbs and the population of Melbourne? In All Quiet the hero wonders whether they ever could get back to normal, after the war, but they did – those who survived. Remarque himself knocked around for a few years, which included primary school teaching (often an essential booster-stage for something else), then, aged twenty-two, published a vaguely radical-right novel he soon wished he had not written, and drifted into sports journalism for a large media concern. Then, at thirty, he produced the work for which he is remembered. All Quiet on the Western Front became an international bestseller, and was snapped up by Hollywood for a record sum. Not surprisingly, like the early works of Graham Greene or Eric Ambler, who also thought cinematically, it made an excellent film. Early in the novel, Paul recalls the population-of-Melbourne maniac getting his seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds as a class to march down the street and volunteer in 1914. One of them, Josef Behm, under-age and overweight, does not want to go, attack, and we left him for dead . . . That afternoon we suddenly heard him shout out and saw him crawling around in no man’s land. He had only been knocked unconscious. Because he couldn’t see and was mad with pain he didn’t take cover, so he was shot down from the other side before anyone could get out to fetch him.’ (This colloquially rendered passage is characteristic of Professor Brian Murdoch’s excellently readable translation.) The War, which had started with cavalry and charging infantry, turned into a long artillery epic, and there are some splendid descriptions of bombardment (Allan Mallinson recalls that no man is an atheist under bombardment, but God – and clergymen – are missing from Remarque’s pages). One after another, the boys go. Second is Kemmerich, at first unaware, in hospital, that his leg has been amputated; there is some awkwardness among his visitors as to whether they should just take his special English airman’s soft-leather boots; Muller wants them, saying his own boots are so bad that even his blisters get blisters. The soldiers’ deaths are recorded intermittently, interspersed with bitter comments and dramatically described events of trench warfare. A failed French attack gives rise to the most memorable scene in the film, which sticks in my mind sixty years after seeing it. Baumer, on forward observation, takes shelter in a shell hole, and a French soldier stumbles in. Baumer’s instinctive reaction is to stab him, and the Frenchman takes hours to die, the German dressing his wounds, giving him water and talking to him even after he is finally dead. He looks into the man’s wallet to identify him, and finds letters from his wife, photographs of his children in a village somewhere. There are other scenes of fraternization, but they are with French girls. Remarque’s general idea is that it is all hellish and that the only sort of meaning to be found is in the cameraderie involved, as Paul and his friends find ways of dealing with rats or with the lack of decent food, or take revenge on the sadistic training corporal whom they encounter again at the front. The description of a fortnight’s home leave is particularly harrowing, as Baumer finds he has nothing to say to his father. And there are still old saloon-bar wiseacres, showering him with cigars, who tell him how the War should be won: ‘aber vor allem muss die gegnerische Front in Flandern durchbrochen und dann von oben aufgerollt werden’ – as if the Flanders front could easily be ‘broken through and then rolled up’.

The wiseacres hated the book, seeing it as an insult to the German army, and the Nazis put it about that Remarque – originally ‘Remark’ (he gave it a French twist: his forebears had been Remarques from across the border) – had in reverse been ‘Kramer’, a Jewish name meaning ‘pedlar’. They also made much of the fact that Remarque had not served in the front line. The irony was that Hitler himself, though he had two medals, did not really have a heroic war. We know from some extraordinary research by Thomas Weber (Hitler’s First War, 2010) that he was not a front-line soldier but a messenger who spent most of his time at headquarters – what other men called an Etappenschwein (‘rear-area pig’). In the British army it was called having a cushy job. Regimental colonels were sent bags of medals from time to time, for distribution, and Hitler got two of them because he was conveniently there, according to his own account, reading Schopenhauer from a pocketbook. Half of the veterans from his regiment, Bavarian Catholics,
refused to turn up when called upon to attend a reunion in 1934 to celebrate the victory of their alleged fellow-soldier, now Fuhrer. Remarque had already left Germany the day after Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. He had easily enough money from royalties to live in Switzerland, and later in Hollywood and New York. He never lived in Germany again. The Nazis, in time, chased his poor sister, Elfriede Scholz, a dressmaker in Dresden. She was denounced by her landlady and a customer in 1943 for saying the war was lost, as indeed it was. An example was made of her, for Wehrkraftzersetzung (roughly, ‘demoralizing the armed forces’) and she was beheaded. After World War II Remarque remained in the USA, quite successful, though always best-known for All Quiet. In the 1950s he married the American actress Paulette Goddard, moved back to Switzerland, and died there in 1970. But All Quiet lives on, and deserves to.

Review:

4.7 out of 5

94.00% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars A Powerful and Heartbreaking Portrait of War

S. · June 20, 2025

5.0 out of 5 stars WOW!

d. · June 13, 2025

This arrived a day late but I enjoyed the book so much I am so glad I got it and read it. It is soooooooooo goooood. WOW!

5.0 out of 5 stars great for students.

J. · March 23, 2025

Great for student note taking. If you or your kid is a person who likes to write notes in the books they are reading for school, this one is prefect. In expensive and large enough font and spacing for notes and stickies.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Requirement to Read

D.S. · April 3, 2017

For someone who is interested in war novels, this one is a requirement to read. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is an excellent novel about the First World War. One of the first books published about the war it was one of the first insights of life in the trenches. This novel gave people sometimes there first experience of what it was like. Leading the way for writers and filmmakers to visualize it. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the best books ever written for its overall imagery that’s gives a vivid image of all the aspects of life as a soldier in World War One.Paul Baumer is 18 years old and has just finished school when the war began. His schoolmaster encouraged him and his classmates to enlist for it was there divine duty to Germany. Soon in just the first week half of them are dead now being stuck in a trench surrounded by artillery bombardment. One interesting use the book does is how the protagonist is a German soldier as well being written by a German soldier. Many consider Germany as the enemy during the Great War so having a German enlisted man gives a shape to opinion of those who read it. How all the armies whether German, French, British or Russian, every soldier was a man with a life suffering in war. Another is how it tells all the aspect of a soldier in World War one. The book does not tell the whole story inside the trenches as Paul Baumer experiences other parts of life during warfare. When Paul goes on leave returning home, when he worked at a prisoner of war camp, when he was hospitalized surrounded by slowly dying men. Each moment gives a visual and emotional pull of how each felt. The last is its use of imagery. This novel cares one of the best uses of imagery in how it tells life in the trenches. How men spend months living in holes full of mud with only rations to eat and nothing to entertain oneself but small talk and cigarettes. How you could die at any moment in dozens of ways by artillery, gas, snipers, disease or just standing three inches to far to the left at the wrong time. The book doesn’t just say what happens but the emotional aspect it as well. How Paul describes how you must separate your emotions fully from yourself because if you think to hard where you are, you will go crazy. In the war Paul says “there is no liberation, no freedom, no pride, only death.”All Quit on the Western Front is a book everyone should read whether there are interested in war or not. It is a lesson of how horrible war really is and how the only thing it brings in the end is death. Everyone should know what the war was like. That it was much more than just starting WWII, a war long ago that doesn’t matter anymore, or how that could only happen during that time. The Great War changed the world forever and if we are not careful it could happen again.

5.0 out of 5 stars All Quiet on the Western Front -- In war we are all the same

A.C. · October 10, 2001

All Quiet on the Western FrontWritten by Enrich Maria RemarqueReviewed by Yael BozzayOriginally banned and burned in Germany by the Nazi's in 1933 (five years after it was first published) because of it's antinationalist, pacifist, and dissident sentiment, All Quiet on the Western Front by Enrich Maria Remarque reached acclaim across the world as an intimate portrayal of life during the war from the "enemy's" point of view. It was translated to over twenty-five languages, two movies have been made, and it has sold many million copies. As a result of its popularity across the world and its subsequent distaste to the Nazi's, Enrich Maria Remarque was exiled in 1938, and his citizenship in Germany was revoked.All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel written from the point of view of a German soldier, Paul Baumer, fighting on the western front during 1917 & 1918 (the last two years of WWI). Through Paul's experiences we can see the similarities between all men in war. From detailed descriptions given by Paul of the food soldiers ate, the boots and clothes they wore, and the conditions under which they lived and fought to the corpse rats, the war field graveyards where the bodies of buried soldiers were unearthed during battle, Remarque leaves no stone unturned about the conditions and subsequent effects of war upon its soldiers.Closely paralleling Hemingway's "Soldier's Home," an account of the effects of WWI on an American soldier, All Quiet on the Western Front displays the universal effects of the war upon those who fought heroically - disillusionment with war and facing the reality of a country who, upon the soldier's return, cannot identify with his life. Estrangement and distance grows with society as the men realize that "the world they (girls & those in society) were in was not the world that he was in" ("Soldier's Home") and "men will not understand us and ... [they will] push us aside; ... the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin"(All Quiet on the Western Front 294). The similarity between men on both sides of the war reveals the universal result of war - death (if not physical then social or emotional). When, upon entering the war, Paul Baumer says, " Our early life is cut off from the moment we came here, and that without even lifting a hand" (AQWF 19), he foreshadows the life of the young soldiers who must face war without a choice and whose life pays the ultimate price of victory for his country. But will Paul willingly sacrifice all for sake of his country?Through the griping battle scenes and the loss of friends to returning home to a "foreign country," All Quiet on the Western Front reveals the struggles of not only soldiers but of ordinary men forced to fight a battle against other men: "...for the first time, I see you are a man like me... Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us... forgive me comrade; how could you be my enemy?" (All Quiet On the Western Front 223) Remarque's personal experience in the war and his realization of the terror that actually occurs - man killing man - reveals the necessity of counting the cost of war and maintaining peace whenever possible. This is what we face today, and the question remains - have we learned from the past, or do we continue to tread upon the same course that leads us to destruction?It is this grim realization that caused his book to be banned and burned by the Nazi's and spread acclaim throughout the rest of the world. Spreading the truth of the real tragedy of war opened people's eyes to the reality that faced those condemned to die - a reality that faces everyone and is the same for everyone in the midst of war ... a reality that is no respecter of persons and takes all it can - a reality called death.

A Very Sobering Read

R. · June 18, 2025

gran libro

M.G.D.D.V. · September 26, 2023

una magnifica lectura en ingles si te gusta la temática de la primera guerra mundial

Classic

R. · October 7, 2022

This is a must have. The book, though translated, reads like a book written natively in English. The "adventures" (or better said as lack of adventure) shown depict an aspect of warfare we commonly overlook. The book displays the destruction of warfare, and changes your view of the world. This is a must havebif you want to learn to see the humanistic factors of any disaster. The book is also much better than the movie, and the plot is completely different. Seriously, why is the movie named after the book if the plots are different?

RAS

L. · August 23, 2023

ras

2 stars for the quality of material.

G. · January 25, 2018

The print quality and paper quality is really bad. It's a mass market paperback in it's true sense. It seems like pages would come loose even before I finish reading the book.This review is for the mass market paperback, sold by cloud tail and published by ballantine.

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All Quiet on the Western Front: A Novel

Name: All Quiet on the Western Front: A Novel
Brand: Ballantine Books
SKU: U0449213943
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