1929 Warsaw 1ST Jewish YIDDISH EDITION Remarque ALL QUIET ON WESTERN FRONT Book

$145.00 $136.30 Buy It Now or Best Offer, $29.00 Shipping, 30-Day Returns, eBay Money Back Guarantee
Seller: judaica-bookstore ✉️ (2,805) 100%, Location: TEL AVIV, IL, Ships to: WORLDWIDE, Item: 276382399915 1929 Warsaw 1ST Jewish YIDDISH EDITION Remarque ALL QUIET ON WESTERN FRONT Book.

DESCRIPTION :  Up for auction is a MEGA RARE FIND - It is what seems to be the FIRST or at least very early JEWISH YIDDISH edition of the legendary ikonic piece by ERICH MARIA REMARQUE - "ALL IS QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT"      ( IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES ) or NOTHING NEW in the WEST . In YIDDISH " Ojfen Marew-Front Kein Neis" . Remarques' book was FIRST PUBLISHED in 1929 and thus it's vey likely that the copy which is offered here for sale is the FIRST YIDDISH JEWISH edition of this giant creation. ( Second printing , Only 2000 copies. from 6000 up to 7000 ). The YIDDISH BOOK was published in WARSAW POLAND in 1929 ( Fully and clearly dated ).  The translation of this book is by Isaac Bashevis Singer.  On the page opposite the author photo, it says at the top:  אײבציקע אױשאָריזירטע איבערזעצונג פֿון דײַטש י. באַשעװיס : "Perpetually authorised translation from German [by] I. Bashevis."  This was the pseudonym he used early in his career before adding his actual surname Singer. Bashevis was his mother's name.  Exquisite ILLUSTRATED cloth HC . Sepia photo of  ERICH MARIA REMARQUE as frontispiece and additional EMR illustrated image.  9 x 6 " . 242  PP . Good condition. Clean. Tightly bound except of very fragile end pages. ( Pls look at scan for accurate AS IS images ) . Will be sent inside a rigid protective packaging .

PAYMENTS : Payment method accepted : Paypal & All credit cards . SHIPPMENT : Shipp worldwide via registered airmail costs $ 29  .  will be sent inside a protective rigid packaging . Handling around 5 -!0 days after payment.  Erich Maria Remarque (/rəˈmɑːrk/, German: [ˈeːʁɪç maˈʁiːa ʁəˈmaʁk] (listen);[1] born Erich Paul Remark;[2] 22 June 1898 – 25 September 1970) was a German-born novelist. His landmark novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), based on his experience in the Imperial German Army during World War I, was an international bestseller which created a new literary genre, and was adapted into multiple films. Remarque's anti-war themes led to his condemnation by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as "unpatriotic". He was able to use his literary success to relocate to Switzerland and the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. Early life Remarque was born on 22 June 1898, as Erich Paul Remark, to Peter Franz Remark and Anna Maria (née Stallknecht), a working-class Roman Catholic family in Osnabrück.[3] He was never close with his father, a bookbinder, but he was close with his mother and he began using the middle name Maria after World War I in her honor.[4] Remarque was the third of four children of Peter and Anna. His siblings were his older sister Erna, older brother Theodor Arthur (who died at the age of five or six), and younger sister Elfriede.[5] The spelling of his last name was changed to Remarque when he published All Quiet on the Western Front in honor of his French ancestors and in order to dissociate himself from his earlier novel Die Traumbude.[6] His grandfather had changed the spelling from Remarque to Remark in the 19th century.[7] Research[when?] by Remarque's childhood and lifelong friend Hanns-Gerd Rabe proved that Remarque had French ancestors – his great-grandfather Johann Adam Remarque, who was born in 1789, came from a French family in Aachen.[8] This is contrary to the falsehood – perpetuated by Nazi propaganda – that his real last name was Kramer ("Remark" spelled backwards) and that he was Jewish.[9][10] Military service During World War I, Remarque was conscripted into the Imperial German Army at the age of 18. On 12 June 1917, he was transferred to the Western Front, 2nd Company, Reserves, Field Depot of the 2nd Guards Reserve Division at Hem-Lenglet. On 26 June 1917 he was posted to the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment, 2nd Company, Engineer Platoon Bethe, and fought in the trenches between Torhout and Houthulst. On 31 July 1917 he was wounded by shell shrapnel in the left leg, right arm and neck, and after being medically evacuated from the field was repatriated to an army hospital in Germany, where he spent the rest of the war, recovering from his wounds, before being demobilized from the army.[citation needed] After the war he continued his teacher training and worked from 1 August 1919 as a primary-school teacher in Lohne, at that time in the county of Lingen, now in the county of Bentheim. From May 1920 he worked in Klein Berssen in the former County of Hümmling, now Emsland, and from August 1920 in Nahne, which has been a part of Osnabrück since 1972. On 20 November 1920 he applied for leave of absence from teaching. He worked at a number of different jobs in this phase of his life, including librarian, businessman, journalist, and editor. His first paid writing job was as a technical writer for the Continental Rubber Company, a German tire manufacturer.[11] Writing career Remarque had made his first attempts at writing at the age of 16. Among them were essays, poems, and the beginnings of a novel that was finished later and published in 1920 as The Dream Room (Die Traumbude). Between 1923 and 1926 he also scripted a comic series, Der Contibuben, drawn by Hermann Schütz, published in the magazine Echo Continental, a publication by the rubber and tire company Continental AG.[12] After coming back from the war, the atrocities of war along with his mother’s death caused him a great deal of mental trauma and grief. In later years as a professional writer, he started using "Maria" as his middle name instead of "Paul", to commemorate his mother.[5] When he published All Quiet on the Western Front, he had his surname reverted to an earlier spelling – from Remark to Remarque – to dissociate himself from his novel Die Traumbude.[6] In 1927, he published the novel Station at the Horizon (Station am Horizont). It was serialised in the sports journal Sport im Bild for which Remarque was working. (It was first published in book form in 1998.) All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) (1929), his career-defining work, was also written in 1927. Remarque was at first unable to find a publisher for it.[3] Its text described the experiences of German soldiers during World War I. On publication it became an international bestseller and a landmark work in twentieth-century literature. It inspired a new genre of veterans writing about conflict, and the commercial publication of a wide variety of war memoirs. It also inspired dramatic representations of the war in theatre and cinema, in Germany as well as in countries that had fought in the conflict against the German Empire, particularly the United Kingdom and the United States. Remarque in 1939 Riding on the tail of the success of All Quiet on the Western Front, a number of similar works followed from Remarque. In simple, emotive language, they described wartime and the postwar years in Germany. In 1931, after finishing The Road Back (Der Weg zurück), he bought a villa in Ronco, Switzerland with the substantial financial wealth that his published works had brought him. He planned to live both there and in France.[citation needed] On 10 May 1933, at the initiative of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Remarque's writing was publicly declared as "unpatriotic" and was banned in Germany. Copies were removed from all libraries and restricted from being sold or published anywhere in the country. Germany was rapidly descending into a totalitarian society, leading to mass arrests of elements of the population of which the new governing order disapproved. Remarque left Germany to live at his villa in Switzerland. His French background as well as his Catholic faith were also publicly attacked by the Nazis. They continued to decry his writings in his absence, proclaiming that anyone who would change the spelling of his name from the German "Remark" to the French "Remarque" could not be a true German. The Nazis further made the false claim that Remarque had not seen active service during World War I. In 1938, Remarque's German citizenship was revoked. In 1939, he and his ex-wife were remarried to prevent her repatriation to Germany. Just before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, they left Porto Ronco, Switzerland for the United States.[13] They became naturalised citizens of the United States in 1947.[14] Remarque continued to write about the German experience after WWI. His next novel, Three Comrades (Drei Kameraden), spans the years of the Weimar Republic, from the hyperinflation of 1923 to the end of the decade. His fourth novel, Flotsam (in German titled Liebe deinen Nächsten, or Love Thy Neighbour), first appeared in a serial version in English translation in Collier's magazine in 1939. He spent another year revising the text for its book publication in 1941, both in English and German. His next work, the novel Arch of Triumph, was first published in 1945 in English, and the next year in German as Arc de Triomphe. Another instant bestseller, it reached worldwide sales of nearly five million. His final novel was Shadows in Paradise. He wrote it while living at 320 East 57th Street in New York City. The apartment building "played a prominent role in his novel".[15] In 1943, the Nazis arrested his youngest sister, Elfriede Scholz, who had stayed behind in Germany with her husband and two children. After a trial at the notorious Volksgerichtshof (Hitler's extra-constitutional "People's Court"), she was found guilty of "undermining morale" for stating that she considered the war lost. Court President Roland Freisler declared, "Ihr Bruder ist uns leider entwischt—Sie aber werden uns nicht entwischen" ("Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach – you, however, will not escape us.") Scholz was beheaded on 16 December 1943.[16] Remarque later said that his sister had been involved in anti-Nazi resistance activities.[17] In exile, Remarque was unaware of his sister Elfriede's fate until after the war. He would dedicate his 1952 novel Spark of Life (Der Funke Leben) to her. The dedication was omitted in the German version of the book, reportedly because he was still seen as a traitor by some Germans.[18] Later years Remarque in 1961 In 1948, Remarque returned to Switzerland, where he spent the remainder of his life. There was a gap of seven years – a long silence for Remarque – between Arch of Triumph and his next work, Spark of Life (Der Funke Leben), which appeared both in German and in English in 1952. While he was writing The Spark of Life he was also working on a novel Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (Time to Live and Time to Die).[citation needed] It was published first in English translation in 1954 with the not-quite-literal title A Time to Love and a Time to Die. In 1958, Douglas Sirk directed the film A Time to Love and a Time to Die in Germany, based on Remarque's novel. Remarque made a cameo appearance in the film in the role of the Professor.[19] In 1955, Remarque wrote the screenplay for an Austrian film The Last Act (Der letzte Akt), about Hitler's final days in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, which was based on the book Ten Days to Die (1950) by Michael Musmanno. In 1956, Remarque wrote a drama Full Circle (Die letzte Station) for the stage, which played in both Germany and on Broadway. An English translation was published in 1974. Heaven Has No Favorites was serialised (as Borrowed Life) in 1959 before appearing as a book in 1961 and was made into the 1977 film Bobby Deerfield. The Night in Lisbon (Die Nacht von Lissabon), published in 1962, is the last work Remarque finished. The novel sold about 900,000 copies in Germany.[citation needed] Personal life Remarque and Paulette Goddard in Ronco, Switzerland, 1961 Remarque's first marriage was to the actress Ilse Jutta Zambona in 1925.[20] The marriage was stormy and unfaithful on both sides. Remarque and Zambona divorced in 1930, but in 1933 they fled together to Switzerland.[21] In 1938, they remarried, to prevent her from being forced to return to Germany, and in 1939 they emigrated to the United States, where they both became naturalized citizens in 1947.[22] They divorced again on 20 May 1957, this time for good. Ilse Remarque died on 25 June 1975.[23] During the 1930s, Remarque had relationships with Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr, Mexican actress Dolores del Río[24] and German actress Marlene Dietrich.[25] The affair with Dietrich began in September 1937, when they met on the Lido while in Venice for the film festival, and continued until at least 1940, maintained mostly by way of letters, telegrams and telephone calls. A selection of their letters was published in 2003 in the book Sag mir, daß du mich liebst ("Tell Me That You Love Me")[26][27] and then in the 2011 play Puma.[28] Remarque married actress Paulette Goddard in 1958.[29] Death Remarque died of heart failure at the age of 72 in Locarno on 25 September 1970.[30] His body was buried in the Ronco Cemetery in Ronco, Ticino, Switzerland.[31] Paulette Goddard, Remarque's wife, died in 1990, and her body was interred next to her husband's. She left a bequest of US$20 million to New York University to fund an institute for European studies, which is named in honour of Remarque,[32] as well as funding "Goddard Hall" on the Greenwich Village campus in New York City.[citation needed] Legacy A commemorative plaque in memory of Erich Maria Remarque on Kaiserdamm Boulevard in Berlin A commemorative plaque in memory of Erich Maria Remarque at the Wittelsbacherstrasse 5 in Berlin, unveiled on 22 June 1972 The first director of The Remarque Institute was Professor Tony Judt.[33] Remarque's papers are housed at NYU's Fales Library.[34] In November 2010, efforts to raise 6.2 million Swiss francs (US$7M), to buy and save the villa of Erich Maria Remarque and Paulette Goddard from demolition were underway. The intent was to transform the "Casa Monte Tabor" into a museum and home to an artist-in-residence program.[35] In 2017, the property was being offered for sale as a private residence.[36] List of works Note: the dates of English publications are those of the first publications in book form. Novels Im Westen nichts Neues, 1929 original version (1920) Die Traumbude. Ein Künstlerroman; English translation: The Dream Room (written 1924, published 1998) Gam (1928) Station am Horizont; English translation: Station at the Horizon (1929) Im Westen nichts Neues; English translation: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) (1931) Der Weg zurück; English translation: The Road Back (1931) (1936) Drei Kameraden; English translation: Three Comrades (1937) (1939) Liebe deinen Nächsten; English translation: Flotsam (1941) (1945) Arc de Triomphe; English translation: Arch of Triumph (1945) (Reviewed by Dr. Albert Simard in Free World[37]) (1952) Der Funke Leben; English translation: Spark of Life (1952) (1954) Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben; English translation: A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954) (1956) Der schwarze Obelisk; English translation: The Black Obelisk (1957) (1961) Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge (serialized as Geborgtes Leben); English translation: Heaven Has No Favorites (1961) (1962) Die Nacht von Lissabon; English translation: The Night in Lisbon (1964) (1970) Das gelobte Land; English translation: The Promised Land (1971) Schatten im Paradies; English translation: Shadows in Paradise (1972) Other works (1931) Der Feind; English translation: The Enemy (1930–1931); short stories (1955) Der letzte Akt; English translation: The Last Act; screenplay (1956) Die letzte Station; English translation: Full Circle (1974); play (1988) Die Heimkehr des Enoch J. Jones; English translation: The Return of Enoch J. Jones; play (1994) Ein militanter Pazifist; English translation: A Militant Pacifist; interviews and essays ******* Erich Maria Remarque German writer Alternate titles: Erich Paul Remark Written and fact-checked by Last Updated: Jan 26, 2023 • Article History Remarque Erich Maria Remarque See all media Born: June 22, 1898 Osnabrück Germany Died: September 25, 1970 (aged 72) Locarno Switzerland Notable Works: “All Quiet on the Western Front” “The Road Back” Notable Family Members: spouse Paulette Goddard Erich Maria Remarque, pseudonym of Erich Paul Remark, (born June 22, 1898, Osnabrück, Ger.—died Sept. 25, 1970, Locarno, Switz.), novelist who is chiefly remembered as the author of Im Westen nichts Neues (1929; All Quiet on the Western Front), which became perhaps the best-known and most representative novel dealing with World War I. Remarque was drafted into the German army at the age of 18 and was wounded several times. After the war he worked as a racing-car driver and as a sportswriter while working on All Quiet on the Western Front. The novel’s events are those in the daily routine of soldiers who seem to have no past or future apart from their life in the trenches. Its title, the language of routine communiqués, is typical of its cool, terse style, which records the daily horrors of war in laconic understatement. Its casual amorality was in shocking contrast to patriotic rhetoric. The book was an immediate international success, as was the American film made from it in 1930. It was followed by a sequel, Der Weg zurück (1931; The Road Back), dealing with the collapse of Germany in 1918. Remarque wrote several other novels, most of them dealing with victims of the political upheavals of Europe during World Wars I and II. Some had popular success and were filmed (e.g., Arc de Triomphe, 1946), but none achieved the critical prestige of his first book. Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, history and society. Britannica Quiz Literary Favorites: Fact or Fiction? Remarque left Germany for Switzerland in 1932. His books were banned by the Nazis in 1933. In 1939 he went to the United States, where he was naturalized in 1947. After World War II he settled in Porto Ronco, Switz., on Lake Maggiore, where he lived with his second wife, the American actress Paulette Goddard, until his death. **** ERICH MARIA REMARQUE: IN DEPTH In 1933, Nazi students at more than 30 German universities pillaged libraries in search of books they considered to be "un-German." Among the literary and political writings they threw into the flames were the works of Erich Maria Remarque. CITE SHARE PRINT TAGS book burning authors Erich Maria Remarque was born Erich Paul Remark on June 22, 1898 in Osnabrück, Germany. He received an education in private Catholic schools and subsequently enrolled in a training school for teachers, which he attended until he was conscripted into the German army. At this time, he also began writing fiction. World War I World War I played a crucial role in Remarque's evolution as a writer. In November 1916, Remarque, along with a number of his classmates, was drafted into the German army. After a period of military training, his unit was sent to the Western Front. There he took part in the trench warfare in Flanders, Belgium. In July 1917, he was wounded by shell fragments during a heavy British artillery attack. After a lengthy convalescence he was recalled to active military service in October 1918. Shortly thereafter, Germany's imperial government was toppled in a revolution, and the country became a republic. On November 11, 1918, the new government signed the armistice with the Allies, which ended the fighting. Remarque's wartime experiences, including the loss of some of his comrades, made a strong impression on the young man and served as inspiration for All Quiet on the Western Front. He returned to Osnabrück, where he finished his educational training. He subsequently took up teaching, but his career was short-lived, He quit this profession in 1920. To make ends meet, he gave piano lessons, served as an organist, and wrote theater reviews for a local newspaper. During this time, he published his first novel, Die Traumbude (The Dream Booth) as well as some poetry and other fiction. In 1922, he moved to Hannover, where he took a position as a writer and editor for Echo Continental, a magazine owned by the Continental Rubber Company, a leading manufacturer of automobile tires. Here he wrote advertising copy, crafted slogans, and published articles on travel, cars, and outdoor life. He also adopted the name Erich Maria Remarque, using the original French spelling of his family's name. In 1925, he relocated to Berlin, where he served as an editor for the popular sports illustrated magazine, Sport im Bild. In the German capital, he mingled with leading writers and film makers, including Leni Riefenstahl, who later created Triumph of the Will and other films in Nazi Germany. All Quiet on the Western Front In 1929, Remarque scored his greatest, and most lasting, success with the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues). The work graphically depicted the horrors and brutality of World War I (1914-1918) through the tragic experiences of a group of young German soldiers. The novel, a lasting tribute to the “lost generation” that perished in the Great War, became an immediate international bestseller. In Germany alone in 1929, the book sold almost one million copies. It was translated into more than a dozen languages, including English, French, and Chinese. All Quiet on the Western Front earned Remarque accolades generally from the liberal and leftist press for the work's pacifist stance. The Nazis and conservative nationalists immediately denounced it as an assault on Germany's honor, as a piece of Marxist propaganda, and the work of a traitor. That same year, German-born Hollywood producer Carl Laemmle, acquired the rights to make a film of the book. In May 1930, the American film premiered in Los Angeles and won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. That summer, audiences in France, Britain, and Belgium flocked to the film and it received popular acclaim. Almost immediately the American film ran into trouble in Germany. When it was proposed for showing, a representative of the German Ministry of Defense urged that its screening be rejected on the grounds that it damaged the country's image and shed bad light on the German military. In response, the Berlin censorship office urged Laemmle to make cuts to the film, which were done. Remarque's former boss, the press and film magnate, and outspoken German nationalist, Alfred Hugenberg, indicated that because of the movie's alleged anti-German bias it would not be shown in any of his theaters. He subsequently petitioned German president, Paul von Hindenburg, to ban the film. In December 1930, when the edited and dubbed version of the film was shown to the general public in Berlin, the Nazis sabotaged the event. The Party's leader in Berlin and its propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, organized a riot to disrupt the showing. Outside, SA storm troopers intimidated movie goers, while inside they released stink bombs and mice and harangued the audience. At subsequent showings, the Nazis carried out violent protests. In response to these actions and conservative attacks on the film, the government banned the film. Liberals and socialists condemned the action, but the prohibition lasted until September 1931, when Laemmle produced a more censored version for German audiences. Book Burning and Beyond In 1933, Remarque was forced by the rising tide of Nazism to flee his native Germany for the relative calm and security of Switzerland, where several years earlier he had purchased a lakeshore villa. Seeing the writing on the wall, he left Berlin just one day before Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor on January 30, 1933. Several months later, in May 1933, pro-Nazi students consigned his works to the flames during the fiery book burning spectacles staged throughout the country. In Berlin, as the students assembled on the Opernplatz opposite the university with piles of books for the pyres, the Nazi speaker denounced various authors for their un-German spirit, concluding with the following comments: “Against literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War, for the education of the people in the spirit of truthfulness! I surrender to the flames the writings of Erich Maria Remarque.” Subsequently, German police purged his works from bookstores, libraries, and universities. In 1938, the Nazi government stripped him of his German citizenship. From 1933 onward, Remarque spent his remaining days outside of Germany, except for occasional trips made after the Nazi defeat in 1945. Though he lost much of his German-speaking audience when the Nazis banned his books, his novels, in translation, continued to find new readers in the United States and elsewhere. In contrast to many of his fellow German exiled writers, Remarque did not suffer a significant loss of fame or fortune when he left Germany. Major publishers still printed his work, magazines, like Collier's serialized his new fiction, and Hollywood filmed a many of his novels. World War II In September 1939, Remarque left Europe for the United States, just as World War II was beginning. Dividing his time between New York and Los Angeles, he continued to write popular novels, which echoed, in part, the experiences of refugees forced to flee Nazi rule. Much of his post1933 fiction, such as Liebe deinen Nächsten (Flotsam), Arc de Triomphe (Arch of Triumph), Die Nacht von Lissabon (The Night in Lisbon), and the posthumous, Schatten im Paradies (Shadows in Paradise), depicts the lives and suffering of anti-Nazi emigres, their often ambivalent feelings towards Germany, and their sometimes difficult adjustments to life in exile. In 1944, Remarque wrote a report for America's Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the country's foreign intelligence organization and the forerunner to today's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In it, he urged the Allies to adopt a systematic policy for re-educating the German population after the war. Germans, he believed, had to be exposed to Nazi crimes and evils of militarism. After the War In his postwar novels, Remarque attempted to continue to expose Nazi crimes. As such, he was among the first and most prominent German writers to address Nazi mass murder, the concentration camp system, and the issue of the population's culpability in these crimes, in such works as Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life) and Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (published in English as A Time to Love and A Time to Die). After the war, he also learned that his younger sister, Elfriede, had been arrested and tried before the Nazi People's Court for making anti-Nazi and “defeatist” remarks. Convicted, she was sentenced to death and beheaded on December 16, 1943. He dedicated Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life) to her memory. In an attempt to bring those who denounced her to justice, he hired Robert Kempner, one of the US prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, to investigate this matter. In 1948, Remarque returned to Switzerland as an American citizen. His works were once again published in Germany, although they frequently received negative criticism and were revised to edit out politically “unpalatable” passages. In 1958, he married American film star Paulette Goddard, with whom he remained until his death in 1970. Published Works Novels: 1920 Die Traumbude 1929 Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) 1931 Der Weg Züruck (The Road Back) 1938 Drei Kameraden (Three Comrades) 1941 Liebe deinen Nächsten, (Love Thy Neighbor), published in English as Flotsam 1945 Arc de Triomphe (Arch of Triumph) 1952 Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life) 1954 Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (A Time to Live and A Time to Die), published in English as A Time to Love and A Time to Die 1956 Der schwarze Obelisk (The Black Obelisk) 1961 Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge (Heaven has no Favorites) 1962 Die Nacht von Lissabon (The Night in Lisbon) 1971 Schatten im Paradies (Shadows in Paradise) ***** Author Erich Maria Remarque born On June 22, 1898, Erich Maria Remarque, the author of the great World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front, is born in Osnabruck, Germany. A student at the University of Munster, Remarque was drafted into the German army at the age of 18. He fought on the Western Front during World War I and was wounded no fewer than five times, the last time seriously. After the war, he worked various jobs—teacher, stonecutter, race-car driver, sports journalist—while working to complete the novel he had had in mind since the war. Published in Germany in 1929 as Im Westen Nichts Neues, it sold 1.2 million copies within a year; the English translation, All Quiet on the Western Front, published the same year, went on to similar success. It was subsequently translated into 12 languages, and made into a celebrated Hollywood film in 1930. The smashing success of All Quiet on the Western Front was due in large part to its reflection of a widespread disillusionment with the war that took hold of many during the 1920s. Praised as a novel of unyielding realism, All Quiet on the Western Front described in stark detail the physical trauma of war. Remarque also articulated the numbing frustration and anger of the conscript soldier, sent into battle by government and military leaders for reasons of politics and power that he struggled to understand. In the words of his protagonist, Paul Baumer: "I see how peoples are set against one another and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one anotherI see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring." The celebrated American journalist H. L. Mencken called All Quiet on the Western Front “unquestionably the best story of the World War.” Both the book and the 1930 film version were banned by the Nazis after their rise to power in Germany in 1933 as prejudicial to German national prestige. Remarque went on to write nine more novels, all dealing with the horror and futility of war and the struggle to understand its purpose; his last novel, The Night in Lisbon, was unsparing in its condemnation of World War II and Adolf Hitler’s attempt to perpetrate the extermination of Jews and others. Though he became a naturalized American citizen and was during the 1930s a frequent participant in New York City nightlife and a companion for several years in Hollywood of the actress Marlene Dietrich, Remarque lived for most of his later life at Porto Ronco, on the shore of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland. He died at Locarno in 1970 with his wife, the actress Paulette Goddard, at his side. ***** Erich Maria Remarque Biography Introduction To the biographer and student of literature, Erich Maria Remarque, who has been called the "recording angel of the Great War," was an enigma, a man rife with contradictions and contrasts. He admired stylish women, Impressionist art, an antique Lancia convertible and a racy Bugatti, and Chinese art from the Tang dynasty and was obsessed with pacifism, free speech, and privacy. Following the overnight success of his landmark war protest novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque was able to indulge numerous sensualistic tastes and escape the mundane hometown that he so vividly describes in his prose. Expunging his middle name — Paul — and replacing it with Maria, his mother's name, he immortalized the name Paul in Paul Bäumer, the speaker of his novel, who lives out the neorealistic horrors of trench warfare — chlorine gas, bayonets, tanks, flamethrowers, mangled messenger dogs and horses, hunger, dysentery, lice, longing, confusion, and despair. A member in good standing of Gertrude Stein's "lost generation," Remarque, in life and literature, witnessed the cataclysm of the two world wars. Like Hemingway, with whom he is frequently compared, Remarque centers on the fighting soldier, the victim who bears the horror of war's uncivil onslaught. Characterizing his contemporaries as "hard . . . afraid of feelings, without trust in anything but the sky, trees, the earth, bread, tobacco that never played false to any man," he attempted to exorcise his own postwar trauma by re-creating on paper the amorphous hell of the western front, where his high school graduating class was thrust from pubescent patriotism into callous cynicism before completing their second decade. Early Years Born Erich Paul Remark (he later changed his name out of embarrassment over a novel he published in 1920), the novelist was the son of bookbinder and master machinist Peter Franz Remark and his wife, Anna Maria Stallknecht Remark, both descendants of devout French Catholic expatriates to the Rhineland following the French Revolution. He was born June 22, 1898, in Osnabrück, Westphalia, a prosperous industrial town in northwestern Germany, twenty-five miles from the Netherlands. As members of the hard-pressed lower end of the working class, the Remarks shuffled almost annually among a series of quarters between 1898 and 1912, once residing in rooms above Prelle, the publishing company where his father was employed. A bookish lad known affectionately as Schmieren, or "Smudge," to his contemporaries, Remarque was the third child of a family of four. His older sister Erna was followed by Theodor Arthur in 1896, who died at the age of five. In 1903, Elfriede, his ill-fated baby sister, completed the family. The Remark children, brought up in a strict Catholic household, attended the local Präparande, a parochial school where Erich often got into scrapes with school authorities, particularly Professor Konschorek, whom he later skewered in the seriocomic character Kantorek. To pay for school books, fish for his aquarium, and a few boyhood niceties, Remarque, a talented pianist and organist, gave piano lessons to young girls who often seemed more drawn to his Aryan good looks than to his pedagogy. When time allowed, he collected butterflies, stones, and stamps, joined a gymnastics club, fished for sticklebacks in the Poggenbach River, performed magic tricks, and composed poems and essays. Except for school teaching, few professional choices lay ahead for men of Remarque's social class. Accepting necessity, he entered elementary education courses at the Lehrerseminar in 1913. In 1915, he and several other idealists formed a literary brotherhood around mentor Fritz Hörstemeier. The following year, his essay about young cadets, "From the Time of Youth," a poem titled "I and You," and a short story, "The Lady with the Golden Eyes," were printed in the Osnabruck newspaper. The Great War On November 26, 1916, shortly after winning thirty marks in an essay contest, Remarque was drafted as a musketeer, or infantryman, and completed basic training at Osnabrück's Westerberg Camp. He then was transferred to Celle, from which he visited his mother, hospitalized for cancer, which ended her life on September 9, 1917. Earlier that June, as a "sapper," or lineman in an engineering unit, Remarque had begun building bunkers, pillboxes, and dugouts behind the Arras Front, east of the Houthulst Forest and south of Handzaeme, frequently working at night to avoid sniper fire. On July 15, 1917, Remarque's company advanced to Flanders for some of the most savage fighting of World War I. Trench warfare dispelled his youthful idealism, particularly after he carried his buddy Troske out of enemy fire and Troske died like the fictional character Kat. He was treated for minor shrapnel injuries and later died of a head wound from a shrapnel splinter while he was being carried to a medic. During five months of heavy rain, the Allied and German armies hammered away at each other, gaining little ground; in four months, the two armies chalked up 770,000 casualties, many of them noncombatants. Spattered with grenade splinters in his neck, left knee, and right wrist, Remarque exited the fray on July 31, evacuated by troop train from the aid station in Thourout to St. Vincenz Hospital, Duisburg, outside Essen. A competent, respected soldier, Remarque was treated well and worked briefly as an orderly room clerk. On his off hours, he dated an officer's daughter, began writing his first novel, and set the poems of Ludwig Bäte to music. Rejoining the 78th Infantry in October, he was declared fit for duty only four days before the armistice. Postwar Life After mustering out on a medical discharge in 1918, Remarque suffered postwar trauma and disillusionment, complicated by regret that his wounds ended his hopes for a career as a concert pianist, and by grief over his mother's death. For a time, he posed illegally as a much-decorated first lieutenant, accompanied by Wolf, his shepherd dog. Occasionally, Remarque dressed extravagantly and wore a monocle. For the next ten years, he would cast about for a life's work, but for now he settled into a special veteran's seminary, where he chaired a student association that rebelled against the practice of treating war veterans like teenagers. With average grades, Remarque graduated on June 25, 1919, having specialized in Goethe's verse and Herder's folk songs. During this year he wrote three poems — "C Sharp Minor," "Nocturne," and "Parting"; three sketches, "Ingeborg: An Awakening," "Beautiful Stranger," and "Hour of Release"; and two essays, "Nature and Art" and "Lilacs." He also received his first assignment as a substitute teacher from August 1 to March 31, 1920, in Löhne, where he boarded with a local family. Once again the Osnabruck newspaper published a poem of Remarque's titled "Evening Poem." He also published a novel that he would later regret called The Dream-Den. It described Remarque's prewar literary circle and was so sentimental that the embarrassed author requested that his publisher, Ullstein, buy up all unsold copies. Following a month's unemployment, Remarque accepted a second substitute post from May 4 to July 31, 1920, in Klein-Berssen, where he lived in the teacherage. On August 20, he accepted a post in Nahne; however, he soon became bored and disgruntled with schools and resigned permanently on November 20. Making do with minor jobs, including playing the organ at the Michaelis Chapel (a mental institution), selling fabric, writing art reviews for Die Schönheit, and carving tombstones for Vogt Brothers, Remarque moved to Hannover in October 1922 to work for Continental Rubber as a test driver and as an editor and writer of humor and verse for the in-house magazine, Echo Continental. Part of his responsibilities included travel throughout Europe as far south as Turkey. During this era, Remarque evolved his pseudonym, replacing his middle name, Paul, with Maria. Partly to distance himself from his sophomoric first novel, The Dream-Den, published in 1920, he adopted the spelling of his last name used by his great-grandfather, Johannes Adam Remarque. Three years later he published a poem, "To a Woman." In 1925, Remarque got his first break in writing as reporter and assistant editor for Sport im Bild (Sports in Pictures). His snobbish, stilted stories, including instructions for mixing cocktails, caused German critics to view these early writings as proof that Remarque was not serious about his art. Eager for social prominence, Remarque paid Baron von Buchwald to adopt him so that he might add a noble lineage, crest, and calling card to his résumé. That same year, on October 14, Remarque married twenty-four-year-old dancer and actress Jutta Ilse Ingeborg Ellen "Jeanne" Zambona, an attractive, fashionable woman of Italian-Danish descent. Drawn to local social events, he developed a reputation for an upscale lifestyle. In 1927, he serialized a trivial car lover's novel, Station on the Horizon, in the company magazine. Career as a Writer and Filmmaker During this same era, concealing postwar trauma beneath public shows of wit and elitism, Remarque began confronting wartime torments, which he had incubated for a decade in his thoughts and dreams. Within five weeks, Remarque, keeping alert on strong coffee and cigars, composed Im Westen nichts Neues (literally, In the West Nothing New), which was serialized in the magazine Vossische Zeitung from November 10 to December 9, 1928, then appeared in novel form the next year in English as All Quiet on the Western Front. Although publishers were skeptical that the postwar reader was still interested in World War I, Remarque's pacifist bestseller sold a million and a half copies that same year and in time was translated into twenty-nine languages. His countrymen, who bought most of the first printing, raised a confusing barrage of enthusiasm and criticism, stating that Remarque simultaneously dramatized pacifism by overstating wartime dangers, enriched himself by glamorizing the German battlefield, and promoted communism. The German Officers League, on hearing talk of a Nobel Prize nomination for Remarque, challenged the Swedish committee's wisdom in considering the proposal. The strongest voices against Remarque belonged to the National Socialist party, an ultranationalist group, who accused him of deliberately creating an antihero to denigrate war and of degrading Germany by victimizing manufacturers and medical staff as incompetent and opportunistic. Refusing his critics the satisfaction of verbal confrontation, Remarque rejected interviews, labeling his work nonpolitical so as to allow readers to draw their own conclusions. However, Remarque had touched a nerve, and the themes and ideas of this first best-seller would echo through his writing for the rest of his life. The next decade brought further turmoil to Remarque's life. Long a seeker of affluence, he bought a Lancia convertible and dressed the part of the bon vivant. In 1930, he ended his formal marriage to Jeanne; the two remained together, however, and moved to Casa Remarque in Porto Ronco, on Switzerland's Lake Maggiore. It was during this year that Remarque made his first move toward cinema with Universal Studio's black-and-white version of All Quiet, which used a 930-acre ranch in Irvine, California, for its battlefield setting. Starring Slim Summerville, 2,000 extras, and unknown actor Lew Ayres as Bäumer, the film, featuring real howitzers, land mines, and flamethrowers, received Academy Awards for best picture and for direction. In addition, scriptwriters Del Andrews, Maxwell Anderson, and George Abbott, as well as photographer Arthur Edeson, who melodramatically concludes with a close-up of Paul's hand clutching at a butterfly when he is hit by a sniper's bullet, also received Academy Awards. Labeled by critics as an American landmark and a major coup for Universal, the film was touted by the National Board of Review and named picture of the year by Photoplay. Variety magazine commented that the League of Nations should "buy up the master-print, reproduce it in every language to be shown to every nation every year until the word war is taken out of the dictionaries." The movie reached vast audiences and caused the growing Nazi party great concern. In the early 1930s, Hitler youth, prodded by propagandist Goebbels, rattled German movie audiences by overrunning theatres, releasing white mice, and tossing beer bottles and stink bombs. Within weeks, the movie was banned. Undeterred, in 1931, Remarque published The Road Back, a study of postwar trauma. Similar in tone and theme to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the novel delineates the slow recovery process, which finally reawakens young survivors to nature and healing. But war was to continue haunting Remarque. Because he was a sincere patriot, Remarque was unable to shut out Germany's attempts to kindle another world war. Immersed in antique Egyptian artifacts, Venetian mirrors, music, and priceless paintings by Cezanne, Daumier, Picasso, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Pissarro, Renoir, and van Gogh, Remarque tried to ignore the hatred of Hitler's propagandist, Josef Goebbels, who plotted to punish the author for antiwar sentiments. Goebbels cranked out a stream of lies and innuendo, linking Remarque with bohemians, Jews, and communists. He also charged him with removing money illegally from the country, concealing Jewish ancestry, championing internationalism and Marxism, and besmirching the memory of heroes killed at Ypres, in Flanders, and in France. In 1933, zealots burned Remarque in effigy in the Obernplatz, the ornate plaza facing Berlin's opera house. That same year, in the company of books by Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Maxim Gorki, Bertolt Brecht, and Albert Einstein, All Quiet on the Western Front was reduced to ashes in front of the Berlin Opera House. Ironically, Soviet Russia repeated the ban later in 1949. Despite the reaction of the book burners, Three Comrades, a sequel to All Quiet extolling the virtues of battlefield friendships, was published in 1931. This pre-World War II novel showed a glimpse of Remarque's love for Jeanne Zambona and moved beyond male bonding to a sweet, but doomed, romantic interest. In January 1938, to spare Jeanne the loss of her Swiss visa and a forced return to Germany, Remarque married her a second time and negotiated an open relationship, giving each of them the freedom they desired. In June, Remarque was stripped of his German citizenship. Throughout his life, he remained sensitive to his nationality, proclaiming, "I had to leave Germany because my life was threatened. I was neither a Jew nor orientated towards the left politically. I was the same then as I am today: a militant pacifist." Later, he moved farther south, settling in Paris and Antibes with longtime companion Marlene Dietrich, cultivating a coterie of expatriates, and drinking heavily. Publicity about Remarque's lifestyle on the French Riviera boosted sales of his books. In response to growing anti-Nazi sentiment, the 1930 film of All Quiet was reissued in the United States in 1939. Padded with voice-overs, prologue, and epilogue, this version proved less emphatic than the original. Shown the world over, it did not appear in Remarque's homeland until 1952, when it was shown in Berlin. Movies would continue to spread Remarque's pacifism. Two films were made of Remarque's novels in 1937 and 1938. First, Universal Studios filmed The Road Back, starring John King, Richard Cromwell, Slim Summerville, Andy Devine, Spring Byington, and Noah Beery. The film so inflamed the German embassy that the director was forced to minimize Remarque's anti-Fascist themes. The following year, MGM released Joseph L. Mankiewicz's version of Three Comrades, using a screenplay by F. Scott Fitzgerald and starring Robert Taylor, Robert Young, Franchot Tone, and Margaret Sullavan, whose performance received an Oscar nomination. Reviews from Time and the National Board of Review remarked on the film's beauty, skillful actors, and sensitive direction. Life in America A new life and citizenship awaited Remarque in America. Shortly before Hitler precipitated war by invading Poland, Remarque, too proud to accept proffered German citizenship, escaped the Gestapo by traveling the back roads through France, sailed on a Panamanian passport aboard the Queen Mary, and entered New York as a literary star. To reporters, Remarque predicted World War II and looked to President Franklin Roosevelt as the world's only hope. In 1941, he published Flotsam (entitled "Love Thy Neighbor" in German), in a serialized version in Collier's. It featured the sufferings of exiles fleeing Hitler's Germany. Remarque collected material for the work from numerous poignant stories that were standard fare among his many expatriate friends. The same year it appeared with a new name as United Artists' So Ends Our Night, but it was unsuccessful as a movie and received only one Academy Award nomination, for Louis Gruenberg's music. The film starred Fredric March, Frances Dee, Glenn Ford, Margaret Sullavan, and Erich von Stroheim. Remarque's time in Los Angeles was followed by a celebrated social life on the east coast. While working for various movie studios, Remarque lived in a colony of German expatriates in west Los Angeles until 1942, when he moved to New York's Ambassador Hotel and eventually to an apartment on East 57th Street, which he considered his permanent home. A lover of beauty, Remarque squired starlets to the Stork Club, Ciro's, and 21, making friends with Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. He felt at home with the style and companionship of the "glittering people." However, even at this safe distance from Hitler's menace, Remarque was not spared the beheading of his sister, fashion designer Elfriede Scholz, in a Berlin prison. The Nazis' perverted insult to her grisly demise was a bill for ninety marks sent by the executioner to Remarque, the brother whose pacifism had precipitated their unstinting spite. The next few years would bring more books and films but also great sadness. When the war ended, Remarque published Arch of Triumph (1945), a major novel that depicted the struggles of pre-World War II exiles and was set in Remarque's beloved Paris. The novel highlighted the stoic, existential strength of Ravic, one of his most memorable protagonists. Later, in 1952, he would revisit his sister Elfriede's death in dedicating his next novel to her, a victim of Nazi vengeance. Spark of Life, describing concentration camps, was the first of Remarque's works to remain unfilmed. In the author's description, he wrote ". . . if it is a good book it will be widely read and through it, some people who did not understand before may be made to understand what the Nazis were like and what they did and what their kind will try to do again." During the years between these two novels, Remarque saw two more of his books made into film, the recently published Arch of Triumph and The Other Love. The latter was a 1947 movie about a melodramatic failed romance starring David Niven and Barbara Stanwyck. In 1948, Lewis Milestone again directed a Remarque title when Arch of Triumph was brought to the screen by United Artists. Starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Louis Calhern, and Charles Laughton, the teary pre-World War II reflection lost three and a half million dollars. However, like All Quiet, it would later be revived for television. Life became less oppressive for Remarque in his last two decades. In 1954, he published A Time to Love and a Time to Die, dedicated to his close friend, and later his wife, Paulette Goddard Remarque. This novel achieved popular success as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Its focus, the effect of Gestapo tactics on civilians, bares the scars inflicted by Germans who chose complicity with the Nazis as a means of coping. The abridged German version of this novel incurred controversy because the editors excised the full horrors of Remarque's incisive view of the Nazi perversion of the national soul. In 1955, Remarque scripted Michael Musmanno's Ten Days to Die under the title The Last Act, which was filmed by an Austrian company to depict Hitler's final days. An effective vehicle, it starred Oskar Werner and earned appreciative comment at the Edinburgh Film Festival. A second Remarque book-to-film, The Black Obelisk, quickly followed in 1956, and its setting returned to hometown scenes following World War I. It contains more ribaldry and humor than Remarque generally incorporated in his writing. That same year, The Last Station, Remarque's only play, was performed under the title Berlin 1945 at Berlin's Renaissance Theatre during a cultural festival. A reenactment of the Russian takeover of Berlin, the play pitted two conquering armies against the greater good of democracy and free speech, one of Remarque's more heartfelt issues. It would be revived in America two decades later. An American citizen since 1947, Remarque sought an amicable divorce from Jeanne in Juarez, Mexico, in 1957. On February 25, 1958, he married actress Paulette Goddard. A trim, vibrant, virile man, Remarque enjoyed peace and contentment in his final marriage, which appeared to be a match of true love. A reader of Malraux, Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Poe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Rilke, London, Wilder, and Zen philosophy, he also devoted himself to book discussions, long walks, and collecting Iranian rugs and Chinese bronze figurines, which his wife later sold to relieve the burden of guarding his costly treasures. Later Years During the 1960s, Remarque expanded the short story "Beyond" into a novel, which he titled Heaven Has No Favorites (1961). It described a star-crossed love story between a young sanitarium patient and a race car driver. The following year, he wrote Night in Lisbon, which centered around the theme of stateless emigrants and captured the rootlessness of many of his compatriots. Remarque and his work remained close to the film industry during the 1960s. During his entire life he wrote, scripted, and/or acted in ten films and was nicknamed the "King of Hollywood." In 1964, he consulted with other eyewitness experts for The Longest Day, a special effects extravaganza that won an Academy Award for Photography. The last work filmed in his lifetime was United Artists' A Time to Love and a Time to Die, which was four years in the making. Filmed in 1968, it brought together a youthful John Gavin and Swiss starlet Lilo Pulver, plus Keenan Wynn, Don Defore, Jock Mahoney, and Remarque, who wrote part of the dialogue and played Professor Pohlmann, earning worthy reviews for his acting skills. The movie, although frequently compared to All Quiet and to Hemingway's successful The Sun Also Rises, failed to meet critical expectations. Few days remained for Remarque. Goddard remained at his side through rehabilitative respites from arthritis, stroke, and congestive heart failure, until his death from an aortic aneurysm in St. Agnese Hospital, Locarno, Switzerland, on September 25, 1970. She respected his wishes to be buried privately near Lake Maggiore, in the land that had become his home when Germany rejected him, and never disclosed to the public his private papers and journals. However, two works were published posthumously and Remarque's novels continued to be filmed or revived in various forms. In 1972, Shadows in Paradise replayed his familiar theme of postwar trauma for exiled Europeans. The following year, Leonard Nimoy and Swedish actress Bibi Andersson starred in Peter Stone's English adaptation of The Last Station, titling it Full Circle. It riveted audiences in New York and Washington, D.C. Five years later Warner Brothers tackled Heaven Has No Favorites, renaming it Bobby Deerfield. Although directed and produced by Sydney Pollack and starring Al Pacino as the Grand Prix racer opposite Marthe Keller as his dying love interest, the film was a flawed effort. In 1979, All Quiet was revived a third time, this time as a TV movie starring Richard Thomas as Paul, Ernest Borgnine as Kat, Ian Holm as Himmelstoss, and Patricia Neal as Paul's mother. Filmed in Czechoslovakia, it utilized Tarrazin, a World War II concentration camp, as the barracks. The final scene depicts Bäumer as killed in action while observing a lark. Several years later, a second version of Arch of Triumph was reshot for television in France in 1985, following an abortive attempt in 1980. Unlike the original, in this version the chemistry of Anthony Hopkins and Lesley-Anne Down resulted in a more successful re-creation of Remarque's novel. Throughout his lifetime, Remarque revisited the themes and ideas of his earlier amazing landmark antiwar novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. In both novel and film form, his ideas continued to cause great consternation and anger to oppressive governments and kept in the public eye the tremendous sacrifice, death, horror, and destruction caused by war. ****** Critical Essays Major Themes The Lost Generation In the autumn of 1918, Paul Bäumer, a 20-year-old German soldier, contemplates his future: "Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing anymore. I am so alone and so without hope that I can confront them without fear" (Chapter 12). These final, melancholy thoughts occur just before his young and untimely death. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque creates Paul Bäumer to represent a whole generation of men who are known to history as the "lost generation." Eight million men died in battle, twenty-one million were injured, and over six and a half million noncombatants were killed in what is called "The Great War." When the smoke cleared and the bodies were finally buried, the world asked — like Paul and his friends — why? Remarque writes his story to explain their reason for asking this question and why they felt betrayed by their teachers, families, and government. He creates a tale of inhumanity and unspeakable horror and the only redeeming themes of his book are the recurring ideas of comradeship in the face of death and nature's beauty in the face of bleak hopelessness. Remarque prefaces his story with his purpose: "I will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war." Throughout the story, the reader feels that this generation has come through an event that closes forever their chance to go back to the world of their childhood. As early as Chapter 2, Paul Bäumer describes the difference between his generation and that of his parents or even the older soldiers. They had a life before the war, a life where they felt comfortable and secure. But Paul's generation never had a chance at that life. He explains, "Our knowledge of life is limited to death" (Chapter 10). Even when the story begins, all Paul has known is death, horror, fear, suffering, and hopelessness. He and his fellow classmates are only nineteen and twenty years old; even the young recruit who is mortally wounded in Chapter 4 causes Kat to say, "Such a kid. . . .young innocents — ." They feel nothing, believe in nothing, and see no future because of their experiences in the war. Even if there were a future, in Chapter 5, Paul and his friends occasionally speculate on what it might hold. Paul cannot imagine anything that would have been "worth having lain here in the muck for" and sees everything as "confused and hopeless." His friend Albert, who will end up in a hospital with his leg amputated, feels that the war has ruined them for everything. Another soldier in their group, Kropp, understands that they will not be able to peel away two years of shells and bombs like an old sock When they were eighteen, they were just starting to live life as adults, but that life was cut short by the war and, as Paul says of their world, ". . . we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts." Will they live to fall in love, to marry, to have children? This is a future they cannot imagine and dare not think about. Paul goes home on leave and regrets what it does to his heart. As he enters his childhood town, he realizes his life will never be the same. A terrible gulf exists between his present and his past and also between himself and his parents. He sees his past, in Chapter 6, as "a vast inapprehensible melancholy. . . . They [memories] are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. . . . And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. . . . I believe we are lost." At home on leave among his books and childhood papers, he realizes that he can never find his way back to that earlier Paul. Too much has happened at the front for him to believe in human beings or compassion. Even with his parents he realizes that life will never be the same. Paul knows his contemporaries share his feelings near the end of his story when he views the desperate and dying in the hospital: ". . . [a]nd 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." Betrayal This lost generation felt a terrible sense of betrayal by their parents, teachers, and government. As they looked around and asked "why," they focused on what they had learned at home and in school. Paul and his friends feel a terrible sense of the absurd when they see how important protocol seems to be to the older generation. The Kaiser visits and all is polished until he leaves; then the new uniforms are given back and the rags of uniforms reappear. The patriotic myths of the older generation become apparent when Paul goes home. A sergeant-major chastises Paul for not saluting him when Paul has spent a good share of his life in the trenches killing the enemy and trying to survive. These examples of betrayal appear again and again in Remarque's novel. Parents also carry the heavy burden of the lost generation's accusation. Paul says that German parents are always ready with the word "coward" for a young person who will not join up. He feels that parents should have been mediators and guides for Paul's friends, but they let them down. No longer can they trust their parents' generation. He speaks of the wise but poor people in relation to their parents: "The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy." He sees this already in Chapter 1 and realizes that his generation is terribly alone and does not share its parent's traditional values. Teachers are also to blame. Going home, Paul hears the head-master spew empty patriotic rhetoric and argue that he knows better than Paul what is happening in the war. Paul blames his old schoolteacher Kantorek for Joseph Behm's death, because Kantorek goaded the hapless Behm to join up. And Paul knows there are Kantoreks all over Germany lecturing their students to patriotic fervor. Even Leer, who was so good at mathematics in school, dies of a terrible wound and Paul wonders what good his school-learned mathematics will do him now. Paul's entire generation has a terrible feeling of betrayal when they consider military protocol, their parents, and their school teachers. Old men start the war and young men die. Whether it be this war or any war since, the agony of the fighters is echoed in Paul's words in Chapter 10, as he gazes around the hospital: 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, or done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all 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. Man's Inhumanity to Man Paul and his friends become so inured to death and horror all around them that the inhumanity and atrocities of war become part of everyday life. Here is where Remarque is at his greatest: in his description of the true horror and paralyzing fear at the front. He describes the atrocities, the terrible consequences of weapons of mass destruction, and how soldiers become hardened to death and its onslaught of sensory perceptions during battle. Atrocities are simply a part of the inhumane business of war. In Chapter 6, Paul and his men come across soldiers whose noses are cut off and eyes poked out with their own saw bayonets. Their mouths and noses are stuffed with sawdust so they suffocate. This constant view of death causes the soldiers to fight back like insensible animals. They use spades to cleave faces in two and jab bayonets into the backs of any enemy who is too slow to get away. Their callousness is contrasted with the reaction of the new recruits who sob, tremble, and give in to front-line madness described over and over again in scenes of the front. Remarque vividly recounts the horror of constant death as Paul comes upon scenes of destruction. In Chapter 6, he sees a Frenchman who dies under German fire. The man's body collapses, hands suspended, and then his body drops away with only the stumps of arms and hands hanging in the wire and the rest of his body on the ground. They later come upon a scene with dead bodies whose bellies are swollen like balloons. "They hiss, belch, and make movements. The gases in them make noises." The smell of blood and putrefaction is overwhelming and causes many of Paul's company to be nauseated and retch. The assault on the senses is overwhelming. They later pile the dead in a shell hole with "three layers so far." This horrifying picture is grimly elaborated on in Chapter 9 when they pass through a forest where there are bodies of victims of trench mortars. It is a "forest of the dead." Parts of naked bodies are hanging in trees, and Paul brutally describes pieces of arms here and half of a naked body there. By the time Remarque reaches Chapter 11, he has described the soldier's life as one long, endless chain of the following: Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks — shattering, corroding, death. Dysentery, influenza, typhus — scalding, choking death. Trenches, hospitals, the common grave — there are no other possibilities. Comradeship Throughout all the horrifying pictures of death and inhumanity, Remarque does scatter a redeeming quality: comradeship. When Paul and his friends waylay Himmelstoss and beat on him, we laugh because he deserves it and they are only giving him his due. As time goes by, however, the pictures of camaraderie relieve the terrible descriptions of front line assaults and death, and they provide a bright light in a place of such terrible darkness. A young recruit becomes gun-shy in his first battle when a rocket fires and explosions begin. He creeps over to Paul and buries his head in Paul's chest and arms, and Paul kindly, gently, tells him that he will get used to it (Chapter 4). Perhaps the two most amazing scenes of humanity and caring can be found in the story of the goose roasting and the battle where his comrades' voices cause Paul to regain his nerve. In Chapter 5, Paul and Kat have captured a goose and are roasting it late at night. Paul says, "We don't talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have. We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death." As he watches Kat roasting the goose and hears his voice, it brings Paul peace and reassurance. Over and over again, in scenes of battle and scenes of rest, we see the comradeship of this tiny group of men. Even though Paul counts their losses at various points, he always considers their close relationship and attempts to keep them together to help each other. In Chapter 9, when Paul is alone in the trench, he loses his nerve and his direction and is afraid he will die. Instead, he hears the voices of his friends: "I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the 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." There is a grace here, in the face of all sorrow and hopelessness, a grace that occurs when men realize their humanity and their reliance on others. Through thick and thin, battle and rest, horror and hopelessness, these men hold each other up. Finally, Paul has only Kat and he loses even this friend and father-figure in Chapter 11. Kat's death is so overwhelming and so final that we do not hear Paul's reaction; we only see him break down in the face of it. There is such final irony in the medic's question about whether they are related. This man, this hero, this father, this life — has been closer to Paul than his own blood relatives and yet Paul must say, "No, we are not related." It is the final stunning blow before Paul must go on alone. Nature Throughout his novel, Remarque uses nature in several ways. It revitalizes the soldiers after terrible hardships, reflects their sadness, and provides a contrast to the unnatural world of war. When Kemmerich, the first of Paul's classmates dies, Paul takes his identification tags and walks outside. "I breathe as deep as I can, and feel the breeze in my face, warm and soft as never before." Many times throughout the novel Remarque uses nature in this way to restore men and help them go on. Nature also reflects the terrible sadness of the lost generation. In Chapter 4, Paul's company sustains heavy losses and a recruit is wounded so badly Paul and Kat consider killing him to end his suffering. The lorries and medics arrive too quickly, and they are forced to rethink their decision. Paul watches the rain fall and says: "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." The cleansing rain falls upon the hopelessness of Paul's life and the lives of those around him. Throughout Remarque's book, we also see a strong affinity between nature and lost dreams and memories. When Paul is on sentry duty in Chapter 6, he remembers his childhood and thinks about the poplar avenue where such a long time ago they sat beneath the trees and put their feet in the stream. Back then the water was fragrant, the wind melodious; these memories of nature cause a powerful calmness and awaken a remembrance of what was — but sadly, will never be again. Finally, butterflies play gracefully and settle on the teeth of a skull; birds fly through the air in a carefree pattern. This is nature in the midst of death and destruction. While men kill each other and wonder why, the butterflies, birds, and breeze flutter though the killing fields and carry on as if mankind were quite insignificant. Even at the end when Paul knows there is so little time until the armistice, he reflects on the beauty of life and hopes that he can stay alive until the laws of nature once again prevail and the actions of men bring peace. He describes the red poppies, meadows, beetles, grass, trees at twilight, and the stars. How can such beauty go on in the midst of such heartache? Remarque says that this novel "will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war." If words can touch what men hold to be dear in their hearts and so cause them to change the world, this book with its words of a lost generation, lost values, and lost humanity is surely one that should be required reading for all generations. **** Critical Essays Style Remarque, telling his story for the most part in first-person until he briefly adopts third-person following Paul's death, enables the reader to identify with a single eyewitness account, which evolves from his own experiences on the western front. Immature and at times bewildered, Paul, still in his teens, enters the war with enthusiasm, unprepared for the total obliteration of his comrades, his country's militaristic aims, his ideals, and his own fragile hold on life. As did the painters of the late nineteenth century, Remarque uses fragmented, dramatic moments in Paul's enlightenment and molds them into a stark, impressionistic whole. The most theatrical of these moments are: Kemmerich's dying words the bombardment of the cemetery Paul's first furlough the pathos of hungry prisoners Gérard Duval's death Paul's attempt to save Kat These scenes give readers a sense of immediacy, as though they too honed bayonets, huddled in trenches, ducked waggle-tops and daisy-cutters, and grasped at life amid chaos. Taken as a unit, or what psychologists call a gestalt, the novel converges into a bleak pattern delineating the loss of personhood under the continual pounding of artillery, planes, and Allied assault. Like Homer, Virgil, and the epic writers who produced the Chanson de Roland, Mahabharata, Beowulf, Kalevala, El Cid, and the Nibelungenlied, Remarque emulates the conventions of war literature, particularly the Greek epic. He centers on the battlefield, beginning in medias res, or in the middle of things, moving back to the classroom and forward to the bitter end of Paul and his friends. He emphasizes the Homeric, or epic simile, comparing events of war with scenes from nature, as with Paul's absorption in the coming of autumn, the rustling of poplar leaves, and "the canteens [which] hum like beehives with rumours of peace." He catalogs his warriors, introducing Paul's classmates one by one, delineating their personality traits and idiosyncrasies, such as Detering's interest in farming, Haie's ham-sized hands, and Albert's desire to reason through the illogic of war. He stresses hubris, the Greek concept of excessive pride, as seen in Himmelstoss' enjoyment of his power over young recruits and Kantorek's strutting chauvinism. He depicts Paul as the vulnerable infantryman, whose importance to the world cataclysm lifts him to the level of an everyman. He extends his canvas over a vast setting — the Western Front, which is described as a five-hundred-mile human wall pitted against the Allied assault. He celebrates male bonding, just as the Iliad emphasizes Achilles' love for Patroclus, whose death overpowers his control of emotions. He focuses on blind chance, over which humans have no power. He maintains an objectivity toward the slaughter of a war, the proportions of which involve a long list of nations that mirror the suffering experienced by all soldiers — German or otherwise, even enemies. In terms of the central intelligence, the novel veers sharply away from epic tradition of the noble warrior; instead, it depicts the decimation of the ordinary foot soldier. Remarque's uncanny grasp of mental breakdown suggests a personal involvement with the character — an identification stemming from his own need to exorcise the terrors of war, which, ten years after his military service, continued to plague him. In telling the story of Paul Bäumer, a German soldier, Remarque creates a universal portrayal of warfare in all its grimness and hypocrisy, despair and waste. As Paul explains his role in the Great War: 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. Dramatizing only one enemy soldier by name and personality, Remarque concentrates on enemy fire as though it were a faceless, demonic machine, churning relentlessly through lines of men, flattening them in foxholes, skewering them with lethal projectiles from machine guns, rifles, grenades, and flamethrowers, and anonymously searing their lungs with gas. A far cry from the romanticized chivalric hero of Arthurian legends, the inexperienced young soldier, lacking epic stature, epitomizes a humanity that demands an end to international conflict acted out with heinous killing machines. As Paul concludes, the level to which he and his comrades are reduced reminds him of Bushmen, the primitive forebears of the human race who should long before have educated future generations on the futility of war. In Paul's only face-to-face confrontation with the enemy, he rises above savagery through first-hand experience and compassion. He speaks the apology of humankind — words that beg pardon for citizenship in nations that choose to annihilate each other rather than to negotiate peacefully their differences. Tragically, men like the Russian prisoners, Paul, Tjaden, Kat, Lewandowski, and Gérard Duval come from ordinary working class families, not the privileged, noble houses of the Kaiser or Hindenburg, whom Paul and Albert blame for fostering such wasteful destruction, such blatant disregard for nature. Sacrifice, exemplified by the jar of jam and potato-cakes from home, falls heavily on noncombatants like Paul's mother and sister, who suffer rationing, but willingly pay the price if their self-denial means that Paul will know some bit of comfort in his mud-floored trench. Likewise, Marja abdicates the dignity of sexual relations exchanged in the privacy of her marital bed in order to snatch a few moments of intimacy with her husband, Johann, in a hospital ward. The nurse on the train, speaking for other noncombatants willing to share the privations of war, urges Paul to rest while he can and disregard the soiling of sheets, which she will gladly wash and iron in exchange for his brief enjoyment of a real bed. ***** Critical Essays Symbolism All Quiet demonstrates a controlled use of symbols, which guide the reader's thinking toward significant themes of loss and longing. Most prominent are the soft airman's boots, which pass from man to man after each wearer succumbs to a violent death. Worn by Kemmerich before his injury, they were undoubtedly stripped from a downed British airman before changing hands, which they do twice more as successive owners die. In all, four men possess the boots; none survives the war. In graphic scenes, Russian prisoners exchange their boots for crusts of bread; dismembered bodies lose not only boots, but the feet and legs they cover. Others, like Albert, have their limbs surgically removed, then fitted with artificial limbs, which mock the propriety of a whole body, undefiled by war. A second symbol, butterflies, derives in part from Remarque's childhood hobby of collecting insects and mounting them in a case. For Paul, the butterflies, mocked by the ominous observation balloons that hover overhead, exemplify the innocence and joy of nature. Even when the graceful creatures alight on a skull, their presence reminds the men and the reader that the land on which battles are fought still contains a semblance of natural order. A second purpose of butterflies is a tangible representation of fragility and vulnerability. Like the frail-winged insect, Paul's life, and the lives of countless other young men, hovers on earth for a short while and ends all too soon. The horses of Chapter 4 emphasize the change of warfare from earlier dependence on beasts of burden to mechanical devices, such as grenades, cannons, flamethrowers, machine guns, balloons, and aerial shells. The noble animals, which bear a column of men to the front, remind Paul of the steeds ridden by knights of old. The terrible cries of these wounded beasts are like the "mourning of the world martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror and groaning." Emblematic of the violence human warriors do to nature, the horses' terrified cries perturb Detering, the farmer who values the animals far too much to jeopardize their lives in battle. In similar fashion, the messenger dog, also victimized and left to howl its pain, draws Berger into harm's way, where he too dies in No Man's Land. Women in the novel represent peace, gentleness, and nurturing, as well as sexual release. The girl in the poster inspires a nostalgic urge for peacetime in Paul and, for two of his comrades, she rouses them to masturbation. At the same time, the vision of her fresh good looks emphasizes Paul's scruffy clothes and infestation with lice. The brunette, who pragmatically exchanges sex for food and cigarettes, holds him close, allowing intimacy as a means of staying alive. His hometown looks so inviting that he compares it to a mother. Before reaching his front door, he rejects the offer of coffee from a smiling Red Cross sister, then gratefully accepts potato-cakes and whortleberry jam from his mother and sister, who have sacrificed to provide his favorite foods. Even at the beer garden, the spire of St. Margaret's Church seems to raise a blessing over his furlough and assure his safety for the duration of his leave. On his way out of his mother's room, Paul trips over his pack, a significant fall, which jerks his awareness back to the war, which stands in the way of his home duties, which urge him to comfort his mother as she battles cancer. On the train to Cologne, Paul receives the kindness of a nurse who ennobles his sacrifices for his country with clean sheets and personal care. At the Catholic hospital, the nuns pray during Morning Devotion, despite the men's wish for an extended sleep. A night nurse, rousted by insistent wardmates, scurries to the aid of Albert, whose wound has broken open and begun to bleed. Another nun, Sister Libertine, spreads cheer among the men, who repay her goodness with deep gratitude, especially after she returns Little Peter from almost certain death in the room beside the morgue. Marja Lewandowski, who brings along her child, shares pieces of sausage, and plumps up wilted pillows, represents motherhood and wifely regard for her husband, who craves intercourse with her after ten months in the hospital. Paul's fondness for potato-cakes, a direct offshoot of his attitude toward his mother, symbolizes home and sacrifice. Like the men who dig into the earth with shovels and sometimes teeth and fingernails to survive bombardment, the potato is a grubby, humble outgrowth of the same soil, as well as a welcome treat when grated and cooked in patties. During the severe rationing at home, Paul's sister must stand in line for food, his father works late to support his household, and Paul's mother, saintly and unselfish, cooks the cakes and puts up whortleberry jam because they are his favorite foods. The gifts are so precious to Paul that he feels compelled to share them with the starving prisoners of war and with his buddies. ****** All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues, lit. 'Nothing New in the West') is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental trauma during the war as well as the detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home from the war. The novel was first published in November and December 1928 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung and in book form in late January 1929. The book and its sequel, The Road Back (1930), were among the books banned and burned in Nazi Germany. All Quiet on the Western Front sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages in its first 18 months in print.[1] In 1930, the book was adapted as an Academy Award-winning film of the same name, directed by Lewis Milestone. It was adapted again in 1979 by Delbert Mann, this time as a television film starring Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine; and again in 2022 with the same name, directed by Edward Berger. Title and translation The English translation by Arthur Wesley Wheen gives the title as All Quiet on the Western Front. The literal translation of "Im Westen nichts Neues" is "Nothing New in the West," with "West" being the Western Front; the phrase refers to the content of an official communiqué at the end of the novel. Brian Murdoch's 1993 translation rendered the phrase as "there was nothing new to report on the Western Front" within the narrative. However, in the foreword, he explains his retention of the original book title: Although it does not match the German exactly, Wheen's title has justly become part of the English language and is retained here with gratitude. The phrase "all quiet on the Western Front" has become a colloquial expression meaning stagnation, or lack of visible change, in any context.[2] Murdoch also explains how, due to the time it was published, Wheen's translation was obliged to Anglicise some lesser-known German references and lessen the impact of certain passages, while omitting others entirely. Murdoch's translation is more accurate to the original text and completely unexpurgated. Plot summary The book centers on Paul Bäumer, a German soldier on the Western Front during World War I. At the start of the book, Paul lives with his parents and sister in a charming German village. He attends school, where the patriotic speeches of his teacher Kantorek lead the whole class to volunteer for the Imperial German Army shortly after the start of The Great War. Bäumer arrives at the Western Front with his friends and schoolmates (Leer, Müller, Kropp, Kemmerich and a number of other characters). There, they meet Stanislaus Katczinsky, an older soldier nicknamed Kat, who becomes Paul's mentor. While fighting at the front, Bäumer and his comrades engage in frequent battles and endure the treacherous and filthy conditions of trench warfare. The battles fought here have no names and seem to have little overall significance, except for the impending possibility of injury or death. Only meager pieces of land are gained, which are often lost again later. Remarque often refers to the living soldiers as old and dead, emotionally drained and shaken. "We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing 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." Paul visits home, and the contrast with civilian life highlights the cost of the war on his psyche. The town has not changed since he went off to war, but he has: he finds that he does "not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world". He feels disconnected from most of the townspeople. His father asks him "stupid and distressing" questions about his war experiences, not understanding "that a man cannot talk of such things". An old schoolmaster lectures him about strategy and advancing to Paris while insisting that Paul and his friends know only their "own little sector" of the war but nothing of the big picture. Indeed, the only person he remains connected to is his dying mother, with whom he shares a tender, yet restrained relationship. The night before he is to return from leave, he stays up with her, exchanging small expressions of love and concern for each other. He thinks to himself, "Ah! Mother, Mother! How can it be that I must part from you? Here I sit and there you are dying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it." In the end, he concludes that he "ought never to have come [home] on leave". Paul is glad to return and reunite with his comrades. Soon after, he volunteers to go on a patrol and kills a man in hand-to-hand combat for the first time. He watches the man die slowly in agony for hours. He is remorseful and devastated, asking for forgiveness from the man's corpse. He later confesses to Kat and Albert, who try to comfort him and reassure him that it is only part of the war. Afterwards, they are sent on what Paul calls a "good job". They must guard a supply depot in a village that was evacuated due to being shelled too heavily. During this time, the men are able to adequately feed themselves, unlike the near-starvation conditions in the German trenches. In addition, the men enjoy themselves while living off the spoils from the village and officers' luxuries from the supply depot (such as fine cigars). While evacuating the villagers (enemy civilians), Paul and Albert are taken by surprise by artillery fired at the civilian convoy and are wounded by a shell. On the train back home, Albert takes a turn for the worse and cannot complete the journey, and instead is sent off the train to recuperate in a Catholic hospital. By a combination of bartering and manipulation, Paul manages to stay together with Albert. Albert eventually has his leg amputated, while Paul is deemed fit for service and returned to the front. By now, the war is nearing its end and the German Army is retreating. In despair, Paul watches as his friends fall one by one. Kat's death is the last straw that finally causes Paul to lose his will to live. In the final chapter, he comments that peace is coming soon, but he does not see the future as bright and shining with hope. Paul feels that he has no aims left in life and that their generation will be different and misunderstood. In October 1918, Paul is finally killed on a remarkably peaceful day. The situation report from the frontline states a simple phrase: "All quiet on the Western Front." Paul's corpse displays a calm expression on its face, "as though almost glad the end had come." Themes This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) At the beginning of the book, Remarque writes, "This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to 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 (its) shells, were destroyed by the war."[3] The book does not focus on heroic stories of bravery, but rather gives a view of the conditions in which the soldiers find themselves. The monotony between battles, the constant threat of artillery fire and bombardments, the struggle to find food, the lack of training of young recruits (meaning lower chances of survival), and the overarching role of random chance in the lives and deaths of the soldiers are described in detail. One of the major themes of the novel is the difficulty experienced by former soldiers trying to revert to civilian life after having experienced extreme combat situations. This internal destruction can be found as early as the first chapter as Paul comments that, although all the boys are young, their youth has already left them. In addition, the massive loss of life and negligible gains from the fighting are constantly emphasized. Soldiers' lives are thrown away by their commanding officers who are stationed comfortably away from the front, ignorant and indifferent of the suffering and terror of the front lines. Another major theme is the concept of blind nationalism. Remarque often emphasizes that the boys were not forced to join the war effort against their will, but rather by a sense of patriotism and pride. Kantorek called Paul's platoon the "Iron Youth", teaching his students a romanticized version of warfare with glory and duty to the Fatherland. It is only when the boys go to war and have to live and fight in dirty, cramped trenches with little protection from enemy bullets and shells while contending with hunger and sickness that they realize just how dispiriting it is to actually serve in the army. Main characters Cover of the first English language edition. The design is based upon a German war bonds poster by Fritz Erler. Paul Bäumer The main character and central figure of the novel. Albert Kropp Kropp is in Paul's class at school and is described as the clearest thinker of the group as well as the smallest. Kropp is wounded towards the end of the novel and undergoes a leg amputation. Both he and Bäumer end up spending time in a Catholic hospital together, Bäumer suffering from shrapnel wounds to the leg and arm. Although Kropp initially plans to commit suicide if he requires an amputation, he postponed suicide because of the strength of military camaraderie and a lack of a revolver. Kropp and Bäumer part ways when Bäumer is recalled to his regiment after recovering. Paul comments that saying farewell was "very hard, but it is something a soldier learns to deal with."[4] Haie Westhus Haie is tall and strong with a good sense of humor, and a peat-digger by profession. His size and behavior make him seem older than Paul, yet he is the same age as Paul and his school-friends, who are roughly 19 at the start of the book. During combat, he is fatally injured in his back (Chapter 6)—the resulting wound is large enough for Paul to see Haie's breathing lung while Himmelstoß (Himmelstoss) carries him to safety. He later dies of this injury. Friedrich Müller Müller is one of Bäumer's classmates, and is 19 when he also volunteers to join the German army. Carrying his old school books with him to the battlefield, he constantly reminds himself of the importance of learning and education. Even while under enemy fire, he "mutters propositions in physics." He takes a liking to Kemmerich's boots and inherits them when Kemmerich dies early in the novel. He is killed later after being shot point-blank in the stomach with a "light pistol" (flare gun). As he was dying "quite conscious and in terrible pain", he gave his boots which he inherited from Kemmerich to Paul. Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky Katczinsky, a recalled reserve militiaman, was a cobbler in civilian life. He is older than Paul Bäumer and his comrades, about 40 years old, and serves as their leadership figure. He also represents a literary model highlighting the differences between the younger and older soldiers. While the older men have already had a life of professional and personal experience before the war, Paul and the men of his age have had little life experience or time for personal growth. Kat is well known for his ability to scavenge nearly any item needed, especially food. At one point he secures four boxes of lobster. Paul describes Kat as possessing a sixth sense. One night, Paul along with a group of other soldiers are held up in a factory with neither rations nor comfortable bedding. Katczinsky leaves for a short while, returning with straw to put over the bare wires of the beds. Later, to feed the hungry men, Kat brings bread, a bag of horse flesh, a lump of fat, a pinch of salt and a pan in which to cook the food. Kat is hit by shrapnel near the end of the story, leaving him with a smashed shin. Paul carries him back to camp on his back, only to discover upon their arrival that a stray splinter had hit Kat in the back of the head and killed him on the way. He is thus the last of Paul's close friends to die in battle. It is Kat's death that eventually makes Bäumer indifferent as to whether he survives the war or not, yet certain that he can face the rest of his life without fear. "Let the months and the years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear." Tjaden "Tjaden" redirects here. For the architect, see Olive Frances Tjaden. One of Bäumer's non-schoolmate friends. Before the war, Tjaden was a locksmith. A big eater with a grudge against the former postman-turned-corporal Himmelstoß (thanks to his strict "disciplinary actions"), he manages to forgive Himmelstoß later in the book. Throughout the book, Paul frequently remarks on how much of an eater he is, yet somehow manages to stay as "thin as a rake". He appears in the sequel, The Road Back. Secondary characters Kantorek Kantorek is the schoolmaster of Paul and his friends, including Kropp, Leer, Müller, and Behm. Behaving "in a way that cost [him] nothing," Kantorek is a strong supporter of the war and encourages Bäumer and other students in his class to join the war effort. Kantorek is a hypocrite, urging the young men he teaches to fight in the name of patriotism, while not voluntarily enlisting himself. In a twist of fate, Kantorek is later drafted. He reluctantly joins the ranks of his former students, where he is drilled and taunted by Mittelstädt, one of the students he had earlier persuaded to enlist. Peter Leer Leer is an intelligent soldier in Bäumer's company, and one of his classmates. He is very popular with women; when he and his comrades meet three French women, he is the first to seduce one of them. Bäumer describes Leer's ability to attract women by saying "Leer is an old hand at the game". In chapter 11, Leer is hit by a shell fragment, which also hits Bertinck. The shrapnel tears open Leer's hip, causing him to bleed to death quickly. His death causes Paul to ask himself, "What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician in school?"[5] Bertinck Lieutenant Bertinck is the leader of Bäumer's company. His men have a great respect for him, and Bertinck has great respect for his men. In the beginning of the book, he permits them to eat the rations of the men that had been killed in action, standing up to the chef Ginger who allowed them only their allotted share. Bertinck is genuinely despondent when he learns that few of his men had survived an engagement. When he and the other characters are trapped in a trench under heavy attack, Bertinck, who has been injured in the firefight, spots a flamethrower team advancing on them. He gets out of cover and takes aim on the flamethrower but misses, and gets hit by enemy fire. With his next shot he kills the flamethrower, and immediately afterwards an enemy shell explodes on his position blowing off his chin. The same explosion also fatally wounds Leer. Himmelstoß Sergeant der Reserve Himmelstoß (which translates as "Heaven-Bound") was a village postman before being mobilised for the war and securing a position as a Sergeant in the Landwehr (Reserves of persons 28-39). Himmelstoß is a power-hungry martinet who compensated for his lack of social standing by abusing his position as the Training NCO for the men under his control, taking sadistic pleasure in punishing the minor infractions of his trainees during their basic training in preparation for their deployment. He had a special contempt for Paul and his friends, because they knew him as their local postman. Paul later figures that the training taught by Himmelstoß made them "hard, suspicious, pitiless, and tough" but most importantly it taught them comradeship. Bäumer and his comrades exact their revenge on Himmelstoß, mercilessly whipping him on the night before they depart for the front. Himmelstoß later joins them at the front, revealing himself as a coward by pretending to be wounded because of a scratch on his face. Paul Bäumer beats him because of it and when a lieutenant comes along looking for men for a trench charge, Himmelstoß joins and leads the charge. He carries Haie Westhus's body to Bäumer after he is fatally wounded. Matured and repentant through his experiences, Himmelstoß later asks for forgiveness from his previous charges. As he becomes the new staff cook, to prove his friendship he secures two pounds of sugar for Bäumer and half a pound of butter for Tjaden. In the 1979 film adaptation, he is referred to as "Corporal" and wears a post 1941 shoulderboard for "Unteroffizier", a very junior NCO. In the book, he was a "Sergeant" or "Unterfeldwebel", a rank reserved for long serving "unteroffizieren" who fulfilled a staff role such as quartermaster, cook, clerks etc. Detering Detering is a farmer who constantly longs to return to his wife and farm. He is fond of horses and is angered when he sees them used in combat. He says, "It is of the vilest baseness to use horses in the war," when the group hears several wounded horses writhe and scream for a long time before dying during a bombardment. He tries to shoot them to put them out of their misery, but is stopped by Kat to keep their current position hidden. He is driven to desert when he sees a cherry tree in blossom, which reminds him of home. He is found by military police and court-martialed and is never heard from again. Josef Hamacher Hamacher is a patient at the Catholic hospital where Paul and Albert Kropp are temporarily stationed. He has an intimate knowledge of the workings of the hospital. He also has a "Special Permit", certifying him as sporadically not responsible for his actions due to a head wound, though he is clearly quite sane and exploiting his permit so he can stay in the hospital and away from the war as long as possible. Franz Kemmerich Just 19 years old, Franz Kemmerich had enlisted with his best friend and classmate, Bäumer. Kemmerich is shot in the leg early in the story; his injured leg has to be amputated, and he dies shortly after. In anticipation of Kemmerich's imminent death, Müller was eager to get his boots. While in the hospital, someone steals Kemmerich's watch that he intended to give to his mother, causing him great distress and prompting him to ask about his watch every time his friends visit him in the hospital. Paul later finds the watch and hands it over to Kemmerich's mother, and lies to her that Franz died instantly and painlessly. Joseph Behm Youthful and overweight, Behm was the only student in Paul's class that was not quickly influenced by Kantorek's patriotism to join the war. Eventually, after pressure from friends and Kantorek, he joins the war. He is the first of Paul's friends to die. He is blinded in no man's land and believed to be dead by his friends. The next day, when he is seen walking blindly around no man's land, it is discovered that he was only unconscious, but he is killed before he can be rescued. Publication and reception Dutch translation, 1929 From November 10 to December 9, 1928, All Quiet on the Western Front was published in serial form in Vossische Zeitung magazine. It was released in book form the following year to great success, selling one and a half million copies that same year. It was the best-selling work of fiction in America for the year 1929, according to Publishers Weekly.[6] Although publishers had worried that interest in World War I had waned more than 10 years after the armistice, Remarque's realistic depiction of trench warfare from the perspective of young soldiers struck a chord with the war's survivors—soldiers and civilians alike—and provoked strong reactions, both positive and negative, around the world. With All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque emerged as an eloquent spokesman for a generation that had been, in his own words, "destroyed by war, even though it might have escaped its shells." Remarque's harshest critics, in turn, were his countrymen, many of whom felt the book denigrated the German war effort, and that Remarque had exaggerated the horrors of war to further his pacifist agenda. The strongest voices against Remarque came from the emerging Nazi Party and its ideological allies. In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, All Quiet on the Western Front became one of the first degenerate books to be publicly burnt;[7] in 1930, screenings of the Academy Award-winning film based on the book were met with Nazi-organized protests and mob attacks on both movie theatres and audience members.[8] Objections to Remarque's portrayal of the World War I German soldiers were not limited to those of the Nazis in 1933. Dr. Karl Kroner [de] was concerned about Remarque's depiction of the medical personnel as being inattentive, uncaring, or absent from frontline action. Kroner was specifically worried that the book would perpetuate German stereotypes abroad that had subsided since the First World War. He offered the following clarification: "People abroad will draw the following conclusions: if German doctors deal with their own fellow countrymen in this manner, what acts of inhumanity will they not perpetuate against helpless prisoners delivered up into their hands or against the populations of occupied territory?"[9][10] A fellow patient of Remarque's in the military hospital in Duisburg objected to the negative depictions of the nuns and patients and to the general portrayal of soldiers: "There were soldiers to whom the protection of homeland, protection of house and homestead, protection of family were the highest objective, and to whom this will to protect their homeland gave the strength to endure any extremities."[10] These criticisms suggest that experiences of the war and the personal reactions of individual soldiers to their experiences may be more diverse than Remarque portrays them; however, it is beyond question that Remarque gives voice to a side of the war and its experience that was overlooked or suppressed at the time. This perspective is crucial to understanding the true effects of World War I. The evidence can be seen in the lingering depression that Remarque and many of his friends and acquaintances were suffering a decade later.[9] The book was also banned in other European countries on the grounds that it was considered anti-war propaganda; Austrian soldiers were forbidden from reading the book in 1929, and Czechoslovakia banned it from its military libraries. The Italian translation was also banned in 1933.[11] When the Nazis were re-militarizing Germany, the book was banned as it was deemed counterproductive to German rearmament.[12] In contrast, All Quiet on the Western Front was trumpeted by pacifists as an anti-war book.[10] Remarque makes a point in the opening statement that the novel does not advocate any political position, but is merely an attempt to describe the experiences of the soldier.[13] Much of the literary criticism came from Salomo Friedlaender, who wrote a book Hat Erich Maria Remarque wirklich gelebt? "Did Erich Maria Remarque really live?" (under the pen name Mynona), which was, in its turn, criticized in: Hat Mynona wirklich gelebt? "Did Mynona really live?" by Kurt Tucholsky.[14] Friedlaender's criticism was mainly personal in nature—he attacked Remarque as being egocentric and greedy. Remarque publicly stated that he wrote All Quiet on the Western Front for personal reasons, not for profit, as Friedlaender had charged.[9][10] Max Joseph Wolff [de] wrote a parody titled Vor Troja nichts Neues (All quiet before the gates of Troy) under the pseudonym Emil Marius Requark.[15] Adaptations Film Poster for the movie All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), featuring star Lew Ayres All Quiet on the Western Front, a 1930 American film directed by Lewis Milestone, starring Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, John Wray, Arnold Lucy, and Ben Alexander. All Quiet on the Western Front, a 2022 German film directed by Edward Berger, starring Felix Kammerer and Albrecht Schuch Television film All Quiet on the Western Front, a 1979 CBS television film by Delbert Mann, starring Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine.[16] Music "All Quiet on the Western Front", a song from Elton John's 1982 album Jump Up!, written by Elton and Bernie Taupin. Radio All Quiet on the Western Front, a 2008 radio adaptation broadcast on BBC Radio 3, starring Robert Lonsdale and Shannon Graney, written by Dave Sheasby, and directed by David Hunter.[17] Audiobooks All Quiet on the Western Front, a 2000 Recorded Books audiobook of the text, read by Frank Muller.[18] All Quiet on the Western Front, a 2010 Hachette Audio UK audiobook narrated by Tom Lawrence.[19] Comics "All Quiet on the Western Front", a 1952 comic book adaptation as part of the Classics Illustrated series.[20]..    ebay6049 208
  • Condition: Used
  • Condition: Good condition. Clean. Tightly bound except of very fragile end pages. ( Pls look at scan for accurate AS IS images )
  • Religion: Judaism
  • Country/Region of Manufacture: Poland

PicClick Insights - 1929 Warsaw 1ST Jewish YIDDISH EDITION Remarque ALL QUIET ON WESTERN FRONT Book PicClick Exclusive

  •  Popularity - 2 watchers, 0.2 new watchers per day, 13 days for sale on eBay. Good amount watching. 0 sold, 1 available.
  •  Best Price -
  •  Seller - 2,805+ items sold. 0% negative feedback. Great seller with very good positive feedback and over 50 ratings.

People Also Loved PicClick Exclusive