Eighteen-year-old Erich Paul Remark was draft into
the German Army to fight in World War I. He was sent to the Western Front in
July 1917. There he experienced the horrors of war, as did many thousands of
other young men on both sides. On July 31 he was wounded (shrapnel in the left
leg, right arm, neck) and sent to an Army hospital where he spent the rest of
the war.
Afterward he became a teacher until he took a leave
of absence in 1920 to begin a literary life. He changed his name to Erich Maria
Remarque. Maria in honor of his mother and Remarque, the traditional German
spelling of his name
In 1929, he published his third novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. In the
novel, eighteen-year-old Paul Baumer is a young German soldier fighting in the
trenches in France. Like the Southerners in Gone
With the Wind, Paul and his buddies head for the front with glorious ideas
of quickly over-running the French. Instead, they are horrified by the blood-drenched
trenches, the constant shelling, the mud, and the general misery of life at the
Front.
When Paul returns home on leave, he is disgusted by
the inaccuracies that people have of the battle---much like the American troops
endured during Vietnam.
I first read this novel over summer break as a teen.
Considered the greatest war novel of all time, I have to concur. Remarque takes
readers into the trenches with him and, through his eyes, readers can
experience the tragedy of war. One of things that make it stand out is that the
point of view is from a German solider.
Remarque probably suffered from shell shock, or
PTSD, as we know it today. I believe that he wrote to try to exorcize the
demons that haunted him. He wrote nine other novels, all concerning war, but All Quiet on the Western Front is the
one for which he is most remembered.
6 out of 5 stars.
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