All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, follows Paul Baumer, a nineteen-year-old schoolboy in a quiet German town whose schoolmaster Kantorek fills his pupils with patriotic talk and sends almost the entire class to enlist in the Imperial German Army. At the Western Front Paul is joined by the classmates who signed up with him, among them Albert Kropp, Muller, Leer and Franz Kemmerich. The novel is narrated by Paul and draws on Remarque's own service as a German veteran of the First World War.

At the training camp the class is scattered among platoons of Frisian fishermen, peasants and labourers, and their former village postman reappears as the petty-minded Sergeant Himmelstoss. At the front they meet Stanislaus Katczinsky, a recalled reservist and a cobbler in civilian life who is about forty and becomes Paul's mentor. The book moves through the routines of the trenches, the bombardments and the shortage of food, into the hospital wards, and on to a period of leave during which Paul finds that his home town and the people in it no longer fit him.

All Quiet on the Western Front first appeared in serial form in the newspaper Vossische Zeitung between November and December 1928, and was issued as a book in January 1929; Arthur Wesley Wheen's English translation followed in 1929 and gave the novel the title it carries in English.