Author
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque's novel follows Paul Bäumer, a young German who goes from the classroom to the Western Front and finds that his teachers' patriotic lessons have little to do with mud, shelling, hunger and fear. Told in the first person, it stays with a small circle of comrades, the routines of trench life, a short leave at home, and the gradual loss of any future the men once imagined. It offers a generation's emotional and moral ledger rather than battle strategy. Published in Germany in 1929, banned and burned by the Nazis, it remains one of the classic novels to read about the First World War and a touchstone of antiwar literature.