All Quiet on the Western Front

What All Quiet on the Western Front is about

Paul Bäumer and his classmates enlist in the German army during the First World War, urged on by their schoolmaster's patriotic speeches. On the Western Front they learn that the war is mud, rats, gas, shellfire, hunger and fear. Paul narrates their life in the trenches and behind the lines: the friendship of the older soldier Katczinsky, the deaths of his friends one by one, a night trapped in a shell hole with a French soldier he has stabbed, and a home leave on which he finds he can no longer talk to his family. The book's title comes from the army report issued on the day of Paul's death, which says there was nothing new to report.

Remarque did not describe battles or strategy. He wrote about what the war did to a generation of young men who, as the book's epigraph says, were destroyed by it even if they escaped its shells.

The ban, in full

The novel was serialised in the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung in late 1928 and published as a book in January 1929. It sold over a million copies in Germany within a year and was quickly translated around the world. Nationalists, including the Nazis, attacked it as an insult to German soldiers. When the American film version opened in Berlin in December 1930, Joseph Goebbels led Nazi supporters in disrupting screenings, releasing mice and stink bombs in cinemas, and within days the film was banned in Germany.

After the Nazis took power, the novel was among the books burned in Berlin and other cities on 10 May 1933 and was banned. Remarque, who had moved to Switzerland, was stripped of his German citizenship in 1938. In 1943 his younger sister, Elfriede Scholz, was executed by the Nazis after being denounced for defeatist remarks.

About Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) was conscripted at eighteen and wounded by shrapnel on the Western Front in 1917. After the war he worked as a teacher, salesman and journalist before the novel made him rich and famous. He lived in Switzerland and the United States, where he became a citizen in 1947, and was married to the actress Paulette Goddard. His later novels include The Road Back and Arch of Triumph.

Which edition to read

A. W. Wheen's 1929 translation was the standard English text for decades. Brian Murdoch's 1994 translation is closer to the original German. Both are in print.

Reception and legacy

The 1930 film directed by Lewis Milestone won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A German film version released in 2022 won four Academy Awards, including Best International Feature.

Questions

Why did the Nazis ban All Quiet on the Western Front?

Because its portrayal of the war as futile and horrific contradicted their glorification of the German army and of war.

Is it still banned in Germany?

No; it has been freely published in Germany since 1945. More: books banned in Germany, banned books in Germany today.