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THE GLENCOE LITERATURE LIBRARY

Study Guide
for

All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque

i

Meet Erich Maria Remarque
During his wartime hospital stay, Remarque continued to write short pieces that were published in a popular German magazine. After the war, Remarque finished his education but remained unsettled by his wartime experiences. He worked briefly as a teacherand at various odd jobs. In 1925 he became an editor for a sports magazine. The financial success of All Quiet on the Western Front, an international bestseller published in 1929, allowed Remarque to quit his job and write full time. In 1931 he moved to a villa in Switzerland on Lake Maggiore. The publication of All Quiet on the Western Front brought controversy to Remarque, as well as fame andwealth. Many readers viewed the novel, which stresses the wasteful destruction of the war, as a humanitarian antiwar statement. To the Nazis, the rising political faction in Germany at the time, the book was unpatriotic and subversive. In 1933 All Quiet on the Western Front was one of the first books that the Nazis burned in public, declaring it a “betrayal of the soldiers of the First World War.”The successful American film of the novel, made in 1930, was also banned by the Nazis. Had Remarque remained in Germany, he would have faced certain persecution. The Nazi government later revoked his German citizenship in 1938. In 1939 Remarque moved from Switzerland to the United States, living first in Hollywood and then in New York City. There he continued to write novels, several of which weremade into films, though none were as greatly admired as his first. Most of them focused on the lives of Germans in the aftermath of the two world wars. Meanwhile, Remarque moved in glamorous circles, acquiring well-known friends and acquaintances including Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, and Ernest Hemingway. Remarque kept his apartment in New York City but divided his time between New York andHollywood, his villa in Switzerland, and several European cities. After years of heart problems, Remarque suffered a fatal heart attack in Switzerland in 1970.

I write by ear. I hear everything that I write. I choose words for their sound. . . . my novels all sound good when they’re read out loud. I find easy what other authors find most difficult: writing dialogue.
—Erich Maria Remarque

LCopyright © by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

ike the main character in All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque served as a German soldier in World War I. Drafted in November 1916 at the age of eighteen, he was sent to the Western Front in Flanders (now Belgium). There he worked in a support unit behind the lines, laying barbed wire and building bunkers and dugouts to help fortifygun sites. His work often took him within range of enemy gunfire. In July 1917 he was wounded while retrieving an injured soldier during an attack. He was sent to a hospital, where he spent most of the rest of the war recuperating. Later he would incorporate some of his own war experiences into his popular war novel, Im Westen nichts Neues, or All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque, whoseancestors were French, was born in Osnabrück, Germany, in 1898. Although his family was poor, Remarque’s childhood was happy. Interested in music at an early age, he played both the organ and piano. By the time he was seventeen, he had begun to write essays and poems and had started a novel.

All Quiet on the Western Front Study Guide

9

Introducing the Novel
This book is to be neither anaccusation 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.
—Erich Maria Remarque, preface to All Quiet on the Western Front

The subject of All Quiet on the Western Front is the worldwide conflict of...