In 1914 Paul Baumer and his classmates are marched to the local recruiting office by a sentimentally patriotic form-master. On a calm October day in 1918, only a few weeks before the Armistice, Paul will be the last of them to be killed. In All Quiet on the Western Fronthe tells their story. A few years after it was published in 1929 the Nazis would denounce and publicly burn Remarque'snovel for insulting the heroic German army - in other words, for 'telling it like it was' for the common soldier on the front line where any notions of glory and national destiny were soon blasted away by the dehumanizing horror of modern warfare. Remarque has an extraordinary power of describing fear: the appalling tension of being holed up in a dugout under heavy bombardment; the animal instinct to kill or be killed which takes over during hand-to-hand combat. He also has an eye for the grimly comic: the consignment of coffins Paul and his friends pass as they make their way up the line for a new offensive; the young soldiers joyfully tucking into double rations when half their company are unexpectedly wiped out. Remarque's elegy for a sacrificed generation is all the more devastating for the laconic prose in which his teenaged veteran narrates shocking experiences which for him have become the stuff of daily life. Paul cannot imagine a life after the war and can no longer relate to his family when he returns home on leave. Only the camaraderie of his diminishing circle of friends has any meaning for him. He comes especially to depend on an older comrade, Stanislaus Katczinsky, and one of the most poignant moments in the book is when he carries the wounded Kat on his back under fire to the field dressing station, with starkly tragic outcome. The saddest and most compelling war story ever written. Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1971) was born into a poor family in Osnabruck, Germany. He was training as a teacher when called up for military service in 1916. Sent to the Western front in summer 1917, he was wounded at Passchendaele and spent the rest of the war convalescing in hospital. After the war he soon abandoned teaching for journalism. All Quieton the Western Front, his second novel, was a publishing sensation in 1929. In Germany it sold nearly half a million copies in the first three months and it was quickly translated into 23 languages. The following year a highly acclaimed film adaptation of his book was made in America. Remarque became wealthy and famous, with a life-style to match, but his work had caught the attention of Joseph Goebbels who orchestrated 150 young 'Brown-shirts' to disrupt the film's second night in Berlin. Increasingly the target of Nazi propaganda, Remarque fled to Switzerland when Hitler took control in 1933, remarrying his divorced wife to ensure she could escape with him. Both emigrated to America early in World War II. Remarque led a glamorous life in Hollywood and New York. He had love affairs with Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo amongst others, and eventually married Paulette Goddard as his second wife. His subsequent novels were successful and many were made into films. But in 1946 he learnt that his younger sister Elfriede had been executed in Germany two years before as an 'enemy of the people', an act of vicarious vengeance by the Nazis on the brother who had escaped their clutches. During the 1950s he began to return to Europe for prolonged visits. He died in Switzerland in 1971.
