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What are readers saying about All Quiet on the Western Front?
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-02-22 10:50:16.
(Language: English)
 
I came to read this book through pure chance. One day my mother and I were re-arranging stuff in our attic, and we happened across a box of books she had for years. In it we saw a worn paperback copy of this book, the binding long since dried out and cracking. She told me it was about WWI, and nothing else about it. Being a history geek, even in my early teens, I decided I'd read it. In the musty, dried out pages I found tragedy and humanity. This book was the first "real" book I read...the first one I got more than just entertainment out of. Because of this book, I read many of the other books on this list. This is another one that goes in the suitcase to be saved.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-08-30 05:38:32.
(Language: English)
One of the best books I have ever read!
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-04-27 06:13:54.
(Language: English)
Amazing and very realistic insight into a soldiers experience of the 1st world war.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-11-17 01:20:28.
(Language: English)
This is a compulsory read for those who intend to understand Post-Trauma Stress Disorder. The Great War was the last of the 'romantic' wars. It was a revelation albeit a costly one where the fruits of the Industrial Revolution went on head on collision with the traditional outlok of conflict. The book illustrates the danger of uninformed patriotism and the reality of war - the scounge of the human race. Though a fiction, it is quite reveiling and real.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-01-04 01:20:37.
(Language: English)
This presents the individual at war. What do people feel on the way to war? Fear is trampled with an idea of the great purpose. An interesting note is that after the book’s publication the German government purged copies as unpatriotic. American and British soldiers identified with the book despite the fact that the author had been their (German) battlefield enemy, although he eventually emigrated to Switzerland and then the United States. A somewhat universal question within this book is: What is the meaning of patriotism, nationalism, expansion, and state sanctioned violence? How do we temper “That shalt not kill” with “Thalt must kill?” How do we juxtapose these clear contrasts with virtue as if they were one and the same? Moreover, what do we do when we realize that we are brainwashed? Well, what do we do?
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-09-08 07:07:04.
(Language: English)
always thought I'd read this one! Enjoyed not the right word, will use it in teaching, well written and extremely vivid and atmospheric.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-11-10 03:18:07.
(Language: English)
What can be said about this book that has not already been said here and elsewhere. The plain simple unadulterated truth. War, any war is a terrible business.I am as always left with the same question, how man as a sentient being can inflict this terrible business on each other time and time again, will we never ever learn!I have just finished re-reading this novel. What struck me most this time around is how resilient the human race can be in the face of great hardship. How we can still find grace and dignity despite it all. This book is unsophisticated, but with an honest and unromaticised viewpoint.It is a novel everyone should read at least once but preferably more than once!
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Derrick posted a review at 2010-11-27 03:09:03.
(Language: English)
Realistic and Compelling. A true classic
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-07-14 12:23:19.
(Language: English)
I agree with Rebecca, this book unlike movies does not glorify war. The point of view is from a soldier who has seen the worst in humanity and who feels that nothing in Earth can ever bring him back a sense on decency that he had for been a man. Another interesting point about this book is that is a piece of history written from the losing side of a conflict in this case the conflict takes place in World War 1 in the German trenches along the French country side. The book is very unusual since history is almost always written from the winners perspective. The book beside giving the public a new perspective on war it also gives the sense of despair that comes from knowing that the men he is and the men he is killing is a difference in uniforms.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-07-29 01:20:54.
(Language: English)
“Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony-Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?” - Erich Maria Remarque One of the most beautiful books I have ever read. Cried on just about every page.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-09-26 09:02:57.
(Language: English)
Devastating and beautiful, this book may be a little out-dated, but the universal truths about life and death and survival still remain. This book is a better explanation of WWI than one hundred history classes, and I don't know why I was never asked to read it in school. I only wish I had realized sooner that this book is a translation from the original German, so I wouldn't have wasted time reading it in English. Read it; cry with it; learn from it, and then never forget it. The first three paragraphs of this book devastated me. The rest of what I've read so far has given me an absolutely intimate view of war and what it means to be a soldier.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-06-19 01:23:47.
(Language: English)
The fact that the film is quite a piece of work in itself, one that I had the fortune to be acquainted with prior to this read is a bonus. As for the story, with any tale of war, loss of the spiritual and intellectual come packaged with much physical suffering. A young man learns that his country and his leaders will use masses of people for the tasks of war, that human identity, life itself, in its most exuberant and vital state can be sacrificed in the name of patriotism, a cover up for inhuman brutality. Leaves you tender and restless. Catch the film too.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-05-29 02:23:01.
(Language: English)
Heartbreaking story of the trenches as told by a 17 year old German schoolboy, urged to enlist along with his friends by his PE teacher. Survival becomes all as one by one his mates are killed. The earth becomes his only hope as he wallows in the mud to escape fire. There are some almost poetic episodes roasting a good with his comrade and during leave home. Again, highly recommended.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-04-29 02:51:54.
(Language: English)
I hadn't read this since I was at school but I found an early edition in a second hand bookshop and decided to re-visit this classic. It was worth it. It is one of the great (anti-)war books of all time and seems as fresh and as relevant to day as it was when it was first written and when I first read it in the 1970s. It is a sad reflection on human affairs that that should be the case This book provides some useful insights into his music for young people. It certainly helps explain why so much of his music is still capable of engaging young people and why he wrote for and performed with young people. The research is very thorough and the narrative compelling. You are left wondering how Britten would have fared in our more judgemental and intrusive age.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-11-29 02:17:35.
(Language: English)
This is one of Erich Maria Remarque's many war novels, and arguably, the most celebrated as I later came to learn. We all know the famous film depiction of this book, starring Lew Ayres (Paul) and Louis Wolheim (Kat). Among the many books written from the axis point of view during the World War I, I like Jaroslav Hasek's satirical work "The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War" best, but Remarque's simple yet powerful language, vivid depiction of war with its long periods of idleness and the brief incongruities of violent battle certainly deserves a high merit. The book is about the German iron youth, colourful idea of war-machines of the authorities. Paul Baumer, who volunteered to enlist when their teacher urged the class to join the glory of German army, later found war at the front to be quite different than the high ideals of the officials back home. This novel is about the world war I, but it never tells why the war was there in the first place, or how the war raged on, who was good and who was bad. Rather, it deals with the life of the tiny insignificant detail of war statistics, a private's life. The 17 year old high-school graduate with optimistic ideas of the glory of war wound up in the ugliest thing the human kind ever managed to create discovers that the war is hateful, war is alive and evil, that war eats the man from inside...
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-08-13 03:42:07.
(Language: English)
I love this book. I think that it really humanizes the Germans in a way that most stories Americans read do not. It demonstrates that the loss of humanity felt by the British and French soldiers (to a lesser extent Americans because really, Americans were not involved as long as the others) in WWI and the detachment they felt towards society was also felt by the Germans. This sense of detachment and loss was truly felt, and I think that Remarque captures it amazingly well, no doubt because he was actually a veteran himself, and as luck would have it, a great author. Remarque demonstrates the hope and excitement felt by civilians prior to WWI, just like what the British felt, and then at the end, instead of victory that the British had, the horrible agony of defeat, that was only made worse by the fact that they were supposed to win. Truly demonstrates how lost the veterans of this war felt.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-06-22 08:08:43.
(Language: English)
"Comrade,I did not want to kill you.If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too.But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its approriate response.It was that abstraction I stabbed.But now,for the first time, I see you are a man like me.I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle;now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship.Forgive me, comrade.We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony-Forgive me, comrade;how could you be my enemy?If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert.Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up-take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now." - Erich Maria Remarque
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-03-04 08:42:12.
(Language: English)
The patriotism of war is a thing of the past, Remarque suggests, as the young recruits quickly learn about the reality of trench warfare. Paul Bäumer, fresh from school at the beginning of the novel, is sent after skimpy but brutal basic training to the trenches in France. He quickly learns that living or dying has little to do with one's prowess as a soldier but more as a conditioned reflex. Since the Allies outgunned the Axis in artillery and machinery, the German youth took refuge in trenches that were no match for the kind of warfare waged. As more and more of his comrades are killed, Bäumer sees that death comes from afar in the artillery shells and the bombs, and as the trenches offer less and less refuge from the other side's new tanks and airplanes and its better guns, survival becomes little more than a chance. All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of a young German foot soldier, Paul Bäumer, during the waning days of the First World War. Since Paul narrates his story—which consists of a series of short episodes—in the first person and in present tense, the novel has the feel of a diary, with entries on everyday life interspersed with horrifying battle episodes.
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Mark posted a review at 2012-05-12 09:02:41.
(Language: English)
Just an awesome read and just as relevant now as it was in the 1920's.
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Shirlene posted a review at 2011-10-25 10:16:52.
(Language: English)
A good book. A compelling ending that has haunted me since I first read it.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-08-07 05:13:16.
(Language: English)
This was a book that I never expected to like. At the time I wasn't much of a "war" story person, and this was the novel that changed my mind completely. Now I can't get enough of these tales. All Quiet on the Western Front is an underrated classic. It's a pleasant read, at times amusing, other times haunting and captivating. The characters feel very real, their trauma grips your heart and the themes are both relevant (even today, as much as they were then) and complex. Definitely keeps your interest, all the way through, save for a few minor bumps of dullness here and there. As it continues, suspension builds, and the story reaches its complete climax at the very end. For reasons I won't mention, this book has the most effective, precise ending I have ever read. I set it down in a startled daze and with a heavy heart from the experience. A book that can do that? An understated masterpiece.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-06-17 11:42:35.
(Language: English)
This book is excellent. Written from the perspective of a German draftee in the depths of WWI it is a harrowing tale of the mortal horros and atrocites that are modern warfare. It takes a very close look in into the dep psychological trauma caused by open combat, and the theft of the very human essence from any human being that is pressed, chooses, or becomes trapped in it. It delves deeply into the thoughts of one soldier on the stupidity of war and how he might even had been brothers with his enemies had they not been fighting each other. Fantastic symbolism and a true telling of the so-called 'glory' in war. By far one of the best books I have ever read.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-11-11 12:24:26.
(Language: English)
All Quiet on the Western Front is about a nineteen year old who fights in the German army on the French front in World War I. The book highlights the horrors of the war and also the deep detachment from German civilian life felt by many men returning from the front. Remarque does not focus on heroic stories of gallantry and courage as do so many other war stories, but rather gives a realistic observation of the misery and agony in which the soldiers find themselves. The constant artillery fire, the struggle to find food, and the overarching role of chance in the lives and deaths of the soldiers, are all described in detail. Unlike most other war novels the author presents a grimly realistic version of a soldier’s experience, stripping the typical romanticism from the war narrative giving a staunchly antiwar message. All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel that is still very pertinent today. It is obviously rather heavy reading and more on the philosophical side, but the writing style is consistently good and the composition of the book makes it easy to read. This is not light fiction and definitely not adventurous or anything, but it is a book that one must read in order to add to one’s perspective on life. The unique thing about this book is that it is through the perspective of a young man, almost a boy. Through this, Remarque gives more depth to his arguments and moves us terribly. An extraordinary book which you won’t be able to put down until finished.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-09-12 12:34:33.
(Language: English)
This book is absolutely amazing. I had to read it in my 9th grade German class and it is pretty much the only piece of assigned reading I ever truly enjoyed. Wonderfully told, it really draws you in and opens your eyes to the gruesome reality of war. Told through the eyes of a German teenaged soldier in WW1, you laugh and cry with him as he is forced to watch his friends getting killed one by one until even his eventual death doesn't result in more than the line "all quiet on the Western front" in the news report. Horrifying, grasping, and utterly realistic, this is a must read for everyone.
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