Remarque wrote of young men who formed a lost generation that had lost not only its youth, but also its connection to society as a whole. In
All Quiet on the Western Front, the comradeship of the trench soldier is the one affirmative human quality left. However, in Remarque's later novels, including the sequel,
The Road Back, and in the final volume of his World War I trilogy,
The Three Comrades, even this connection is lost in the trauma of the post-war world.
Remarque knew all about such dislocations. As a child, his working-class family moved eleven times by 1916, when he was drafted into the army as an eighteen-year-old. After serving in World War I, he returned to civilian life a changed man, out of place in a changed society. With the publication in 1929 of his second novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque won international fame and fortune, but he was reviled in his native Germany for the book's pacifist sentiments. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the author fled the country.
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