All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) is one of the most surprising phenomena in the history of literature. Its commercial success was unparalleled…. But the novel was not simply a best-seller. It also became a focus of intellectual and, indeed, of political life. Immediately upon its appearance, it provided a casus belli for the battle, in the Germany of 1929, between militarists and pacifists, right wing and left. (p. 101)

Neither in length, scope, nor importance can the work of Erich Maria Remarque, whose novel, Im Westen nichts Neues [All Quiet on the Western Front] (1928), became a world sensation, be compared to the epic achievement of [Arnold] Zweig. Its success will perhaps never be satisfactorily explained, but one fact seems certain: it cannot be due exclusively to extraordinary merit. Remarque is an artist. By his impressionistic talent he knows how to draw characters and situations that engage attention and arouse d...

Erich Maria Remarque was a German soldier during the World War and has written a record of life in the trenches ["All Quiet on the Western Front"]…. [As] the terse story marches forward we encounter the things that other war books have made known to us: the trench mud, the lice, the ineradicable rats, the tension, noise, fear, pain, hunger, horror….

In ["All Quiet on the Western Front"] it is the war as, in all its physical horror, it passed before the eyes of a twenty-year-old German private, an intelligent but not unusual boy who, with no preparation, with no fixed principles, was sent away to fight. We are told in a foreword that it is not to be a confession, or an accusation, or an adventure he chronicles, but the tale of a "generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war." ...

[In "All Quiet on the Western Front"] a German tells in three hundred simple and vivid pages that same "truth about the war" which his fellows on the other side have already told: War is an interminable, exhausting, and nightmarish business without alleviation or purpose. The soldier is prepared by the gratuitous brutality of the training camp for the necessary brutality of the trenches, and, once he has been launched in his trade, there is no variety except in the kinds of miser...