All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) (edit title/settings)

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Paul Bäumer: The narrator and main character of the novel, representing Remarque's own experience in World War I.
• Albert Kropp: Was in Paul's class at school and is described as the clearest thinker of the group.
• Haie Westhus: Tall and strong, and a peat-digger by profession
• Fredrich Müller: One of Bäumer's classmates who, at 19 years of age, also volunteers to join the German army and go to war.
• Stanislaus Katczinsky: Also known as Kat, he has the most positive influence on Paul and his comrades on the battlefield.
• Tjaden: One of Bäumer's non-schoolmate friends. Before the war Tjaden was a locksmith.
• Kantorek: The schoolmaster of Paul and his friends, including Kropp, Leer, and Müller.
• Leer: A soldier in Bäumer's company, and one of his classmates.
• Bertinck: The leader of Bäumer's company.
• Himmelstoss: A power-hungry corporal with special contempt for Paul and his friends, taking sadistic pleasure in punishing the minor infractions of his trainees during their basic training in preparation for their deployment.
• Detering: A young farmer who loved his wife and farm and constantly longed to return to them.
• Josef Hamacher: A patient at the Catholic hospital where Paul and Albert Kropp are temporarily stationed.
• Franz Kemmerich: Kemmerich had enlisted in the army for WWI along with his best friend and classmate, Bäumer.
• Joseph Behm: A student in Paul's class.
• Gérard Duval: The first person whom Paul kills in hand-to-hand combat.
• Mittelstaedt: One of Paul's classmates; becomes a training officer.
• Lewandowski: A patient in the Catholic hospital.
• Cris: The experience of German Soldiers during WWI

Quotes edit see section history

• “The leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose for dirty weather, good food, and soft jobs.”

• “The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily. Our families and our teachers will be shocked when we go home, but here it is the universal language.”

• “While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards--they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”

• “The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy. Katczinsky said that was a result of their upbringing. It made them stupid. And what Kat said, he had thought about.”

• “It is strange that all the memories that come have these two qualities. They are always completely calm, that is predominant in them; and even if they are not really calm, they become so. They are soundless apparitions that speak to me, with looks and gestures silently, without any word--and it is the alarm of their silence that forces me to lay hold of my sleeve and my rifle lest I should abandon myself to the liberation and allurement in which my body would dilate and gently pass away into the still forces that lie behind these things....Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow--a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires--but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. In the barracks they called forth a rebellious, wild craving for their return; for then they were still bound to us, we belonged to them and they to us, even though we were already absent from them.”

• “There is a musician amongst them, he says he used to be a violinist in Berlin. When he hears that I can play the paino he fetches his violin and plays. The others sit down and lean their backs against the fence. He stands up and plays, sometimes he has that absent expression which violinists get when they close their eyes, or again he sways the instrument to the rhythm and smiles across to me.He plays mostly folk songs and the others hum with him. They are like a country of dark hills that sing far down under the ground. The sound of the violin stands like a slender girl above it and is clear and alone. The voices cease and the violin continues alone. In the night it is so thin it sounds frozen; one must stand close up; it would be much better in a room--out here it makes a man grow sad.”

• “To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.Earth! Earth! Earth!Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!”

• “These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed. They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness; - I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.”

• “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 appropriate 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.”

• “"It's queer, when one thinks about it , we are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now who's in the right?"”

  Kropp

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Russia
• France
• Germany

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Gulaschkanone: field kitchen

Errata edit see section history

On page 108 the narrator states, "It is a marvel that our post has had no casualties so far. It is one of the less deep dug-outs." Then on page 110, only 2 pages later, the narrator states, "If we were in one of those light dug-outs that they have been building lately instead of this deeper one, none of us would be alive." Without moving from their position, the characters change from occupying what is described as a "less deep dug-out" to a "deeper one."

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Erich Maria Remarque (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Brian Murdoch (Translator)
2. Frank Muller (Reader)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• BBC's Big Read (April 2003, #141)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PT2635.E68 I625 1929
• Dewey: 833.912

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Fine for teens or adults.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction › War
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Folio Society: Few novels have described the reality of the First World War with such honesty and raw eloquence as All Quiet on the Western Front. The most famous German anti-war novel, it was based on Remarque’s own experiences in the trenches. Over a million copies were sold in the year after its first publication in 1929, and an award-winning film adaptation followed in 1930.

Movie Connections edit see section history

• All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) (IMDb): Staring Lew Ayres
• All Quiet on the Western Front (1979)(TV) (IMDb): Staring Richard Thomas, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, and Ian Holm

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