All Quiet on the Western Front gives a nineteen-year-old boy's testimony of war. Paul Bäumer enlisted in the German army on the French front in World War I. Entering the army a young German patriot, eager to fight – thanks to his teacher’s stirring speeches –, Bäumer soon realizes he knew nothing about war but clichés. In the company of his schoolmates, he faces the constant physical terror and mental damage of true war and trench warfare.
Erich Maria Remarque – born Erich Paul Remarque – was born on June 22nd, 1898, in Osnabrück, Westphalia. The third child in a family of four, he was brought up in a strict Catholic household, his family on the lower end of the working class. One of his biggest hobbies from a young age was composing essays and poems. Being drafted into the German army at the age of eighteen, he is a prime example of the horrors war has to offer. After living through years of trench warfare and being injured five times, he became a novelist. His first novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), quickly gained international recognitions. He is now known as one of the best and most widely read authors of German literature in the twentieth century and is often called the “recording angel of the Great War."
This wonderfully written novel describes the horrors of war with such …show more content…
By taking us to the “Western Front” in Belgium and France, through an extremely graphic depiction, Remarque allows the reader to experience the continuous shock and trauma a soldier would be put through on the daily. Some examples of the so-called terrors are: shrapnel to the stomach, bleeding to death in no-man's-land, drowning in mud, succumbing to dysentery, shot for deserting, bayoneted at close range, being vaporized by a whizz-bang. All of these deaths, each time performed in a new, impersonal, and mechanized way, led to the technological advances of war
Erich Maria Remarque – born Erich Paul Remarque – was born on June 22nd, 1898, in Osnabrück, Westphalia. The third child in a family of four, he was brought up in a strict Catholic household, his family on the lower end of the working class. One of his biggest hobbies from a young age was composing essays and poems. Being drafted into the German army at the age of eighteen, he is a prime example of the horrors war has to offer. After living through years of trench warfare and being injured five times, he became a novelist. His first novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), quickly gained international recognitions. He is now known as one of the best and most widely read authors of German literature in the twentieth century and is often called the “recording angel of the Great War."
This wonderfully written novel describes the horrors of war with such …show more content…
By taking us to the “Western Front” in Belgium and France, through an extremely graphic depiction, Remarque allows the reader to experience the continuous shock and trauma a soldier would be put through on the daily. Some examples of the so-called terrors are: shrapnel to the stomach, bleeding to death in no-man's-land, drowning in mud, succumbing to dysentery, shot for deserting, bayoneted at close range, being vaporized by a whizz-bang. All of these deaths, each time performed in a new, impersonal, and mechanized way, led to the technological advances of war