Book Study: All Quiet on the Western Front

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Like the main character in All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque served as a German soldier in World War I. Drafted in November 1916 at the age of eighteen, he was sent to the Western Front in Flanders (now Belgium). There he worked in a support unit behind the lines, laying barbed wire and building bunkers and dugouts to help fortify gun sites. His work often took him within range of enemy gunfire.

In July 1917 he was wounded while retrieving an injured soldier during an attack. He was sent to a hospital, where he spent most of the rest of the war recuperating. Later he would incorporate some of his own war experiences into his popular war novel, Im Westen nichts Neues, or All Quiet on the Western Front.

Remarque, whose ancestors were French, was born in Osnabrück, Germany, in 1898. Although his family was poor, Remarque’s childhood was happy. Interested in music at an early age, he played both the organ and piano. By the time he was seventeen, he had begun to write essays and poems and had started a novel.

During his wartime hospital stay, Remarque continued to write short pieces that were published in a popular German magazine. After the war, Remarque finished his education but remained unsettled by his wartime experiences. He worked briefly as a teacher and at various odd jobs. In 1925 he became an editor for a sports magazine. The financial success of All Quiet on the Western Front, an international bestseller published in 1929, allowed Remarque to quit his job and write full time. In 1931 he moved to a villa in Switzerland on Lake Maggiore.  The publication of All Quiet on the Western Front brought controversy to Remarque, as well as fame and wealth. Many readers viewed the novel, which stresses the wasteful destruction of the war, as a humanitarian antiwar statement. To the Nazis, the rising political faction in Germany at the time, the book was unpatriotic and subversive. In 1933 All Quiet on the Western Front was one of the first books that the Nazis burned in public, declaring it a “betrayal of the soldiers of the First World War.” The successful American film of the novel, made in 1930, was also banned by the Nazis. Had Remarque remained in Germany, he would have faced certain persecution.

The Nazi government later revoked his German citizenship in 1938. In 1939 Remarque moved from Switzerland to the United States, living first in Hollywood and then in New York City. There he continued to write novels, several of which were made into films, though none were as greatly admired as his first. Most of them focused on the lives of Germans in the aftermath of the two world wars.

Meanwhile, Remarque moved in glamorous circles, acquiring well-known friends and acquaintances including Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, and Ernest Hemingway. Remarque kept his apartment in New York City but divided his time between New York and Hollywood, his villa in Switzerland, and several European cities. After years of heart problems, Remarque suffered a fatal heart attack in Switzerland in 1970.

Homework:

• Begin reading All Quiet on the Western Front
• You will receive a handout (here is a copy) which you will work through as you read
• Chapters 1-5 Due Tuesday
• Vocabulary
• Freewriting (Journal): Older Generations (in complete sentences)
• List of Characters
• Questions 1-5
• Chapters 6-8 Due Thursday
• Vocabulary
• Group Review (List of group members and passages with imagery/symbolism)
• Questions 1-5
• Active Reading Diagram of Imagery
• Chapters 9-12 Due Friday
• Vocabulary
• Focus Activity Chart
• Questions 1-7
• You will have a test on the book next Friday.