The arrangements made to allow a hospital inmate to enjoy a marital visit with his wife, while the rest of the patients in the room concentrate on ‘a noisy game of cards’.

The story is studded with remarkable incidents that linger in the mind: roasting a stolen goose in the middle of a barrage, for instance, or stabbing a Frenchman to death in a fit of panic while sheltering in the same shell-hole. Remarque has the same elements as everyone else – because pretty much everyone in this war went through the same godawful mind-numbingly exhausting terror – but he describes it all with such conviction and such clarity that I was sucker-punched by the full horror of it all over again. I wish, after spending many months reading around this subject, that I could pick out some obscure classic to recommend (and perhaps I will still find some, because I intend to keep reading about 1914–18 throughout 2014–18), but I have to say that this novel, famously one of the greatest war novels, is in fact genuinely excellent and left quite an impression on me, despite my trench fatigue. It's like the most depressing drinking game ever. Now it's just a matter of guessing which horrible death will be assigned to them: shrapnel to the stomach, bleeding to death in no-man's-land, drowning in mud, succumbing to dysentery, shot for deserting, bayonetted at close range, vaporised by a whizz-bang, victim of Spanish flu. There's only so many times you can go through the same shit, whether they're English, French, German, Russian – oh look, another group of pals from school, eagerly jogging down to the war office to sign up. I've been reading about the First World War solidly since December and I've had enough now. The complete works of Remarque are both highly interrelated with his Osnabrück background and speaking thematically of a critical examination of German history, whereby the preservation of human dignity and humanity in times of oppression, terror and war always was at the forefront of his literary creation. Remarque's novels have been translated in more than fifty languages globally the total edition comes up to several million copies. The first publication attained worldwide recognition, continuing today.Įxamples of his other novels also internationally published are: The Road Back (1931), Three Comrades (1936, 38), Arch of Triumph (1945), The Black Obelisk (1956), and Night in Lisbon (1962). German history of the twentieth century essentially marks biography of Remarque and fundamentally influences his writing: Childhood and youth, the Weimar Republic, and most of all his exile in Switzerland and the United States. People most widely read literature of author with pen name of Erich Paul Remark in the twentieth century. Experiences of German-born American writer Erich Maria Remarque in World War I based All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), his best known novel.

All quiet on the western front author