All Quiet on the Western Front, originally published in German in 1928 as Im Westen Nichts Neues, expresses deep-seeded humanism and fierce opposition to the violence of war. For those reasons, it became an object of Hitler’s hatred: Remarque was forced into exile in 1931, and the novel was burned and banned by the Nazis in 1933.
Widely regarded on a par with War and Peace as the greatest war novel (or anti-war novel), it is written in first-person from the perspective of Paul Bäumer, a student who enlists with his schoolmates in the German Army in World War I. Paul recounts his experiences on the front and on leave (based in part on Remarque’s own experiences as a soldier in the Great War).
An epilogue tells us that Paul died on the Western front in October 1918—just before the long-rumored armistice and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on November 11, 1918. Remarque’s novel pits the moral prohibition against killing into conflict with the demands of war. He does this by placing Paul in a series of face-to-face encounters with the enemy.
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