All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) is Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel following Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier who enlists for World War I alongside his classmates after being swept up by a schoolmaster's patriotic rhetoric. What follows is not the heroic war he was promised but years of trench warfare, artillery bombardment, hunger, and the deaths of friend after friend, told in spare, unflinching prose drawn from Remarque's own service on the Western Front.

The novel is less a war story than an account of what war does to the people who survive it: a home leave shows Paul that he no longer belongs among civilians who still believe in the cause, and the book closes with his death in October 1918, on a day the military report called quiet. First serialized in the Vossische Zeitung in late 1928 and published in book form in January 1929, it sold roughly 2.5 million copies in 22 languages within eighteen months and is widely regarded as one of the definitive anti-war novels of the twentieth century, adapted for film in 1930, 1979, and 2022.