All Quiet on the Western Front

A Book For Memorial Day

War has long been a major theme of fiction, and is often glamorized or celebrated as an adventure, in a way that abstracts notions of sacrifice, loss and suffering. With Memorial Day coming up this weekend, it is time for us to pause and recognize the great sacrifice that our military personnel have made, and continue to make, for all of us. Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, is a powerful and moving story that explores the impact of war on the men who fight.

The novel is about a young German who enlists in the military with his friends, shortly after the outbreak of World War One. It explores the awful conditions they experience on the front lines, the monotony of daily life, the futility of the war itself, and the random chance which can lead to death - or a life spared. It also explores the disconnection they feel from civilian life, the reaction of towns-folk who have no way to relate to what the soldier has experienced, and how they in turn have no way to communicate about it.

The impact of the book, and the great Hollywood film directed by Lewis Milestone, was enough to have both book and film banned by Adolf Hitler in Germany, with further bans in Austria and Italy. Variety wrote at the time: ?The League of nations could make no better investment than to buy up the master-print and reproduce it in every language, to be shown in all the nations until the word 'war' is taken out of the dictionaries.? Ultimately the lesson of the novel is to understand the true cost of war.

I will leave the final words to the novel's author, Erich Maria Remarque: "This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."

Read more by Paul Ryall