All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque, A W Wheen (Translator)

Overview

Paul Baumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I. Youthful, enthusiastic, they become soldiers. But despite what they have learned, they break into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. And as horrible war plods on year after year, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principles of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other—if only he can come out of the war alive.
"The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first trank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781803986371
Publisher:	Mixtpublish
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) wrote his most famous novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, based on his experience as a soldier in the German army in World War I; it became an instant bestseller upon its publication in 1929. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they burned his books and, in 1938, revoked his citizenship. Remarque had already resettled in Switzerland; in 1939 he left Europe for the United States, never to return to the country of his birth. All Quiet on the Western Front has been translated into more than fifty languages and adapted into three acclaimed movies. It is the most widely read novel of World War I.

Maria Tatar (translator) is the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Folklore & Mythology and Germanic Languages & Literatures, Emerita, and a senior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. She is the author, editor, and translator of many acclaimed books, among them The Heroine with 1001 Faces, Lustmord: Sexual Violence in Weimar Germany, and, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the NAACP Image Award–winning Annotated African American Folktales. She served as Harvard’s first Dean for the Humanities and is a frequent contributor to the BBC, NPR, and other media outlets. Born in Pressath, Germany, and raised in Illinois, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Samantha Power (foreword) is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide and the New York Times bestselling memoir The Education of an Idealist. A former war correspondent, she served as the US ambassador to the United Nations, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and a member of President Obama’s cabinet, and is a professor of practice at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School.

Read an Excerpt

"Summer of 1918-Never was life in the line more bitter and more full of horror than in the hours of the bombardment, when the blanched faces lie in the dirt and the hands clutch at the one thought: No! No! Not now! Not now at the last moment!"
—from All Quiet on the Western Front

Table of Contents

Introduction     7
Biographical Sketch     9
The Story Behind the Story     17
List of Characters     20
Summary and Analysis     23
Critical Views     52
Brian Murdoch on All Quiet on the Western Front as a Weimar Antiwar Novel     52
Brian Murdoch on Remarque and Homer     57
A.F. Bance on the Novel's Best-seller Status     63
Chris Daley on the Force of Silence in All Quiet on the Western Front     68
Hildegard Emmel on All Quiet on the Western Front as a Weimar Novel     71
Vita Fortunati on the Representation of World War I in Hemingway, Remarque, and Ford Madox Ford     75
Dorothy B. Jones on the Film Version of the Novel     79
Helmut Liedloff on A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front     83
Alfredo Bonadeo on Paul Baumer's Relationship to German Culture     87
Modris Eksteins on the Novel as a Postwar Commentary     92
Hans Wagener on the Final Chapter of All Quiet on the Western Front     96
Robert Baird on Hollywood's Ambivalence to World War I Novels     100
Wilhelm J. Schwarz on Remarque's Memorial to the Unknown Soldier     105
Works   Erich Maria Remarque     110
Annotated Bibliography     111
Contributors     120
Acknowledgments     123
Index     125

Editorial Reviews

The world has gained a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will.

[A] gripping new translation . . . Human fallibility almost guarantees that All Quiet on the Western Front will be read generations from now. But with more conflict occurring now than at any time since the end of the Cold War, with global tensions among the superpowers rising, and with entire media ecosystems armed for informational warfare and demonization, we can be grateful that this new translation will help shape the moral architecture of future generations—driving home the urgent necessity of seeing our common humanity despite all that stands in the way.” —Samantha Power, from the Foreword

From the Publisher

"Remarque has been served generally well by his previous English-language translators, but never better than by Kurt Beals of the University of Richmond. Mr. Beals’s shimmering version of this novel should become the standard for English readers. He commits to each page a burnished prose that beautifully stewards the original, and he captures more vividly than any other translator the sensory onslaught of Remarque’s narration, the unholy cacophony of trench battle. Mr. Beals also vividly renders Remarque’s indelible imagery: corpses bombed out of their caskets, the baffling presence of butterflies that ‘pause to rest on the teeth of a skull.’"

Wall Street Journal - William Giraldi

"It is very fortunate that Kurt Beals has written a new translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and produced a crisp, fresh and very much more faithful to the German original version that brings new life to one of the classic novels to come out of the First World War, and makes it well worth reading again, or reading for the first time. Beals’s translation makes it clear why the book has sold millions of copies in almost every language, and been made into two major motion pictures—it is a moving story about war, all war, and not dated at all."

Michael Korda

"We all know how the story ends, but Beals’s taut, approachable translation casts the wartime classic in a fresh light."

New Criterion

"Kurt Beals brings an immediacy to what has been called the greatest war novel of all time, refreshing the text for a new generation of readers who might have only seen the Netflix version of Paul Bäumer and his comrades navigating the trenches of the First World War."

The American Scholar Smarty Pants Podcast

"A leaner, far more kinetic reading experience than that old Wheen translation . . . lively, unsentimental . . . a welcome invitation for a re-read."

Open Letters Review - Steve Donoghue

"A new translation by Kurt Beals . . . renders Remarque’s German in a colloquial register—sometimes caustic, sometimes lyrical—that is itself a product of the Great War . . . He gives us a version that can stand as Remarque’s contemporary."

Atlantic - George Packer

"Almost a hundred years ago, All Quiet on the Western Front invented the anti-war novel. This fluent new translation captures the devastating experiences of ordinary soldiers with renewed urgency."

Martin Puchner

"[A] starkly effective new translation."

Arts Fuse - Matt Hanson