All Quiet on the Western Front

Galvanized by youthful idealism and patriotic fervor, nineteen-year-old Paul Bäumer and his schoolmates enlist in the German army at the onset of World War I. But soon their dreams of heroism shatter beneath the first shells of the bombardment, as they find on the battle front not the glory they were promised but savage brutality.

The most influential war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front has sold more than twenty million copies, been translated into more than fifty languages, and been adapted into three acclaimed films. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Bob Dylan included it among three books that have left an impression on him since elementary school: "This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. . . . I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did." In this brilliant new translation, the distinguished Harvard professor Maria Tatar draws on her lifelong engagement with German literature to give a new generation of readers an English version that comes closest to the lyrical tragedy of the 1929 original. It compels us to see with fresh eyes the abject horror of trench warfare, and to feel with a quickened heart the unbreakable bonds of friendship forged among Paul and his fellow soldiers as they fight not just for their country but also for their own survival. At a time when we are more divided than ever, Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel reminds us that enemy soldiers who've been demonized by the rhetoric of war actually have much in common, giving it the potential to generate principled outrage about the senselessness of war for another hundred years.

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