In 1927 Remarque decided to write about the Great War, partly in order to express the trauma he carried from his own experiences as a soldier on the front line. The result is something between reportage and novel, not claiming to reproduce particular events yet never far from lived experience.

[

] was first serialized in 1928 in the

. The book edition of 1929 sold 3.5 million copies in the first 18 months after its publication. Remarque narrates almost without a cohesive plot, working through standard situations in a soldier’s life between 1914 and 1918: naïve enthusiasm, training, loss of friends, alienation from civilian life, helplessness under fire, war as a machine, sexual encounters, meeting the enemy,…

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Citation: White, Alfred D.. "Im Westen nichts Neues". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 November 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16864, accessed 27 November 2024.]