In the Library
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque, 1929
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by A. W. Wheen
- Chapters
- Chapters 12
- Length
- Length 63k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
A pair of good leather boots passes from one dying boy to the next, each new owner inheriting them the moment the last is buried, a small grim economy that outlasts every man who laces them. This is the world Remarque hands you, the Western Front seen not by a general but by Paul Bäumer, a German schoolboy of nineteen who marched off because a teacher swore it was glorious, and who spends his short life learning what the teacher never had to. What sets this book apart from every other war story is its refusal to console. Paul lies trapped in a shell crater beside a French soldier he has just stabbed, finds in the dead man's pocket that he was a printer named Gérard Duval with a wife and child, and pleads forgiveness from a corpse. The enemy was a boy too. Remarque tells it in prose so flat and clear it leaves nowhere to look away, and the close is the cruelest stroke of all: the title is the lie the dispatches send home.