All Quiet on the Western front- Where does the author get the title and whats the most memorable passage in th

Question

e story? What mood is created?

Answer 1

Warning I'm going to spoil the ending.....don't read if you haven't read the book.....


At the end during a small peaceful interlude the main character gets killed when a stray bullet hits him. At the time of his death his comrades say that all was quiet on the western front..this is ironic, because at the beginning the narrator was seeking time away from the fighting but as time passes he becomes dehumaized and immune to the noises. At the end when there is peace that he wanted...he gets killed


Thats why the book is titled that way

Answer 2

This is guess work. The title comes from what the German high command would call a day in the west where the causalities were minimal. Only a few thousand on that day.

The mood to me was of feeling decieved and then realizing that no one who was not there would ever understand. A desperation grows. As for the most memorable passage, there are so many, to me that depends on the reader was it the part in the graveyard, the first night, the end, or going home.

Answer 3

Written by Eric Maria Remarque a German born citizen of America. All Quiet On The Western Front is about the end of the 1st W.W. when at last, all was quiet on the western front. Remarque served in this war thus could write about it so eloquently. It was written about German soldiers, their service in that war & the terror of war itself. There are too many great passages in this story; to name just one is impossible to me. I enjoyed reading all of his books, wonderful way with words, he could put you there & you could feel the pain of those men.

Answer 4

* for Gee Gee: Erich Paul Remark was born in
Osnabrück into a working-class Roman Catholic family. He was conscripted into the army at 18. On 12 June, 1917 he was transferred to the Western Front, 2nd Company, Reserves, Field Depot of the 2nd Reserves Guards Division at Hem-Lenglet. On 26 June, he was stationed between Thorhut and Houthulst, Trench Battalion Bethe (Name of commander), 2nd Company of the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment. On 31 July he was wounded by shrapnel in the left leg, right arm and neck, and repatriated to an army hospital in Germany, where he spent the rest of the war.

After the war he changed his last name to Remarque, which had been the family-name until his grandfather changed it due to 19th Century German xenophobia.
He worked at a number of different jobs, including librarian, businessman, teacher, journalist and editor.

There is no AMERICAN connection!!

The book was first published in German as "Im Westen nichts Neues", in January 1929. It sold 2.5 million copies in twenty-five languages in its first eighteen months in print[citation needed].

In 1930 the book was turned into an Oscar-winning movie of the same name, directed by Lewis Milestone.

The 1929 English translation by Arthur Wesley Wheen gives the title as "All Quiet on the Western Front."

The literal translation is in fact "Nothing New in the West" (Im Westen Nichts Neues), with "West" being the war front, which was in fact a routine dispatch used by the German Army.

This title in German adds to the terrible irony of the actual situation. In English the phrase would be unclear, whereas "All Quiet..." does sound like the English used for such matters.

Brian Murdoch's 1994 translation renders the phrase as "there was nothing new to report on the western front" within the narrative. Explaining his retention of the original book-title, he says:

Although it does not match the German exactly (there is a different kind of irony in the literal version...), Wheen's title has justly become part of the English language and is retained here with gratitude.

Separately, the phrase "all quiet on the western front" later became popular slang for a lack of action (in reference to the Phony War in World War II's Western Front).

The story follows the experiences of Paul Bäumer, a soldier whose teacher inspires him to join the German army shortly after the start of World War I.

He arrives on the Western Front with his friends (Tjaden, Müller, Kropp and a number of other characters) and meets Stanislaus Katczinsky, known as Kat. The older Kat soon becomes Paul's mentor and teaches him about the realities of war. Paul and Kat swiftly become almost brothers, bonded by the hardships of the war.

Paul and his friends have to endure day after day of non-stop bombardment. Eventually it all becomes clear to him: war is entirely pointless. All his friends say that they are fighting the war for a few national leaders whom they have never met and most likely never will. They are the only people that can gain anything from this war, not Paul and his friends.

The book does not focus on heroic stories of bravery as do so many other war stories, but rather gives a realistic view of the hell in which the soldiers found themselves.

The monotony, the constant artillery fire, the struggle to find food, and the overarching role of chance in the lives and deaths of the soldiers, are all described in detail. Unlike many other war novels, here individual battles have no names and are of little significance. Rather, one after another each battle offers a new chance for Paul and his comrades to be killed.

The armies fight battles to gain pitifully small pieces of land, only to lose them again later. Remarque often refers to the living soldiers as old and dead, emotionally depleted and hardened. "We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm.

We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."

Paul's visit on leave to his home highlights the cost of the war on his psyche. The town has not changed since he went off to war; however, he finds that he does "not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world." He feels disconnected from most of the townspeople. His father asks him "stupid and distressing" questions about his war experiences, not understanding "that a man cannot talk of such things."

An old schoolmaster lectures him about strategy and advancing to Paris, while insisting that Paul and his friends know only their "own little sector" of the war but nothing of the big picture. Indeed, the only person he remains connected to is his dying mother, with whom he shares a tender yet restrained relationship. The night before he is to return from leave, he stays up with her exchanging small expressions of love and concern for each other. He thinks to himself, "Ah! Mother, Mother! how can it be that I must part from you? Here I sit and there you are lying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it." In the end, he concludes that he "ought never to have come [home] on leave."

There are many central themes in the book. Among them is that war is total nonsense. For example, none of the characters has ever seen a Frenchman before the war, much less have reason to kill them, but that is now what they are forced to do.

Some of the soldiers ponder how the war was started, why it was declared, and whom it benefits. Nobody has any answers. There are also other themes that include: comradeship/friendship, the humanity of the "enemy", the hypocrisy of authority figures, loss of hope for the future, animal instincts or how war reduces men to animals and many others such as loss of innocence.

Remarque exemplifies the psychological transformation that soldiers undergo when heading into battle. Paul observes this phenomenon as he and his comrades near the front on their mission to lay barbed wire. They cease to become men, and instead, become beasts at the first sight of war.

To survive, it is necessary for the soldiers to sacrifice the thoughtful and analytical parts of their minds and rely, instead, on animal instinct. Paul describes men who have been walking thoughtlessly along and suddenly find themselves thrown to the ground just in time to avoid a shell, without consciously having been aware that a shell was approaching and without having intended to leap to avoid it.

Paul calls this instinct a “second sight” and says that it is the only thing that enables soldiers to survive a battle. In this way, Paul implies that battles are animalistic and even subhuman, a large aspect of the devastation that the war wreaks on a soldier’s humanity.

"The Road Back" (1931) another book written by Erich Maria Remarque, is about a different group of soldiers trying to cope with postwar Germany: dealing with the defeated German society after the war, trying to go to school, and trying to live a normal life.

The book was banned during Nazi rule, the content of the 1937 Hollywood film directed by James Whale and released by Universal Pictures was watered down to avoid a German boycott, and Remarque was stripped of his German citizenship in 1938.

Remarque himeslf disenchanted with the performance of the German Army in WW1 arrived home dressed as a Lieutenant with a self awarded Iron Cross First Class, he was a simple corporal.