"All quiet on the western front" by Erich Maria Remarque

Gliederung

• Erich Maria Remarque: The author and his times
• The plot
• Paul Baumer
• Kantorek
• Corporal Himmelstoss
• Stanislaus Katczinsky
• Franz Kemmerich
• Muller
• Leer
• Tjaden
• Detering
• Albert Kropp
• Haie Westhus
• Bulcke
• Ginger
• Josef Behm
• Lieutenant Bertnick
• Heinrich Bredemeyer
• Frau (Mrs.) Baumer
• Frau (Mrs.) Kemmerich
• Mittelstaedt
• Boettcher
• Gerard Duval
• Sergeant Oellrich
• Josef Hamacher
• Little Peter
• Sister Libertine
• Franz Wachter
• The three French girls
• Berger
• Kaiser Wilhelm
• Setting
• Themes
• 1. The horror of war
• 2. A rejection of traditional values
• 3. Friendship: The only enduring value
• 4. A generation destroyed by world war
• Style and structure
• Point of view
• Form
• Author's note
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• The English translation
• In the Army
• German names: Pronunciation

Erich Maria Remarque: The author and his times

Born Erich Paul Remark on June 22, 1898, he grew up in a Roman Catholic family in Osnabruck in the province of Westphalia, Germany - a city in the northwest part of what is now West Germany. He adored his mother, Anna Maria, but was never close to his father, Peter. The First World War effectively shut him off from his sisters, Elfriede and Erna. Peter Remark, descended from a family that fled to Germany after the French Revolution, earned so little as a bookbinder that the family had to move 11 times between 1898 and 1912. The family's poverty drove Remarque as a teenager to earn his own clothes money (giving piano lessons). He developed a craving for luxury, which he never outgrew. His piano playing and other interests, such as collecting butterflies and exploring streams and forests, later appeared in his fictional characters. His love of writing earned him the nickname Smudge.

Because of the frequent moving, Remarque attended two different elementary schools and then the Catholic Praparande (preparatory school). He loved the drama of Catholic rituals, the beauty of churches, the flowers in cloister gardens, and works of art. He later wrote with a sense of theater, and he featured churches and museums, flowers and trees as symbols of enduring peace. While in school, he had problems with teachers, however, and eventually paid them back by ridiculing them in his novels. At the Praparande he argued so much with one teacher that he used the man's personality and another's name (Konschorek) to produce a specific character in Ail Quiet on the Western Front: Schoolmaster Kantorek.

In November 1916, when Remarque was eighteen and a third-year student at Osnabruck's Lehrerseminar (teachers college), he

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