The story opens in 1917, when half of Baumer’s company-many of them schoolmates from back in Germany-has been killed in battle. The protagonist of that novel, All Quiet on the Western Front–its German title, Im Westen nichts Neues literally translates as In the West Nothing New–is Paul Baumer, a young German soldier fighting in the trenches of World War I. Returning to Germany after the war, he changed his name back to the French spelling and worked various jobs–teacher, stonecutter, race-car driver, sports journalist–while working on his first novel. Remarque (born Erich Paul Remark) was born in 1898 in lower Saxony to a family of French ancestry he enlisted in the German army at the age of 18 and headed to fight on the Western Front, where he was wounded five times, the last time seriously. On November 10, 1928, the first installment of All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s acclaimed novel of World War I, appears in the German magazine Vossische Zeitung.
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