Excerpts from All Quiet on the Western Front

Translated by A. W. Wheen
Published in 1929

"To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself."

From All Quiet on the Western Front

"We are not youth any longer," writes German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970). "We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly 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. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer,...