All Quiet on the Western Front

The "iron youth" is the manner through which the war is presented to young people in Germany. Part of what makes All Quiet on the Western Front such a timeless read is that it probes into why wars...

Like many talented writers, Erich Maria Remarque deliberately uses similes and metaphors in his novel All Quiet on the Western Front. These figures of speech help make the novel more vivid and...

Caught in a bloody and seemingly unending offensive after waiting in anticipation and boredom for many days, Paul describes the state of being that characterizes the fighting man in battle...

The quote is in Chapter 5, from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. The page number will depend on your edition of the book. In the Penguin Random House edition, that particular...

Most of the students at Paul's school join the army in response to the zeal and patriotic enthusiasm surrounding the whole matter. This was led in no small part by Kantorek, the boys' teacher. The...

Literary devices such as simile, metaphor, onomatopoeia, and metonymy help create the fog of war in Chapters 8 and 9. A literary device can be almost anything that is used to describe and add...

The people who make declarations of war are never the people who have to do the dirty work of fighting it. Kat's ironic statement, "Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay and the war...

In Chapter 4, the soldiers move to the front. Paul encapsulates the the horror of the situation in the terse statement, "...we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human...

They are like children because war has destroyed the foundation upon which they understood their lives. It's like starting over again, learning to perceive and understand the world again with a new...

Friendship is probably the biggest theme in All Quiet on the Western Front. There are numerous examples of friendship being of paramount importance in the life of a soldier. In chapter five, Paul...

Dehumanization results from the soldiers' lack of hand-to-hand combat. The shell warfare creates a bizarre non-entity rather than an enemy soldier. Because Paul and his fellow soldiers strive to...

The irony at the end of All Quiet on the Western Front is that Paul, the main character and narrator of the book, is killed right before the end of the war. The title of the book is derived from...

Personification is figurative language related to metaphor. Authors use this literary tool as a method of describing something to make it more easily understood, to emphasize a particular point, or...

In Chapter 5, Paul and his comrades discuss aspects of life from the perspective of the western front. Things here are very different from how they were during their training. The avenues of...

Kat blames the tendency of power to corrupt on man's fallen nature. He says, "In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum"....

In the graveyard scene, human life before and after death are juxtaposed, and, with chilling clarity, it is shown that there is very little distance between the two. Paul's regiment is caught in a...

When we first meet Kemmerich in the opening chapters of All Quiet on the Western Front he is suffering with an amputated leg in an army field hospital. When his friends, including our narrator...

I think that what can be done here is to express how Paul's emotional experience can be universally appreciated. Certainly, few could say that they "get" what Paul is talking about. His...

In Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, the author develops his central themes of alienation, dehumanization, and disconnectedness by using several literary devices, including...

In Chapter 2, the author describes his experiences in boot camp. He talks about how the cold reality of what the boys are about to be forced to undertake contrasts with the lofty impressions of war...

In Chapter 3, the boys are sent to the field, and begin to learn more about war, authority, and power within the ranks. Kropp, who is "a thinker," has a theory about how wars should be conducted....

After Paul's arm is wounded and his leg broken, he is taken to the hospital. There the doctors are quick to amputate rather than try to save limbs, but after one doctor probes around Paul's wounded...

The men in All Quiet on the Western Front are in the middle of a deadly and destructive war. War during this time period was quite literally in the earth itself, and therefore, the earth was highly...

Early in Chapter 4 of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the narrator describes the behavior of a young soldier – a “new recruit” – who has joined more experienced men...

Kropp and his comrades have been deeply traumatized by their experiences of war. So much so that they can't seen any meaningful future for themselves once they've eventually returned to civilian...

Paul articulates the condition of young men sent to the front in World War I. Paul sees his generation, a young one, as comprising the vast majority of soldiers sent towards military action in the...

In Chapter 7 of All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul's classmate Mittelstaedt torments their former schoolmaster Kantorek. Kantorek has enlisted as one of the reserve soldiers, and he proves that...

Remarque's intentions are to record the horrors of war and the damage to the spirit of the individual. Remarque's novel moves from an objective style to one marked more by impressionistic images...

In his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque uses a wide variety of literary devices and figures of speech. Consider, for example, the following paragraph, chosen at random:...

Similes and metaphors are two kinds of comparisons; both are made between unlike things for effect. A simile uses “like” or “as,” while a metaphor is a direct comparison. Chapter 3 is concerned...

In Chapter 3 of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, a common soldier nick-named “Kat” – a favorite of the other men because he finds food and shares it with them –...

Himmelstoss is not well-received upon coming to the front in the novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Prior to his arrival, Himmelstoss had been a severe and exacting leader while he was the men's...

All we know about the circumstances of Paul's death is that he was killed on the front lines on an otherwise quiet day. His death was not part of a big battle or heroic action. Since the book is...

Remarque's passionately anti-war novel about the senseless slaughter of World War I and the young men who were its victims is punctuated with lyrical, poetic language, some of it almost...

In Erich Maria Remarque's novel, images of Nature, the "lost world of beauty," represent the loss of innocence and peace of the "Iron Youth" as Kantorek alludes to the young German soldiers. Often...

The original question had to be edited down. I would suggest that the primary significance of the daydream is to bring to light how far off reality is from it. Paul's daydream brings to light the...

Paul Baumer is part of a lost generation. Young and idealistic, Paul marches off to a dehumanizing war of battles in which the soldiers cannot even see their enemy. Terrorized by shell warfare,...

Haie Westhus dies of an injury to his lung that he sustained in the trenches. After being wounded in the back during battle by some shrapnel or pieces of weaponry, Haie endures significant pain...

Paul refuses to be "put under" because he fears that the surgeon will amputate his injured leg. In Chapter 10 of All Quiet on the Western Front, after having three weeks of good food and relaxation...

This passage from Chapter 8 of All Quiet on the Western Front points to Paul Baumer's attempts to bring some meaning to the senselessness of war. Having returned from a furlough during which he...

The meaning of the title, in general and specifically with regard to Paul, can be interpreted in different ways, but the overriding concept is one of the senseless nature of war, of life, and of...

Paul has a difficult time remembering the past because of the contrast between the calm in the memories and the chaos of war. On the front, there is always noise. In their memories only, there is...

In chapter 6, Paul remembers the line of old poplar trees in the meadow behind the town, and how the children, including himself, used to love them. The children would sit beneath the trees and...

By the end of Chapter 11 of All Quiet on the Western Front, which takes place in the summer of 1918, it is clear that the German army is losing the war. The men are becoming nervous and losing...

Albert and I find a mahogany bed which can be taken to pieces with a sky of blue silk and a lace coverlet. We sweat like monkeys moving it in, but a man cannot let a thing like that slip, and it...

Schoolmaster Kantorek refers to his former students as "the Iron Youth". Paul Baumer and Albert Kropp scoff at the term because it is so ironic. Kantorek speaks of them as if they are glorious...

This first battle depicted in the film was revolutionary for its time. Never before had the horrors of battle been portrayed so realistically on screen. It is unclear what the total number of...

On the first page of chapter 15, in the first paragraph, Remarque uses the simile, "war is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery." This simile suggests that...

There are many reasons, and unfortunately for the boys, most of them turned out to be false and empty. Considering their young age, perhaps the most tragic is the much-quoted influence of their...

In All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul suggests that social pressure was one of the reasons the boys enlisted in the army. Paul identifies one potential reason why the boys enlisted in the book's...