review on All Quiet on the Western Front
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All Quiet on the Western Front by the German Author Erich Maria Remarque is one of the best WW-I pacifistic book written conveying a very strong anti-war message. It's a story about a whole generation that was swept away and pulverized by the war. The book was written in 1929 when still the world was mourning over the loss and the earth had just soaked fresh blood from the war. The author himself served as a soldier for Germany in the WWI, and although the book being a fiction it more or less accounts his experiences. As this book represents anti-militarism and shows the German soldiers as sympathetic protagonists, it was burned and forbidden by the Nazi regime and the author was deprived of the German Citizenship.
All Quiet on the Western Front is narrated by a German soldier named Paul Baumer and presents the war through the eyes of a seventeen year old boy forced to become a soldier and join the War. After listening to the firing lecture on idealism and patriotism from their war-mongering School Master, the whole class of young enthusiastic 17yrs old boys sign up for the Great War. Their nave minds were still not exposed to the horror of war during their brutal training under their unpleasant drill-instructor. But as soon as they reach the front line, the horror, atrocities, pain and the absurdity of the war embraces them like a clasp and changes their lives forever. They witness their comrades fall one by one like lambs in a slaughterhouse...