What brought me to Australia? Reading "All Quiet On The Western Front" in my teens! So when the "Bundeswehr" gave me the thumbs-up on my medical and a "Wehrpass" which obliged me to report my whereabouts every time I moved, I knew it was time to move - PERMANENTLY!
"All Quiet On The Western Front" is a powerpul anti-war novel written by Erich Maria remarque, a German veteran of World War I. Published in 1929, it was deemed degenerate, or anti-German, and banned in Germany with the rise of the Nazi Party. In 1933, Nazis began burning copies of the novel, and in 1939 Erich Maria Remarque emigrated to the United States, where he became a naturalised citizen in 1947.
"This book is intended neither as an accusation nor as a confession, but simply as an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war - even those of it who survived the shelling."
There are three movie adaptations of Erich Maria Remarque's famous 1929 anti-war novel: a 1930 version, the above 1979 version, and the most recent one in 2022. All have the same powerful anti-war ending:
"He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad that the end had come."
"All quiet on the Western front." I wish we could say the same about the Eastern front right now.
