But it wasn’t called All Quiet on the Western Front: The German title was (and is) Im Westen nichts Neues, meaning “Nothing New in the West.”

The Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung printed Remarque’s story in serial form in 1928 and the Ullstein Verlag, a German publisher, released it as a book the following January. All Quiet on the Western Front isn’t a direct translation of the book’s German title. The very day this thought struck me, I put pen to paper, without much in the way of prior thought.” Six weeks later, the novel was finished. “The shadow of war hung over us, especially when we tried to shut our minds to it. “I could observe a similar phenomenon in many of my friends and acquaintances,” he said in a 1929 interview. Remarque experienced depression in the decade following the war, and it wasn’t until 1928 that he finally linked his malaise to military trauma. He spent about six weeks at the front in the early summer of 1917 before a shrapnel injury landed him in the hospital, and those harrowing memories eventually inspired All Quiet on the Western Front. (He would later replace Paul with Maria as a tribute to his mother and adopt his French ancestors’ spelling of his surname: Remarque.) The future writer was an 18-year-old student when, in November 1916, he was drafted into the Imperial German Army. brandstaetter images/GettyImagesĮrich Paul Remark was born in Osnabrück, Germany, on June 22, 1898, to Anna Maria and Peter Franz Remark.

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