All Quiet on the Western Front

The All Quiet on the Western Front sequence follows a generation of German soldiers through the First World War and its aftermath. All Quiet on the Western Front places Paul Bäumer and his school friends in the trenches of the Western Front, while The Road Back turns to Ernst and the surviving men of his company as they return to a defeated and politically unstable Germany.

The two novels are linked less by a continuous protagonist than by a shared subject: what industrial war does to young men before, during and after combat. Read together, they move from enlistment, bombardment and comradeship to demobilisation, estrangement from civilian life and the difficult search for purpose after the armistice.