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Series
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.
Reading order
Paul Bäumer and several of his school friends enlist in the German army after being encouraged by the patriotic certainty of their teacher. Training strips away their confidence, and service on the Western Front replaces abstract ideas of duty with bombardment, hunger, wounds and the practical…
The armistice sends Ernst and the surviving soldiers of his company back to Germany, but peace does not restore the lives they left behind. School, family and work now seem remote from the experience of the front, while shortages, political unrest and public arguments about the…