Erich Maria Remarque

After four grueling years the Great War has finally ended. Now Ernst and the few men left from his company cannot help wondering what will become of them. The town they departed as eager young men seems colder, their homes smaller, the reasons their comrades had to die even more inexplicable. For Ernst and his friends, the road back to peace is more treacherous than they ever imagined. Suffering food shortages, political unrest, and a broken heart,...

Retreating from the Russian front after the failure to take Moscow in 1944, German soldier Ernst Graeber is granted a three-week furlough. He returns to his home village for the first time since he left two years before and is shocked to learn that his parents are among the thousands left dead or missing by the Allied bombing raids. Then he falls for the beautiful Elizabeth Kruse, and the two attempt to begin a romance amidst the devastation and despair...

The testament of Paul Baumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I, illuminates the savagery and futility of war.

Political dissidents, Jews, medical students, petty criminals: Among the thousands of displaced persons traveling the unpaved roads of Europe, there are Steiner and Kern. Both have irritated officials for outstaying their two-week sojourn in Czechoslovakia. And so they must leave. Not that either has any place to go. Not in 1939. But when a man is led by a guard to the border of one country, he must try another. Until he is escorted from that one...

"Follows a group of German recruits during World War I, whose patriotism soon turns to disillusionment."--

Includes chapter summaries and commentaries, character sketches, Remarque's style and technique, and Erich Maria Remarque's life and background.

"Paul Baumer is just 19 years old when he and his classmates enlist. They are Germany's Iron Youth who enter the war with high ideals and leave it disillusioned or dead. As Paul struggles with the realities of the man he has become, and the inscrutable world to which he must return, he is led like a ghost of his former self into the war's final hours. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the greatest war novels of all time, an eloquent expression...

Haunted by a secret past and tormented by an uncertain future, two lonely people are drawn together in Paris during the last desperate days of freedom before WWII. A surgeon flees to Paris to escape the Nazis' growing power. After falling in love with an unemployed cabaret singer and finding her a job, he is deported when unable to produce his passport. Things come to a crisis when war is declared.