Propaganda In All Quiet On The Western Front

From a Nazi German perspective, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque was the epitome of anti-war propaganda. The focal point of the novel went against the very core of Nazi beliefs, causing them to ban the book from Germany in fear of people rising up against them, or deserting the cause. The author of the book himself was stripped of his German citizenship for writing such a book. The novel shows the journey that a young man takes through the course of the war and how that journey destroys him as a person because of the repugnance of war. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the plot focuses on several men who enlist in the German army in World War I expecting glory and pomp, but soon learn that war is not the glory it had been painted as in their youth. The main character, Paul, reminisces about how his professors in school extolled

As they fight in the trenches, they lose sight of any cease to the eternal torment. “At the front there is no quietness, and the curse of the front reaches so far that we never pass beyond it” (121). The time that Paul and his fellow men spend at the front is a turning point for their morale. They used to have at least some trace of hope that the war would someday end, yet now it is gone. The ceaseless monotony of the bullets soaring through the air utterly destroys their youth and hope of returning to a normal life. “How long has it been? Weeks-months-years? Only days. We see time pass in the colorless faces of the dying” (133) At this point, the men have reached the point of no return. They are so scarred that they cannot turn back to how they were before the wretched war began. Hitler didn’t want people to see this side of war. He and the Nazi party wanted citizens to be blind to what war can do to a person, therefore, in order to support the cause, he banned this novel in fear that the public might realize the