All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, translated by Kurt Beals

All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque

translated by Kurt Beals

Liveright 2025

Erich Maria Remarque's famous Im Westen nichts Neues, first serialized in the newspaper Vossische Zeitung, then released as a book in 1929, entered the US public domain in 2024, so a small brace of new English-language translations can be expected. Remarque's book was an enormous success right from its first appearance in Germany and was an even bigger success in the US, where it's been a staple of high school reading curricula for almost a century in A. W. Wheen's 1929 translation.

The book, which chronicles the First World War experiences of an Everyman soldier named Paul Bäumer and his colleagues, has routinely been ranked as one of the best war novels ever written; it's been translated into dozens of languages, dramatized for stage and screen, and now from Liveright it gets a new English-language version by skilled translator Kurt Beals, who's occasionally not above the kinds of banal cliches that have filled a million high school book reports from Bar Harbor to Sacramento. “Remarque forces us to reckon with the stark differences between the soldiers' world and our own,” he writes, for instance. “The daily discomforts and horrors that have become familiar, even mundane, for Bäumer and his fellow soldiers strike us with full force when we encounter them unprepared.”

Fortunately, Beals in his Introduction can also occasionally be grimly droll, as when he notes that the Nazis of course fiercely hated Remarque's book and mentions that the feeling was mutual, adding, “His bitterness toward Germany was more than justified; the Nazis had not only mistreated Remarque himself, they had also beheaded his sister Elfriede in 1943.” And he's polite but firm about the creakiness of earlier English-language translations. For his own, he eludes the elisions of Remarque's various publishers, the omissions of massive popularizers like Book of the Month Club, and the decisions of earlier translators, going instead straight to Vossische Zeitung and the original German of Im Westen nichts Neues.

The result is a leaner, far more kinetic reading experience than that old Wheen translation, certainly. Beals writes that he's sought to emphasize that Bäumer is “a narrator who can be believed,” and whether or not this is an entirely accurate goal, it makes for gripping reading throughout. Remarque wrote the sections of his book with headlong energy, completing the whole thing in six weeks, and Beals has very much managed to recapture that feeling of urgency, particularly when the narrative convulses into action:

The thundering of the guns intensifies into a single dull roar, then breaks up again into smaller clusters of explosions. The dry bursts of machine-gun fire rattle. Above us, the air is filled with invisible darting, howling, whistling, and hissing,. Those are the smaller projectiles; but now and then the big coal boxes, the very heavy shells, bellow through the night and land far behind us. They have a roaring, hoarse, distant call, like stags in rutting season, and they sail high above the howls and whistles of the smaller projectiles.

The quality of Remarque's prose that's proven most elusive for earlier translators his tendency to wrap a scene or even just a line with epigrammatic Weimar stingers, and Beals, perhaps through his long familiarity with the master of such things, Kafka, never fails to catch their pitch perfectly:

Today we would move about in the landscape of our youth like travelers. We have been burned by realities, we know differences as merchants do, and necessities as butchers do. We are no longer carefree – we are horribly indifferent. We would be there; but would we be alive?

We are abandoned like children and experienced like old men, we are raw and sad and superficial – I think we are lost.

Beals appends no notes to his edition, and his 10-page Introduction effectively but merely covers the basics of the book's provenance (including a glancing mention of the fact that Remarque had read and reviewed, and one might add envied, the real-face-of-war novels of Ernst Jünger, revelatory books like Fire and Blood and particularly In Storms of Steel). Readers looking to learn more about Remarque's life can consult the lifeless little 1979 biography Beals cites or wait in naive hope for the larger, fuller English-language life this author very much deserves.

But Beals is correct, of course, that Remarque's life has always revolved around this one masterpiece, and it now has a lively, unsentimental new appearance in English, rendered by an extremely apt translator. It's a welcome invitation for a re-read, since high school was perhaps some time ago.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News