Historic Analysis of All Quiet on the Western Front
Historic Analysis of All Quiet on the Western Front
World War I was the first total war. Once the war began, the countries involved mobilized their entire populations and economic resources to achieve victory on the battlefield. The term home front, which was widely employed for the first time during World War I, perfectly symbolized this new concept of a war in which the civilian population behind the lines was directly and critically involved in the war effort.
The war began as a clash between two coalitions of European countries. The first coalition, known as the Allied Powers, included the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Serbia and the Russian Empire. The Central Powers, which opposed them, consisted of the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Although the United States originally was neutral, it joined the Allies in 1917.
The immediate cause of the war was the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by a Serbian nationalist. The fundamental causes of the conflict, however, were rooted deeply in the European history of the previous century,
By the end of 1914 the war entered a stalemate. Both sides became mired in two main, stationary fronts—the western front, primarily in northeastern France, and the eastern front, mainly in western Russia. At the fronts, the troops fought each other from numerous parallel lines of interconnected trenches. Each side laid siege to the other’s system of trenches and endeavored to break through their lines.
When the war finally came to an end on November 11, 1918, and the Central Powers were defeated, the political order of Europe had been transformed beyond recognition. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires had collapsed. The war also helped precipitate the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which established the ideology of Communism in Russia.
The war also had important long-term consequences. The enormous cost of the war undermined the financial stability of all of the countries involved, and they had to bear an onerous burden of debt for many years to come. These financial losses, combined with the battlefield deaths and physical destruction, severely weakened the European powers.
.Erich Maria Remarque created with his novel All Quiet on the Western Front an amazingly good picture how World War I was like. He shows the world a life created by the front in a fictive character, that could have existed everywhere on the German-French front. Remarque opens the book with the main...