The phrase "all quiet on the Western Front" has become a colloquial expression meaning stagnation, or lack of visible change, in any context.

[3] Murdoch also explains how, owing to the time it was published, Wheen's translation was obliged to Anglicise some lesser-known German references and lessen the impact of certain passages while omitting others entirely.

He attended school, where the patriotic speeches of his teacher Kantorek led the whole class to volunteer for the Imperial German Army shortly after the start of the Great War.

At the training camp, where they meet Himmelstoß, his class is scattered over the platoons amongst Frisian fishermen, peasants and labourers, with whom they soon become friends.

Bäumer arrives at the Western Front with his friends and schoolmates (Albert, Kemmerich, Leer, Müller, and a number of other characters).

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces" While fighting at the front, Bäumer and his comrades engage in frequent battles and endure the treacherous and filthy conditions of trench warfare.

Paul recovers the books and writings he had left in his childhood room, but finds his passion for literature to have been completely erased by the trauma of war.

He feels disconnected from most of the townspeople, who ask him "stupid and distressing" questions about his experiences or lecture him about strategy and advancing to Paris while insisting that Paul and his friends know only their "own little sector" but nothing of the big picture.

Paul and his company receive a temporary reprieve from the horrid rations and living conditions of the trenches when they are instead sent to a supply depot in an occupied French town.

They enjoy food and luxuries taken from the depot or looted from the town but continue to lose men to Allied shelling, culminating in Paul and Albert being wounded while evacuating civilians and needing to be diverted to a Catholic hospital far behind the lines.

Kantorek called Paul's platoon the "Iron Youth", teaching his students a romanticized version of warfare with glory and duty to the Fatherland.

It is only when the boys go to war and have to live and fight in dirty, cramped trenches with little protection from enemy bullets and shells while contending with hunger and sickness that they realize just how dispiriting it is to actually serve in the army.

With All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque emerged as an eloquent spokesman for a generation that had been, in his own words, "destroyed by war, even though it might have escaped its shells."

Dr. Karl Kroner [de] was concerned about Remarque's depiction of the medical personnel as being inattentive, uncaring, or absent from frontline action.

He offered the following clarification: "People abroad will draw the following conclusions: if German doctors deal with their own fellow countrymen in this manner, what acts of inhumanity will they not perpetuate against helpless prisoners delivered up into their hands or against the populations of occupied territory?

[11] Much of the literary criticism came from Salomo Friedlaender, who wrote a book Hat Erich Maria Remarque wirklich gelebt?

Remarque publicly stated that he wrote All Quiet on the Western Front for personal reasons, not for profit, as Friedlaender had charged.

[7][8] All Quiet on the Western Front was followed in 1931 by The Road Back, which follows the surviving characters after the Treaty of Versailles, and the two are considered part of a trilogy alongside the narratively unrelated Three Comrades, released in 1936 and set well into the post-war era.