‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ finds a new voice

Published in January 1929, “All Quiet on the Western Front” sold a million copies in Germany in its first year and two million around the world. Just a little over a decade after World War I ended, Erich Maria Remarque’s readers found themselves behind the German front lines, empathizing with German soldiers who had once been mortal enemies to the Americans, British and the French. Like the outcropping of surrealism after WWI, “All Quiet on the Western Front” opened up a new genre of books for veterans to process what they had gone through. “The novel attracted global audiences in its own time — and continues to do so nearly a century later — because it lays bare features identifiable in virtually any war: deprivation, terror, trauma, kinship, black humor, alienation from society, and (usually) some questioning of the cause,” Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., writes in the forward of the book’s most recent translation. However, while it is one of the most famous books to come out of WWI — or any war for that matter — “All Quiet on the Western Front” — until recently — had only been translated twice from German to English. Once in 1929 by an Australian; the second translation, from 1993, is available only in the United Kingdom. Arthur Wesley Wheen’s 1929 edition, despite its numerous mistranslations and stylistic flaws, is the dominant one today, having been the only one available in the U.S. for almost one hundred years. Mar…