All Quiet on The Western Front showed me the power literature has to connect emotion across time.

I have recently finished the much lauded All Quiet on The Western Front and was struggling to find much online discussion for it that wasn’t about the film of the same title (which I still haven’t seen).

The book is practically as classic as a classic can get, rightly seen as one of the greatest forms of war fiction ever put to paper. I can hardly say how big of an impact it had on me personally, it is a barrage of gut punches packed into 200 pages, and has angered me more than any other fiction I’ve ever read. This isn’t anger at the book for its prose or its plot its anger at the world for allowing such horrors to happen, at war broadly for all its depravity and horror.

I can tell the book was having an serious impact when I would consistently mentally repeat ‘this really happened’, wishing someone could come along and tell me it was never so whilst perhaps removing all the 20th century history books from my house for good measure. Whilst admittedly the exact events of the books may not have taken place exactly as described (it is still a fiction after all) the pain and fear was infinitely more real and it is this the book managed to capture for me so well, more than any other I think I might ever read.