The Road Back

This is an excellent story about a group of young men who try to to put some semblance of normality back into their lives after experiencing the horrors of war. One cannot help feeling sympathetic for these men. Perhaps they were the enemy, perhaps they were on the "other side". But for the most part they were ordinary young men, generally decent and not so different from men in the U.S., Britain or Canada. They went to war with the same ideals of patriotism and duty as allied soldiers, and came back scarred physically and emotionally. As well as feeling disillusioned to find that their sacrifices had been for nothing, the people at home seem to be almost indifferent and have no understanding of what they went through. What they experienced then, seems to be very similar to what soldiers of today are experiencing. Post traumatic stress disorder.

A wonderful mix of poetic and politics, idealism and romanticism, beautiful scenery and horrible flashbacks. You are never completely sure what is going to happen and you are not allowed to be led by any single event in the novel except life itself. Remarque hits on our own senses and emotions and gives us a rare opportunity to follow the affairs and thoughts of another being. Amazing

The Road Back, sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, is a incredibly touching story of comrades returning from years at war to a society that neither wants to accept nor help them in their search for a meaningful life after war. This lost generation goes through life seeing no more purpose in living. Remarque's incredible descriptive style leads the reader through turmoil in Germany, from food shortages, to political unrest, suicide, and murder, and yet at the same time he makes pauses to simply show some of the beauty left in the world. The characters are incredible and after putting down the book I felt that I had bonded with people I had only known for a couple of hundred pages and yet had been through so much with. Follow the comrades through tough times and their realizations about their own meanings of life.

i have recently read All Quiet On The Western Front, Remarque's first novel. to follow it up, i have read The Road Back. to anyone who's read the first, the only way to give closure to the tough, touching story of Paul Baumer is to read the sequal- The Road Back. In it, a young soldier named Ernst and the few men left of his company come back home after 4 grueling years of the unspeakable horrors of military life in World War 1 only to discover that the world may no longer be at war, but there's still a war far more horrifical raging in their own hearts. They must now fight to fit back into society, and stay true to themselves and their dead comrades. In this story of lost youth and the fight for survival, Ernst and his friends fight to regain control of their shattered lives and go on in what seems to be an almost pointless existance, finding hope in the strangest places... And as Remarque once said, this is a story of 'a generation ruined by war'.