Both of these classic novels were written during the Weimar period in Germany, 1919-1933. All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of Paul Baumer, a young soldier who enlisted in the German army with youthful enthusiasm just before World War I, only to find himself destroyed by the brutality of trench warfare. His poignant tale is not a treatise on the inhumane nature of combat, but rather the story of one ordinary young man's life-changing experience. As Remarque opens his novel: This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.