The Road Back

The Road Back

First edition cover
Author	Erich Maria Remarque
Original title	Der Weg zurück
Translator	Arthur Wesley Wheen
Language	German
Genre	War novel
Publisher	Propyläen Verlag (German) Little, Brown & Co (English)
Publication date	April 1931
Publication place	Germany
Published in English	May 1931
Media type	Print (Hardback)
OCLC	909194
Preceded by	All Quiet on the Western Front

The Road Back, also translated as The Way Back, (German: Der Weg zurück) is a novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque, commonly regarded as a sequel to his 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front. It was first serialized in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung between December 1930 and January 1931, and published in book form in April 1931.

Plot

Although the book follows different characters from those in All Quiet on the Western Front, it can be assumed that they were in the same company, as the characters recall other characters from the earlier novel. Tjaden is the only member of the 2nd Company to feature prominently in both books.

Set a few weeks after the end of All Quiet on the Western Front, the novel deals with the fall of the German Empire and details the experience of young men in Germany who have returned from the trenches of World War I and are trying to integrate back into civilian life. Its most salient feature is the main characters' pessimism about contemporary society which, they feel, is morally bankrupt because it has allegedly caused the war and apparently does not wish to reform itself.

For example, in one early scene, a group of veterans quietly seethe at the back of a classroom while their professor eulogizes their fallen comrades. The professor speaks about how the fallen have entered a “long sleep beneath the green grasses,” which causes the veterans to laugh mockingly. After the laughter subsides, the veteran Westerholt spits out a tirade: “in the mud of shell holes they are lying, knocked rotten, ripped in pieces, gone down into the bog—Green grasses! … Would you like to know how young Hoyer died? All day long he lay out on the wire screaming, and his guts hanging out of this belly like macaroni … now you go and tell his mother how he died.” The scene dramatically underlines the painful tension that arises in a culture between realistic and romantic memory after a dreadful war.

Reception

The book was banned during Nazi rule.

Preservation

Under the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the book will enter the public domain in the United States in 2027.

Adaptations

• 1937, The Road Back – motion picture directed by James Whale and starring, among others, Noah Beery Jr. and Richard Cromwell.

English translations

• Arthur Wesley Wheen, as The Road Back. Published in 1931 by Little, Brown, and Company, McClelland & Stewart and G.P. Putnam and Co.
• Brian Murdoch, as The Way Back. Published in 2019 by Vintage Classics, ISBN 9781784875268.