More importantly though, its depictions of the soul-destroying insanity of warfare have become part of our modern response to war-among those of us both for and against any particular conflict-without us necessarily realizing how we have come to absorb these attitudes. There is no telling how many readers and leaders were moved by the book to become anti-militaristic. It's the one fictional work of the era that we might say has affected history. When we say "influential", we don't mean only in the book's influence on other authors (although it did set the standard for writing about war in the twentieth century), but in its impact on the world's people and even on their governments. Remarque was a great and popular writer for more than four decades, but will be remembered always for his first gigantically influential novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.
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