Sitting on one of my bookshelves at home is a battered copy of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
Today, it is surrounded by other books that have exerted a greater influence on my understanding of the first world war. But it was this paperback that first inspired a fascination that became a career.
I first came across it at my north London comprehensive when I was about 13 years old. My English teacher read out passages that seemed to jump off the page, with descriptions of giant rats, lice, mud and even the toilet humour of German soldiers in the trenches of the western front.
I was fascinated by the experiences of the young Paul Bäumer, his classmates and Katczinsky, the old hand who takes them under his wing.
While today I am able to see the problems in a semi-autobiographical novel that mixes aspects of first-hand experience with retrospectively influenced fiction, back then I was amazed by the bluntly powerful writing.
This interest turned into something more concrete at university, where I did postgraduate research on the 56th (London) Division on the western front, which I am now adapting into a book. It helped me to join the Imperial War Museum in 2006, where I work as a historian in the research and information department.
Now I get to delve into the museum’s collections for exhibition research and find artefacts similar to the kind so vividly described in Remarque’s novel.
Matt Brosnan is a historian at the Imperial War Museum, London
Today, it is surrounded by other books that have exerted a greater influence on my understanding of the first world war. But it was this paperback that first inspired a fascination that became a career.
I first came across it at my north London comprehensive when I was about 13 years old. My English teacher read out passages that seemed to jump off the page, with descriptions of giant rats, lice, mud and even the toilet humour of German soldiers in the trenches of the western front.
I was fascinated by the experiences of the young Paul Bäumer, his classmates and Katczinsky, the old hand who takes them under his wing.
While today I am able to see the problems in a semi-autobiographical novel that mixes aspects of first-hand experience with retrospectively influenced fiction, back then I was amazed by the bluntly powerful writing.
This interest turned into something more concrete at university, where I did postgraduate research on the 56th (London) Division on the western front, which I am now adapting into a book. It helped me to join the Imperial War Museum in 2006, where I work as a historian in the research and information department.
Now I get to delve into the museum’s collections for exhibition research and find artefacts similar to the kind so vividly described in Remarque’s novel.
Matt Brosnan is a historian at the Imperial War Museum, London
