All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War

Abstract

Between 1928 and 1930 Germany and Great Britain especially, and France and America to a lesser extent, experienced a sudden and remarkable 'boom' in war books, plays, and films. For a decade after the end of the war, publishers, theatre directors, and film makers had treated war material gingerly, viewing it as a poor commercial propositon, on the assumption that the public wished, contrary to annual remembrance day exhortations, to forget the war. In the course of 1928, and then particularly in early 1929, it became abundantly clear that the war had become a saleable subject, and cultural artifacts dealing with the war began to pour forth. What some felt to have been a 'conspiracy of silence' was shattered with a