Not so Quiet on the New Zealand Front: All Quiet on the Western Front and New Zealand Memories of First World War

Abstract

In 1929, ten years after the end of the First World War, many New Zealanders commented on how their memories and sense of the conflict sat with the representations emerging within contemporary popular literature. Much of this commentary cited Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front which stood as the definitive example of a new more graphic and cynical presentation of the war emerging at the time.

Study of this commentary complicates some of the assertions of previous studies on the subject of New Zealand’s memory and sense of the conflict. It suggests that, in 1929, New Zealander’s held and advanced multifaceted, nuanced and, very significantly, noisy interpretations of the war. Evidently it was not so quiet on the New Zealand front.