Eindelijk nieuws van het westelijk front

A sign of life on the Western Front. The reception of Im Westen nichts Neues in the Netherlands, 1929-1940

Shortly after its release in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel Im Westen nichts Neues became a bestseller in the Netherlands. Though it was a novel and thus fictional, it was seen as an honest and true-to-life representation of what went on during the First World War. The novel (and its later adaptation to film) made Dutch contemporaries feel intimately connected to the experiences of frontline soldiers. This paper analyses the reception of Remarque’s novel in the Netherlands during the nineteen thirties. It shows how, in the public perception of the novel’s contents, fact and fiction became inseparable.