The novel, made famous by a film, is a war diary. Set during the First World War, it recounts the story of a group of German twenty-year-olds: “the iron youth,” as their schoolmasters called them. Everything is confused; memories of their previous lives are > mute visions, (...) an immense, disconsolate melancholy. (..) As long as we were in the barracks they awakened in us a wild and rebellious
