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Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front

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An ancient Chinese proverb states “One cannot know peace without knowing war” (Herzberg). In a time where all that plagues many nations was war, it was inevitable that a time of peace needed to follow or at least the sober idea of it. The proverb was created to validate wars and later turned into a way to approach life’s troubles. Being within an individual or on a global scale, war and peace are connected. They exist coherently but never together; they are the cause and effects of each other. One follows the other yet both are needed in order to understand the other one. This relationship between war and peace is developed in the Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. While the first major world war is the background …show more content…

After losing a generation of men and experiencing the hardships of war, many peace related objectives were put into place to prevent another war so destructive and disastrous. The road to peace started with the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. United States President, Woodrow Wilson, presented a drafted series of peace proposals called the Fourteen Points. The last point addressed the possibility of having a group dedicated to peace and interactions among nations no matter the size (Macmillan). This organization would stop wars like World War I from happening so that it does not become part of the culture of the Western World yet again. While the idea of the league was originally rejected, the Treaty of Versailles, the most significant treaty to come out of WWI, established the League of Nations. Eventually, the League of Nations disbanded in five years after the start of World War II and the United Nations was formed. Newton Diehl Baker, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of War argues that the lack of such a league to keep peace in 1914 is what threw the world into the chaos of World War (Macmillan). Even Baker did not know the ramifications the war would have due to the lack of peace structure until after the war

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