This book is for literature, what Otto Dix did for painting.
That is to say, the novel treats the social dimension of the crisis of the 1920s in Germany in the same way that painters of objective realism did.
They denounce the abandonment of war invalids, the elites' indecent lifestyle, the Weimar Republic's headlong rush, and National Socialism's popularity.
In this novel, E.M. Remarque speaks of all the morgue of the crisis. The morgue is the proper sense since it is the undertakers' story, who prosper thanks to poverty and famine and punctuate their days with endless drunkenness.
The story is very cynical, structuring the novel to feel the delirious fever of these periods of inflation.