Erich Maria Remarque (1898 - 1970) was a German-born novelist whose experience as a conscripted soldier in the First World War shaped a body of fiction about war, exile, and survival. [1] His novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929) sold in the millions within a year and was translated worldwide, while its refusal of patriotic consolation made him a target of the German right. [2] Stripped of his citizenship in 1938, he spent the rest of his life in Switzerland and the United States.
Early life and the war
Erich Paul Remark was born on 22 June 1898 in Osnabrück, in Lower Saxony, into a Catholic working-class family; his father was a bookbinder. [1] He was training as a teacher when he was conscripted in 1916 and sent to the Western Front the following year.
He was wounded by shell fragments near Ypres in July 1917 and spent the remainder of the war in an army hospital in Duisburg. [2] After the armistice he worked briefly as a schoolteacher and then in a variety of jobs, including stonecutter's assistant, salesman, and motoring journalist, adopting the name Erich Maria Remarque in memory of his mother and reverting to an older French spelling of the family name.
All Quiet on the Western Front
Serialised in a Berlin newspaper in late 1928 and published as a book the following year, All Quiet on the Western Front follows a group of young German soldiers from schoolroom enthusiasm to disillusion and death. [3] Told in plain, concrete prose from the viewpoint of the ordinary infantryman, it dwelt on hunger, fear, boredom, and physical detail rather than on strategy or national purpose.
The novel sold enormously in Germany and abroad and was filmed in Hollywood in 1930 by Lewis Milestone; the American film won the Academy Award for Best Picture. [3] Nazi activists disrupted screenings in Berlin, and the book became one of the principal targets of the book burnings of May 1933. A sequel, Der Weg zurück (The Road Back), dealt with the return of veterans to a broken society.
Exile
Remarque left Germany for Switzerland in 1931 and settled at Porto Ronco on Lake Maggiore. German authorities revoked his citizenship in 1938, and in 1939 he moved to the United States, becoming a naturalised American citizen in 1947. [1]
His novels of exile include Drei Kameraden (Three Comrades), Arc de Triomphe (Arch of Triumph), set among refugees in Paris before the Second World War, and Die Nacht von Lissabon (The Night in Lisbon). Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life) is set in a concentration camp, and Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (A Time to Love and a Time to Die) returns to the Eastern Front of the Second World War. [2] His sister Elfriede Scholz was tried and executed in Berlin in 1943, a loss he commemorated in the dedication of Der Funke Leben.
Later life and legacy
Remarque married the actress Paulette Goddard in 1958 and returned to live in Switzerland, where he died at Locarno on 25 September 1970. [1] The Federal Republic of Germany awarded him its Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit.
All Quiet on the Western Front has remained continuously in print and has been adapted for screen several times, including a German-language film that won the Academy Award for Best International Feature in 2023. [3] His native city of Osnabrück maintains a peace centre and archive in his name, and the novel is a standard text in the teaching of twentieth-century European history and literature. [2]
