Erich Maria Remarque
The Eternal Pacifist
Reading Remarque is the best antidote against war
Erich Maria Remarque (born Erich Paul Remark; 22 June 1898 – 25 September 1970) was a 20th-century German novelist. His landmark novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) (1928), about the German military experience of World War 1, was an international best-seller that created a new literary genre.
Erich Maria Remarque was a surprisingly thoughtful and extremely intelligent person with a very sensitive soul and subtle talent, which he always doubted that he possessed. His books are startlingly frank expressions of real feelings as well as vivid characters that sprang from the author’s own life and heart.
In Remarque’s novels, love is passionate, all-consuming, and immortal. ’His’ war is terrible; it breaks one’s will, faith, and fate. His books are about a lost generation — ’lost’ in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world, and because its members felt they had no place among the living.
Peter Franz Remark, Remarque’s father, was a poorly paid bookbinder. Although Franz Remark did not show much interest in intellectual activities, except for his interest in the occult, the family had a piano, and at one point in his life, Remarque planned a musical career. Once he also played the organ in an insane asylum.
In 1904, at the age of six, Remarque entered the Domschule (cathedral school), and four years later he moved to the Johannisschule. Remarque was “always the best in class”, as one of his closest school friends later recalled. For a time Remarque studied at the University of Münster, but he had to enlist in the German army at the age of 18.
World War I played a crucial role in Remarque’s evolution as a writer. In November 1916, Remarque, along with a number of his classmates, was drafted into the German army.
After a period of military training, his unit was sent to the Western Front. There he took part in the trench warfare in Flanders, Belgium.
In July 1917, he was wounded by shell fragments in the left leg, right arm, and neck during a heavy British artillery attack. After a lengthy convalescence, he was recalled to active military service in October 1918.
Shortly thereafter, Germany’s imperial government was toppled in a revolution, and the country became a republic.
On November 11, 1918, the new government signed the armistice with the Allies, which ended the fighting. Remarque’s wartime experiences, including the loss of some of his comrades, made a strong impression on the young man and served as inspiration for All Quiet on the Western Front.
He returned to Osnabrück, where he finished his educational training. He subsequently took up teaching, but his career was short-lived, He quit this profession in 1920.
During this time, he published his first novel, Die Traumbude (The Dream Booth) as well as some poetry and other fiction.
In 1922, he moved to Hannover, where he took a position as a writer and editor for Echo Continental, a magazine owned by the Continental Rubber Company, a leading manufacturer of automobile tires.
Here he wrote advertising copy, crafted slogans, and published articles on travel, cars, and outdoor life. He also adopted the name, Erich Maria Remarque, using the original French spelling of his family’s name.
In 1925, he relocated to Berlin, where he served as an editor for the popular sports illustrated magazine, Sport im Bild. In the German capital, he mingled with leading writers and filmmakers, including Leni Riefenstahl, who later created Triumph of the Will and other films in Nazi Germany.
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All Quiet on the Western Front
In 1929, Remarque scored his greatest, and most lasting, success with the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues). The work graphically depicted the horrors and brutality of World War I (1914-1918) through the tragic experiences of a group of young German soldiers.
The novel, a lasting tribute to the “lost generation” that perished in the Great War, became an immediate international bestseller. In Germany alone in 1929, the book sold almost one million copies. It was translated into more than a dozen languages, including English, French, and Chinese.
All Quiet on the Western Front earned Remarque accolades generally from the liberal and leftist press for the work’s pacifist stance. The Nazis and conservative nationalists immediately denounced it as an assault on Germany’s honor, as a piece of Marxist propaganda, and the work of a traitor.
That same year, German-born Hollywood producer Carl Laemmle, acquired the rights to make a film of the book. In May 1930, the American film premiered in Los Angeles and won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director.
That summer, audiences in France, Britain, and Belgium flocked to the film and it received popular acclaim.
Almost immediately the American film ran into trouble in Germany. When it was proposed for showing, a representative of the German Ministry of Defense urged that its screening be rejected on the grounds that it damaged the country’s image and shed a bad light on the German military.
He subsequently petitioned German president, Paul von Hindenburg, to ban the film.
In December 1930, when the edited and dubbed version of the film was shown to the general public in Berlin, the Nazis sabotaged the event.
The Party’s leader in Berlin and its propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, organized a riot to disrupt the showing.
Outside, SA stormtroopers intimidated moviegoers, while inside they released stink bombs and mice and harangued the audience. At subsequent showings, the Nazis carried out violent protests.
In response to these actions and conservative attacks on the film, the government banned the film.
Liberals and socialists condemned the action, but the prohibition lasted until September 1931, when Laemmle produced a more censored version for German audiences.
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Book Burning
In 1933, Remarque was forced by the rising tide of Nazism to flee his native Germany for the relative calm and security of Switzerland, where several years earlier he had purchased a lakeshore villa (Casa Monte Tabor at Porto Ronco).
Seeing the writing on the wall, he left Berlin just one day before Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor on January 30, 1933.
Several months later, in May 1933, pro-Nazi students consigned his works to the flames during the fiery book-burning spectacles staged throughout the country.
In Berlin, as the students assembled on the Opernplatz opposite the university with piles of books for the pyres, the Nazi speaker denounced various authors for their un-German spirit, concluding with the following comments:
“Against literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War, for the education of the people in the spirit of truthfulness! I surrender to the flames the writings of Erich Maria Remarque.”
Subsequently, German police purged his works from bookstores, libraries, and universities.
In 1938, the Nazi government stripped him of his German citizenship.
From 1933 onward, Remarque spent his remaining days outside of Germany, except for occasional trips made after the Nazi defeat in 1945.
Though he lost much of his German-speaking audience when the Nazis banned his books, his novels, in translation, continued to find new readers in the United States and elsewhere.
In contrast to many of his fellow German exiled writers, Remarque did not suffer a significant loss of fame or fortune when he left Germany. Major publishers still printed his work, magazines, like Collier’s serialized his new fiction, and Hollywood filmed many of his novels.
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World War II
In September 1939, Remarque left Europe for the United States, just as World War II was beginning.
Much of his post1933 fiction, such as Liebe deinen Nächsten (Flotsam), Arc de Triomphe (Arch of Triumph), Die Nacht von Lissabon (The Night in Lisbon), and the posthumous, Schatten im Paradies (Shadows in Paradise), depicts the lives and suffering of anti-Nazi émigrés, their often ambivalent feelings towards Germany, and their sometimes difficult adjustments to life in exile.
In 1944, Remarque wrote a report for America’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the country’s foreign intelligence organization and the forerunner to today’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In it, he urged the Allies to adopt a systematic policy for re-educating the German population after the war. Germans, he believed, had to be exposed to Nazi crimes and the evils of militarism.
After the War
In his postwar novels, Remarque attempted to continue to expose Nazi crimes.
As such, he was among the first and most prominent German writers to address Nazi mass murder, the concentration camp system, and the issue of the population’s culpability in these crimes, in such works as Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life) and Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (published in English as A Time to Love and A Time to Die).
After the war, he also learned that his younger sister, Elfriede, had been arrested and tried before the Nazi People’s Court for making anti-Nazi and “defeatist” remarks.
Convicted, she was sentenced to death and beheaded on December 16, 1943. He dedicated Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life) to her memory.
In an attempt to bring those who denounced her to justice, he hired Robert Kempner, one of the US prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, to investigate this matter.
In 1948, Remarque returned to Switzerland as an American citizen.
His works were once again published in Germany, although they frequently received negative criticism and were revised to edit out politically “unpalatable” passages.
In 1958, he married American film star Paulette Goddard, with whom he remained until his death in 1970.
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Below is a video of an interview conducted by Friedrich Luft in German with English subtitles (you should remember to turn them on – see the video setting line just below the video picture when you have started the video). Even if you do not understand German you will get a good impression of the person Erich Maria Remarque.
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Published Novels:
1920 Die Traumbude (The Dream Booth)
1929 Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front)
Erich Maria Remarque’s account of his experiences as a German soldier on the Western Front is told through the fictional story of Private Paul Bauer who is encouraged to enlist together with his entire school class.
The account of the destruction and death of his friends through the horrors of trench warfare is told in a poignant and evocative manner.
The story dissects the psychological effects upon Bauer and his colleagues, his alienation from his fellow non-combatant countrymen, and the manner in which the soldiers deal with the ever-present threat of death.
The book contains episodes that are vividly descriptive, tragic, and often imbued with a wry gallows humor. An essential read. It is easy to see that Bauer’s story and his experiences apply to those on the opposite side of the trenches.
1931 Der Weg Züruck (The Road Back)
After surviving several horrifying years in the inferno of the Western Front, a young German soldier and his cohorts return home at the end of WW1. Their road back to life in the civilian world is made arduous by their bitterness about what they find in post-war society.
This is such an important book. Why? It complements the horror of the more famous ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ with the sterility and unappreciated demeanor of those dealing with the return of their soldiers.
It’s remarkable that this book isn’t more renowned as it just as eloquently reveals the pointless sacrifice and indeed reckless squandering of youth. Those who returned have nightmares, injuries to accompany them, unemployment, ridicule, lack of empathy, unfaithfulness, crater-filled civilian battlefields for which they have received no training or indeed warning. And if more is needed to make their existence questionable, many are branded as traitorous, Bolshevists and lacking in courage and responsibility to the Fatherland.
1938 Drei Kameraden (Three Comrades)
The year is 1928. On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship is the only refuge from the chaos around them. Then the youngest of them falls in love and brings into the group a young woman who will become a comrade as well, as they are all tested in ways they can never have imagined.
Written with overwhelming simplicity and directness it portrays the greatness of the human spirit, manifested through characters who must find the inner resources to live in a world they did not make but must endure.
An amazing novel about men and male friendship and loyalty. This is a love story in its simplest, most poignant, the overwhelming way in this novel. You get chills while reading it; his story, his words, and his characters are so powerful because of his realistic and human descriptions.
A great story of friendship during hard times.
1941 Liebe deinen Nächsten, (Love Thy Neighbor), published in English as Flotsam
Flotsam tells the story of several refugees from Germany prior to World War II who are shunted back and forth across borders without any regard for their dignity, and without those countries taking any serious interest in finding a solution for this practice.
The refugees struggle to maintain their dignity and start again in new countries that won’t accept them or give them permission to remain or work there.
The futility of their efforts, their varying abilities to adjust to this new world of rumor and chance, and the kindnesses and evil they experience along the way from their fellow human beings tell an extraordinary tale.
Sadly, it does not appear that the world has changed since these conditions continue to this day.
Wars disrupt lives, the combatants, and the civilians. Remarque never poses or indulges in righteous indignation. He simply tells a story about real and easily understood people. They could so easily be us. A modern classic.
1945 Arc de Triomphe (Arch of Triumph)
This novel is sad, profound, and beautiful. All those elements are “in Extremis” with this novel. His most powerful and believable love story lies in these pages, but once again there is no Happy Ever After.
The setting is Paris in 1939. It seems that every page has the imminent invasion of France hanging above the characters and their dialogue. It is written (and translated) with utterly beautiful prose and images.
The protagonist is a surgeon who, being a deportee from Germany is prohibited from practicing in France and must therefore function subordinate to much lesser practitioners. Prior to his deportation, he was tortured in Germany. Despite his situation, he is a compassionate and caring person.
A love that should have grown and thrived does not. Heartbreaking. Yet certainly one of his best. It is epic and deep. Few authors could capture this entire milieu nearly so well.
1952 Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life)
This dark, disquieting novel should be required reading for everyone. Never has the misery of the Nazi death camps been so vividly described nor with so much power. At times humorous and at times appalling, the book tells the story of a camp in the last weeks of the war and even the Nazis are painted with some humanity – a marvelous scene near the end when the Commandant does not even realize that he has been a war criminal!
1954 Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (A Time to Live and A Time to Die)
The story tells us of how an experienced German soldier and his struggle for survival on the Russian front was briefly halted when he was allowed leave for the first time in two years, and how his small City was completely obliterated by the British bombing raids.
It covers events in a very human way exposing the grotesque effects of Nazism. The writing is sometimes very poetical and at other times quite simple. Throughout it is very atmospheric and you can imagine the feelings of soldiers on the Russian front and civilians in a bombed-out German city.
1956 Der schwarze Obelisk (The Black Obelisk)
What a novel! Better than “All Quiet on the Western Front”. There is humor, pathos, and an accurate description of some of the evils of the early Brownshirts of the Nazi Party. There are so many levels to enjoy and the characters stand out vividly representing, in most cases, aspects of people that everyone will have met in life. It is a novel about the between-war years and the absurd inflation that Germany went through. Though set in the 1920s, and written in the 1950s, it has much to warn us of, still.
Ludwig Bodmer, the protagonist, is made appealing to the reader due to the stoic, wily way that he snakes his way through life in late 1930s Germany and the hyperinflation that reduces everyone to desperation. His world of the workplace, an undertaker’s, the local people, including a woman whom everyone watches brazenly perform a strange act through the curtains at night, and a woman he loves, Isabel, are compelling.
This is a human drama in a historical context and it feels like you’re there and hanging out with the characters.
Humorous yet intellectual, silly yet true, easy to read but thought-provoking. A real classic.
It is perhaps the author’s best work and has both pithy humor and lightness of touch that makes it so rich in tone. It is elusive and gentle, bittersweet, offbeat, and intelligent.
1961 Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge (Heaven has no Favorites)
This is Remarque’s second novel about cars, racing, sanatoriums, and a beautiful woman dying of tuberculosis. (The other is Three Comrades.)
However this one is nothing like the other and in fact, the female protagonist takes up a great deal of the narrative with her stream of consciousness, unusual with Remarque.
It is another of his tragic romances laced through with the characters trying to comprehend suffering and death while bright strands of love and beauty simultaneously fill the reader’s mind. It is certainly one of Remarque’s most powerful, well-knit, and engaging works.
The final paragraph echoes the final paragraph of All Quiet and is just as haunting, painful, and poetic. Both the healthy and the ill fall in this novel. It is not only war that kills. Remarque reminds us that inevitably life takes us all.
1962 Die Nacht von Lissabon (The Night in Lisbon)
With the world slowly sliding into war, it is crucial that enemies of the Reich flee Europe at once. But so many routes are closed, and so much money is needed.
Then one night in Lisbon, as a poor refugee gazes hungrily at the boat en route to America, a man approaches him with two tickets and a story to tell.
It is a harrowing tale of bravery and butchery, daring and death, where the price of love is beyond measure, and the legacy of evil is infinite. And as the young man listens spellbound to the desperate teller, in a matter of hours, the two form a unique and unshakable bond–one that will last all their lives. . . .
The themes of honesty, loyalty, love, and despair are brilliantly handled in the context of refugee life during the second world war.
A very moving novel that will speak to anybody who lost a much-loved person.
Bleak, sometimes black, invariably sardonic, sometimes warming.
1971 Schatten im Paradies (Shadows in Paradise)
After hiding and surviving near-death in a concentration camp, Ross is finally safe. Now living in New York City among old friends, far from Europe’s chilling atrocities, Ross soon meets Natasha, a beautiful model, and fellow émigré, with a warm heart to help him forget his cold memories.
Yet even as the war draws to its violent close, Ross cannot find peace. Demons still pursue him. Whether they are ghosts from the past or the guilt of surviving, he does not know. For he is only beginning to understand that freedom is far from easy–and that paradise, however perfect, has a price.
This unfinished novel was not published by Remarque but by his wife after his death. While the story is interesting, it is not the best work by Remarque.
References:
Erich Maria Remarque Peace Center
Hilton Tims: Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic.
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Quotes by Remarque
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We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
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-Why does a man live?
-In order to think about it…
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To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.
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Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life, they are exploited and then shoved aside.
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A man is truly happy only when he pays the least amount of attention possible to the passage of time, and when fears no longer chase him. Even if your fears chase you, laugh. What else you can do?
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A woman becomes smarter when she is in love, whereas a man simply loses his mind.
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Love cannot stand explanations. It requires action.
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Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It’s one of the most important secrets of living.
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No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an effect.
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Anything you can settle with money is cheap.
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We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.
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A man has to have something he can put faith in.
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I always thought everyone was against the war until I found out there are those who are all for it, especially those who do not have to go there.
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Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying – a little shove toward the end.
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Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.
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Give ’em all the same grub and all the same pay. And the war would be over and done in a day.
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The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy.
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Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?
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It’s only terrible to have nothing to wait for.
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Keep things at arm’s length… If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.
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Only the unhappy man appreciates happiness. A happy man doesn’t truly feel joy any more than a mannequin does. He merely displays it; he doesn’t possess it. Light doesn’t shine in the light; it shines in the dark.
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Whatever you can’t get always seems better than whatever you have. This is the romance and the stupidity of our life.
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Repentance is the most useless thing in the world. Nothing can be brought back or changed. Nothing can be fixed. Otherwise, we would all be saints. Life didn’t mean for us to be perfect. Those who are perfect should be placed in museums.
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A woman is a beautiful flower. She should only hear nice words and command your full attention. It is better to say something wonderful to her every day than to work in a gloomy frenzy for her sake every day of your life.
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Reviews
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“There are some books that should be read by every generation… Remarque’s story of German trench soldiers of the 1914-18 war gains even more authority in the context of the loss of life in wars that still rage” (Chris Searle)
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“Remarque’s evocation of the horrors of modern warfare has lost none of its force” (The Times)
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“The book conquers without persuading, it shakes you without exaggerating, a perfect work of art and at the same time truth that cannot be doubted” (Stefan Zweig)
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“The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of the unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.”–The New York Times Book Review
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