Remarque, Erich Maria

born Erich Paul Remark (1898-1970)

   writer; best known for his antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Wes-ten nichts Neues). He was born to a bookbinder in Osnabrück. His future seemed fixed in his sixteenth year by the onset of World War I. Completing emergency ex-ams (Notabitur) at eighteen, he enlisted in the army. His role at the front is un-clear: perhaps he spent time behind the front lines; perhaps he was in the thick of battle near Ypres and was severely wounded in July 1917. In any case, after the war he was the prototype of the so-called lost generation, suffering postwar trauma and wandering through aimless jobs (including playing the organ in the chapel of a mental institution) before turning to journalism. Prior to joining Ber-lin's* Sport im Bild in 1925 as deputy editor, he changed his middle name to Ma-ria and adopted the last name (Remarque) of his great-grandfather.

   Remarque's breakthrough came in 1929 when Ullstein* published All Quiet. First appearing in the Vossische Zeitung, the story was an instant success—it sold 200,000 copies within three weeks, was quickly translated into several languages, and was filmed in Hollywood, all in 1929. Although pacifists praised its message, some leftists denounced it as war propaganda; Kurt Tucholsky* argued that Remarque had mellowed the war's tragedy by relating the experience of human solidarity in the trenches. But the book soon ran to several editions and made Remarque a wealthy man. He relocated to Switzerland in 1929 and continued to write. Two sequels to All Quiet, Der Weg zurück (The Road Back, 1931) and Drei Kameraden (Three Comrades, 1937), while sometimes deemed superior to their predecessor, are less well known. The Germans burned Re-marque in effigy in 1933. He emigrated to the United States in 1939, settling with a colony of German expatriates. His American publications included Flot-sam (1941), Arch of Triumph (1946), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954), and Night in Lisbon (1962). He returned to Switzerland after World War II. Deemed "literary treason to the soldiers of the World War," All Quiet and Road Back were reduced to ashes by the NSDAP in Kaiserslautern on 26 March 1933, six weeks before the dramatic book burning of May.

   REFERENCES:Barker and Last, Erich Maria Remarque; Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Owen, Erich Maria Remarque; Wagener, Understanding Erich Maria Re-marque.