Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970)
Life
Remarque was born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabrück, a small German city, to a working-class Catholic family. There was nothing literary about his background. He was drafted into the German army in 1916, at eighteen, and sent to the Western Front, where he was wounded by British shell fragments almost immediately and spent the rest of the war in a military hospital. Everyone he had gone to school with — essentially his entire class — was either dead or broken by the end of 1918. That fact never left him. He came home to a Germany that had lost a war nobody wanted to talk honestly about, and worked as a schoolteacher, stonecutter, and sports journalist while trying to turn what he had seen into a book.
All Quiet on the Western Front came out in 1929 and sold more than a million copies in German alone within a year. He changed the spelling of his name back to the French form the family had once used, partly for literary flair, partly to distance himself from his family. Then the Nazis came. They publicly burned his books in 1933 and called him a French Jew (he was neither) to discredit his war writing. They stripped his citizenship in 1938. They eventually beheaded his younger sister Elfriede in 1943, essentially as revenge for Remarque being out of reach — the judge told her so at her trial.
He fled first to Switzerland, then in 1939 to the United States. He spent the 1940s in Hollywood, had affairs with Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, drank heroically, and kept writing in German. He eventually married the actress Paulette Goddard and settled between New York and Ticino. He died in Switzerland in 1970, never having moved back to Germany.
What They Were Doing
Remarque is the great novelist of the 20th century’s refugees, deserters, and soldiers who lost. What makes him hit so hard is the register. He doesn’t lecture. He writes hardboiled, tender, a little drunk, a little in love with Paris even as it’s about to fall. The prose is simple in a way that can look easy until you try to do it. Short scenes, short sentences, one clear eye on a cheap bottle of calvados and another on the clock ticking down to the next disaster.
His real subject is dignity in the ruins. His characters have lost everything that used to give life shape — country, papers, profession, future — and the books are about what you hold onto when all of that is gone. Usually it’s small: a loyal friend, a woman you are trying to love properly for once, a good meal when you can afford one, the refusal to turn informer. All Quiet on the Western Front did this for a generation of soldiers who came back from the trenches and had no vocabulary for what had happened to them. Paul Bäumer’s voice — young, exhausted, alternately tender and numb — became the voice of the whole lost cohort.
The exile novels — Arch of Triumph, The Night in Lisbon, Flotsam — extend the same project into the 1930s and 40s. Statelessness is the permanent condition. Every character is hunted by paperwork. The romance is always on a deadline. You get the sense that Remarque is writing down what his friends actually told him in cafés in Paris and New York before they disappeared or killed themselves. Many of them did.
Influence
Remarque rewrote what a war novel looks like in the 20th century. Before him, war fiction mostly still inherited the 19th-century register of heroism and sacrifice. After him — and after the 1930 film adaptation of All Quiet — that pose became untenable. Hemingway read him and wrote alongside him; A Farewell to Arms came out the same year. Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut both stand downstream. His refugee novels quietly prefigure a whole later tradition of displacement literature, from W.G. Sebald to Aleksandar Hemon. Inside postwar Germany, his honesty about the First World War made the Second harder to sentimentalize.
Connections
- Ernest Hemingway — The obvious twin. Same war, same generation, same pared-down prose, same code of dignity under fire. Published A Farewell to Arms the same year All Quiet came out.
- A Farewell to Arms — The American mirror of Remarque’s project. Wounded soldier, nurse, a love affair on borrowed time — all the same raw materials, different accent.
- Arch of Triumph — His own exile novel, the one that picks up where the trenches left off. Stateless doctor in pre-war Paris, cheap calvados, a woman, the Gestapo closing in.
- Thomas Mann — The other major German writer kicked out by the Nazis. Both kept writing in German from abroad, but Mann worked the high-cultural register while Remarque stayed in the cafés and hotel rooms.
- George Orwell — Different war, same allergy to sentimental politics. Both writers who had actually been shot at and couldn’t stomach the propaganda afterward.
Key Works
- Arch of Triumph (1945)
- All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
- The Night in Lisbon (1962)
- Three Comrades (1936)