Erich Maria Remarque

Born Erich Paul Remark on June 22, 1898, in Osnabrück, a working-class city in northwestern Germany, Remarque was the son of a bookbinder. At eighteen he was conscripted into the Imperial German Army and transferred to the Western Front in June 1917, where on July 31 he was struck by shell fragments during a British artillery barrage at Flanders, suffering wounds to the left leg, right arm, and neck. He spent the remainder of the war in a military hospital. After the armistice he drifted through a series of occupations, schoolteacher, stonecutter, organist, test driver for a tire company, before turning to journalism and fiction. He later changed the spelling of his surname to Remarque, honoring his family’s French Huguenot ancestry. Im Westen nichts Neues (1929), published in English as All Quiet on the Western Front, sold 1.5 million copies in Germany in its first year and was translated into twenty-nine languages, becoming the most widely read novel about the First World War. Its unflinching depiction of trench life through the eyes of young volunteers enraged the rising Nazi movement; in May 1933, Joseph Goebbels ordered Remarque’s books burned publicly, declaring them unpatriotic. Remarque had already left Germany for Switzerland in 1932. The regime revoked his citizenship and, in a grotesque act of proxy vengeance, arrested his sister Elfriede Scholz in 1943 and had her beheaded for “undermining morale.” He emigrated to the United States in 1939, became an American citizen in 1947, and later married the actress Paulette Goddard. He died on September 25, 1970, in Locarno, Switzerland. His tombstone bears no epitaph.

On 4 December 1930, the film of his novel opened in Berlin. Goebbels led Brownshirts into the cinema, hurling stink bombs, scattering sneezing powder, and loosing white mice among the seats until the screening collapsed. Within a week the government banned the film. Remarque had shown the war too plainly to be forgiven.