Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Paul Remark was born on June 22, 1898, in Osnabrück, a cathedral town in northwestern Germany, the son of Peter Franz Remark, a bookbinder, and his wife Anna Maria ^[1]. The family was Catholic and of modest means, moving between rented flats in the town's working quarters. The boy later adopted his mother's middle name, Maria, after her death, and restored the French spelling of the family surname, Remarque, which an earlier generation had Germanized ^[2].

He attended Catholic elementary schools in Osnabrück and then entered a teachers' training seminary, the standard route into education for boys of his background. He read widely, played the piano seriously enough to consider a musical career, and collected butterflies and stones, small enthusiasms that later surfaced in his fiction ^[1]. Any Erich Maria Remarque biography has to begin with this unremarkable provincial childhood, because the contrast with what followed explains much of his work: he was an ordinary teenager from an ordinary town when the state put a rifle in his hands.

In November 1916, at eighteen, he was conscripted into the German army along with several of his classmates ^[2]. After training he was sent to the Western Front in June 1917, where he served behind the front line near Ypres laying barbed wire and building fortifications. On July 31, 1917, during the opening of the Battle of Passchendaele, he was wounded by shell fragments in the leg, arm, and neck ^[3]. He spent most of the rest of the war in an army hospital in Duisburg and was still recovering when the armistice came in November 1918. His mother died of cancer in 1917 while he lay wounded, a loss that marked him deeply.

The postwar years were restless. Remarque completed his teacher training and worked briefly as a substitute schoolteacher in villages near Osnabrück, but he resigned within a year and drifted through a series of jobs: stonecutter carving gravestones, organist at an asylum chapel, salesman, and test driver ^[1]. He wrote all the while. His first novel, Die Traumbude (The Dream Room), appeared in 1920 and was a sentimental effort he later found so embarrassing that he changed his publishing name partly to distance himself from it ^[2].

Journalism gave him a foothold. In the mid 1920s he moved to Hannover to edit a tire company magazine, then to Berlin in 1925 as picture editor of Sport im Bild, a glossy sporting weekly ^[1]. He married the actress and dancer Ilse Jutta Zambona in 1925, cultivated an elegant wardrobe, and lived the surface life of a Weimar-era man about town while the war kept working underneath.

In a concentrated burst during 1927 and 1928 he wrote Im Westen nichts Neues, the novel published in English as All Quiet on the Western Front. The Ullstein publishing house serialized it in the newspaper Vossische Zeitung in late 1928 and issued it as a book in January 1929 ^[3]. Its success had almost no precedent. The novel sold roughly a million copies in Germany within its first year and was translated into more than twenty languages almost immediately, making its author, at thirty, one of the most famous writers alive ^[3]. Told through the eyes of the young soldier Paul Bäumer, the book stripped the war of heroism and presented it as the destruction of a generation, including those who physically survived.

All Quiet on the Western Front remains the center of any account of Erich Maria Remarque achievements. Scholars and publishers have long ranked it among the best selling novels of the twentieth century, with worldwide sales estimated in the tens of millions across dozens of languages ^[4]. The 1930 Hollywood adaptation directed by Lewis Milestone won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production, and its Berlin screenings were disrupted by Nazi brownshirts under Joseph Goebbels, who released mice and stink bombs in cinemas until the film was banned in Germany ^[3]. A second American adaptation appeared in 1979, and a German-language Netflix version won four Academy Awards in 2023, evidence of the story's continuing reach ^[5].

Remarque followed the book with Der Weg zurück (The Road Back, 1931), which traced soldiers returning to a homeland that no longer made sense to them, and Drei Kameraden (Three Comrades, 1936), a story of friendship and economic collapse in postwar Germany that became a Hollywood film in 1938 with a screenplay partly credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald ^[1].

Exile then became his great subject. Flotsam (1939) and the bestselling Arch of Triumph (1945), set among refugees in prewar Paris, described the lives of the stateless with an authority few writers could match, since he was living that condition himself ^[4]. Arch of Triumph sold in enormous numbers in the United States and was filmed in 1948 with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Later novels included Spark of Life (1952), set in a concentration camp, A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954), about a German soldier on leave from the Eastern Front, and The Night in Lisbon (1962), another refugee story. The Black Obelisk (1956) returned to the hyperinflation Germany of his youth. His final novel, Shadows in Paradise, appeared posthumously in 1971 ^[2].

The Nazis treated Remarque as an enemy from the start. Right-wing propagandists spread the false claim that he was a Jew named Kramer (Remark spelled backwards) who had never seen the front, a fabrication that has occasionally resurfaced ever since ^[2]. When the regime organized public book burnings in May 1933, All Quiet on the Western Front was thrown into the flames in Berlin's Opernplatz with a denunciation of its supposed betrayal of the front-line soldier ^[3].

Remarque had seen it coming. He had bought a villa at Porto Ronco on Lake Maggiore in Switzerland in 1931 and left Germany for good in January 1933, days before Hitler took power ^[1]. The German government revoked his citizenship in 1938. In 1939 he sailed for the United States, dividing his time between New York and Los Angeles, where he moved through Hollywood's émigré circles and had a widely reported relationship with Marlene Dietrich ^[4].

The regime's vengeance found a substitute target. His youngest sister, Elfriede Scholz, who had remained in Germany, was arrested in 1943 for remarks defeatist of the war effort. The president of the People's Court, Roland Freisler, reportedly told her that her brother had escaped them but she would not, and she was beheaded in December 1943 ^[2]. Remarque learned of her death only after the war and later dedicated his novel Spark of Life to her memory. Osnabrück named a street after her in 1968.

Remarque's private life was turbulent and well photographed. He married Ilse Jutta Zambona in 1925; they divorced in 1930, remarried in 1938 (a step that helped protect her stateless status during their flight from Europe), and divorced again in 1957 ^[1]. His long affair with Marlene Dietrich, conducted in Paris, on ocean liners, and in Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s, produced a correspondence that was later published and became part of both their legends ^[4]. He was also linked with the actresses Greta Garbo and Paulette Goddard, and it was Goddard, Charlie Chaplin's former wife, whom he married in 1958. The marriage lasted until his death ^[1].

He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1947 ^[3]. Financially secure from his book and film earnings, he lived expensively: fast cars, tailored suits, and a serious collection of paintings that included works by Cézanne, van Gogh, Degas, and Renoir, along with Chinese bronzes and antique carpets ^[2]. Friends described a courteous, melancholy man who drank heavily and never fully shook the depressions that had followed him since the war.

Among the less familiar Erich Maria Remarque facts: he wrote for the stage and screen as well as the page. His play Die letzte Station (The Last Station, later staged in English as Full Circle) premiered in Berlin in 1956, and he contributed to the screenplay of the 1958 film adaptation of A Time to Love and a Time to Die, in which he also appeared on screen in a small acting role as a schoolmaster ^[2].

After the war Remarque resumed spending long periods at his villa in Porto Ronco, and from the late 1940s onward Switzerland was again his principal home, with New York as a second base ^[1]. He revisited Germany only briefly and never lived there again. West Germany awarded him the Great Cross of Merit in 1967, an official gesture of reconciliation, though the country never restored the citizenship the Nazis had taken away, a fact he noted with some bitterness ^[2].

His health declined through the 1960s. He suffered a series of heart attacks and spent his last years quietly with Paulette Goddard on Lake Maggiore, working slowly on the manuscript published after his death as Shadows in Paradise ^[1]. Erich Maria Remarque died in a hospital in Locarno, Switzerland, on September 25, 1970, at the age of seventy-two, and was buried in the cemetery at Ronco sopra Ascona above the lake ^[3]. Goddard was buried beside him after her death in 1990.

Few novels have shaped the world's picture of an event as thoroughly as All Quiet on the Western Front shaped the memory of the First World War. Generations of readers, many of them schoolchildren, met the trenches first through Paul Bäumer, and the book remains assigned reading across Europe and North America nearly a century after publication ^[4]. Historians debate details of its accuracy, but its influence on how modern cultures talk about war, disillusionment, and the so-called lost generation is not in dispute.

His home town has made him its most honored son. Osnabrück established the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Center, which houses his archive jointly with the university and mounts exhibitions on his life, and the city awards the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize to writers and journalists engaged with themes of war and peace ^[5]. New York University, which acquired a large portion of his papers, has also supported research into his work and the wider German exile community.

Remarque's later fiction has enjoyed a quiet revival, with new translations and reprints of his exile novels finding readers in an era once again full of refugees. The questions his books ask, about what people owe each other when states fail them, have not aged. That endurance, more than sales figures or film awards, is the real measure of his career ^[4].