Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque: The Novel the Nazis Could Not Answer

On 10 May 1933 Joseph Goebbels declared the work of a decorated German infantryman "unpatriotic," and his books came out of the libraries and onto the fires. The regime went further, circulating the claim that he had never seen active service — a lie about a man carrying shrapnel wounds to the leg, arm and neck and an Iron Cross First Class. In 1938 it revoked his citizenship. In 1943, unable to reach him, it beheaded his youngest sister.

Osnabrück, and a Bookbinder's Son

He was born Erich Paul Remark on 22 June 1898 in Osnabrück, into a working-class Roman Catholic family. His father, Peter Franz Remark, was a bookbinder; his mother was Anna Maria Stallknecht. He was the second of four children — an older brother had died in infancy — and among his younger sisters was Elfriede Maria. He was writing essays and poetry by sixteen.

Both later alterations to his name were deliberate acts. He restored the French spelling "Remarque," honouring the family's French ancestry, when he published his masterwork; and he took "Maria" as a middle name after his mother's death, in tribute to her. The change also had a practical function: it put distance between the new book and *The Dream Room*, an embarrassing early novel of 1920.

Wounded on 31 July 1917

Conscripted at eighteen, he was transferred to the Western Front on 12 June 1917 with the 2nd Guards Reserve Division and fought in the trenches near Belgium. On 31 July 1917 he was severely wounded — shrapnel in the left leg, the right arm and the neck. He spent the balance of the war in hospital, received the Iron Cross First Class in November 1918, and was discharged on 5 January 1919.

What followed was a stretch of ordinary, slightly aimless work: teacher training and a year as a primary-school teacher from 1919, then librarian, journalist, and technical copywriter for the Continental Rubber Company. He was, in other words, one of millions of returned men doing whatever paid, and that experience — rather than the fighting itself — supplied the deepest theme of his fiction.

The Book That Named a Generation

*Im Westen nichts Neues* appeared in 1928–29, drawn directly from his own front-line service. Its title is its argument: the flat phrasing of an army communiqué, the formula in which a day's killing is officially recorded as nothing worth reporting. The book became an international bestseller and, in the process, invented a genre — the veteran's war narrative, written from inside the ranks rather than above them — and it has been adapted for stage and screen repeatedly ever since. Remarque's work has been translated into more than fifty languages and sold in the millions.

The Regime Answers

The Nazi response was disproportionate in a way that testifies to the book's power. Banning and burning came in May 1933; the propaganda campaign added the falsehood about his service record and antisemitic inventions about his identity. He left for Switzerland in 1933 — he had bought the Villa Casa Monte Tabor at Ronco sopra Ascona in 1931 on the proceeds of *The Road Back* — and emigrated to the United States before the war. He remarried his ex-wife Jutta Zambona specifically to prevent her forced repatriation to Germany; both were naturalised as Americans in 1947.

Elfriede Scholz stayed. Arrested in 1943 for saying aloud that the war was lost, she was tried before the Volksgerichtshof and beheaded on 16 December 1943. Remarque dedicated *Spark of Life* (1952) to her.

Ascona, Hollywood, and Marlene Dietrich

He was married twice, both times to actresses: Ilse Jutta Zambona from 1925 to 1930 and again from 1933 to 1957, and Paulette Goddard from 1958 until his death. In between came a much-documented affair with Marlene Dietrich beginning in September 1937 — their letters were published in 2003 as *Sag mir, daß du mich liebst* — and relationships with Hedy Lamarr and Dolores del Río. The émigré-glamour phase is the least interesting thing about him and the most frequently written about.

The Later Novels

He kept working, and the output is more substantial than the one-book reputation suggests: *The Road Back* (1931), *Three Comrades* (1936), *Flotsam* (1939), *Arch of Triumph* (1945), which sold close to five million copies worldwide, *Spark of Life* (1952), *A Time to Love and a Time to Die* (1954), *The Black Obelisk* (1956), *Heaven Has No Favorites* (1961) and *The Night in Lisbon* (1962), which sold some 900,000 copies in Germany alone. The subjects shift from the trenches to the refugee, the stateless, the camp inmate and the inflation-era German, but the preoccupation is constant: as the Remarque Peace Center in Osnabrück puts it, the preservation of human dignity in times of oppression, terror and war.

Why Erich Is Called a Genius

The claim here is not for intellectual range or formal invention, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Remarque was not an experimental writer; his sentences are plain, his structures conventional, his philosophy nowhere systematised. The faculty involved is tonal control — the ability to describe atrocity at close range in a flat, unraised voice and let the reader supply the horror. That sounds simple and is extraordinarily difficult. Every instinct in a writer handling this material pushes toward rhetoric, and the force of *All Quiet on the Western Front* comes from his refusal: no denunciation, no editorial, no heroism to invert. He found the register in which mass industrial killing could be reported by one of the men subjected to it, and having found it he could hold it for the length of a book.

The evidence of its effectiveness is partly negative. A totalitarian state with a professional propaganda ministry could not produce a counter-argument to a novel about lice and boots, and resorted instead to burning it, lying about the author's war record, stripping his nationality and executing his sister. Regimes do not do that to books they can refute.

The counter-case: the later novels are widely judged to repeat the formula with diminishing force, several are frankly commercial, and he never won a major literary prize. He is a writer of one indispensable book and several good ones — which is one more indispensable book than almost anybody manages.

Ronco

He returned to Switzerland in 1948 and stayed. He never recovered German citizenship and never sought it, observing that he had never applied to be denaturalised either. He died of heart failure at Locarno on 25 September 1970, aged 72, and is buried at Ronco. Paulette Goddard's 1990 bequest of $20 million founded the Remarque Institute for European Studies at New York University, which holds his estate; the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Center, established in Osnabrück in 1989 with the university, keeps a near-complete microfilm copy and runs the scholarship. An asteroid, 10119 Remarque, was named for him in 1992.

Achievements

• Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany — 1967
• Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• Notable work: All Quiet on the Western Front
• Notable work: Shadows in Paradise
• Notable work: The Road Back
• Notable work: Spark of Life