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Erich Maria Remarque
born June 22, 1898, Osnabrück, Ger.
died Sept. 25, 1970, Locarno, Switz.

novelist who is chiefly remembered as the author
of Im Westen nichts Neues (1929; All Quiet on
the Western Front), which became perhaps the
best-known and most representative novel dealing
with World War I.
Remarque was drafted into the German army at
the age of 18 and was wounded several times.
After the war he worked as a racing-car driver
and as a sportswriter while working on All Quiet
on the Western Front. The novel’s events are
those in the daily routine of soldiers who seem
to have no past or future apart from their life
in the trenches. Its title, the language of
routine communiqués, is typical of its cool,
terse style, which records the daily horrors of
war in laconic understatement. Its casual
amorality was in shocking contrast to patriotic
rhetoric. The book was an immediate
international success, as was the American film
made from it in 1930. It was followed by a
sequel, Der Weg zurück (1931; The Road Back),
dealing with the collapse of Germany in 1918.
Remarque wrote several other novels, most of
them dealing with victims of the political
upheavals of Europe during World Wars I and II.
Some had popular success and were filmed (e.g.,
Arc de Triomphe, 1946), but none achieved the
critical prestige of his first book.
Remarque left Germany for Switzerland in
1932. His books were banned by the Nazis in
1933. In 1939 he went to the United States,
where he was naturalized in 1947. After World
War II he settled in Porto Ronco, Switz., on
Lake Maggiore, where he lived with his second
wife, the American actress Paulette Goddard,
until his death.

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All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
1898-1970
The epigraph of Ail Quiet on the Western Front states that
the intention of the book is to be neither an accusation nor a
confession, but an account of a generation, Including the
survivors, "destroyed by the war." But rather than a warning, or
even a statement of self-defense, this epigraph, marked by its
simplicity and clarity, is a one-sentence declaration, however
quiet, that what follows is a story of destruction.
In the polarized political debates of the Weimar Republic, the
Great War was not a topic but a touchstone for all else. How you
understood the war, its origins, its conduct, surrender, and
defeat, was the index to your understanding of the past and to
your understanding of how liveable or damaged the future could
be. Given this interpretive context, the pacifism of the novel
could satisfy neither left nor right ends of the critical
spectrum in inter-war Germany. But Remarque's text does not
assume or argue for pacifism; it simply enacts it as an appalled
response to the daily efficiencies of organized slaughter. It is
this quiet, certain, yet exploratory demonstration of the utter
inhumanity of war that constitutes the magnificence of All Quiet
on the Western Front as an anti-war novel.
Central to Remarque's achievement is the voice of Paul Baumer,
the novel's nineteen-year-old narrator. He is one of a band of
front-line soldiers whose experience of war strips the mythology
of heroism bare, leaving the tedium, the earth-shaking fear, the
loneliness, and the anger of men whose bodies are neither
protected nor honored by military uniforms. The novel ends with
the disappearance of Baumer's voice; it is replaced by the
polite brevity of the report of his death on a day in which all
was quiet on the western front.
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