Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque was a German novelist 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, and his mother was Anna Maria née Stallknecht. Remarque was close to his mother, and after World War I he began using her middle name, Maria, in her honor. He was the second of four children, with an older brother who died young and two younger sisters, Erna and Elfriede Maria.

His life was shaped early by war. At 18, Remarque was conscripted into the Imperial German Army during World War I. In June 1917 he was transferred to the Western Front, and later that month he served with the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment. On 31 July 1917 he was wounded by shell shrapnel in his left leg, right arm, and neck, then evacuated to an army hospital in Duisburg. He was recalled in October 1918, received the Iron Cross First Class in mid-November, and was released from service on 5 January 1919.

After the war, Remarque trained and worked as a primary-school teacher in several places, including Lohne, Klein Berssen, and Nahne, before applying for leave from teaching in November 1920. He then worked in a range of jobs: librarian, businessman, journalist, editor, and technical writer for the Continental Rubber Company. He had begun trying to write at 16, producing essays, poems, and the beginnings of a novel later published in 1920 as The Dream Room (Die Traumbude). Between 1923 and 1926, he also scripted the comic series Die Contibuben for Echo Continental.

Remarque is best known for All Quiet on the Western Front, his career-defining novel based on his experience in the German army during World War I. Written in 1927 and associated with its 1928 publication, it described the experiences of German soldiers in plain, emotional language. At first he could not find a publisher, but once published it became an international bestseller. It helped create a new genre of veterans writing about conflict and inspired many later war memoirs, as well as stage and film versions in Germany and in countries that had fought against the German Empire. The book was adapted to film several times.

The same success that gave Remarque financial freedom also made him a target. In 1931, after finishing The Road Back (Der Weg zurück), he bought a villa in Ronco, Switzerland. On 10 May 1933, at the initiative of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his writing was declared “unpatriotic” and banned in Germany. Copies were removed from libraries, and sales and publication were restricted. The Nazis also attacked his French background, his Catholic faith, the spelling of his name, and falsely claimed he had not seen active service in World War I. In 1938 his German citizenship was revoked. He and his ex-wife remarried that year to prevent her repatriation to Germany, and just before World War II they left Switzerland for the United States. They became naturalized U.S. citizens in 1947.

Remarque died on 25 September 1970, but his writing remains tied to the stark moral pressure of the age he lived through: the trenches, the grief after war, exile, censorship, and the struggle to speak honestly when patriotism was being used as a weapon. His line, “Anything you can settle with money is cheap,” carries that hard-earned clarity. It sounds like a sentence from someone who had seen that the deepest costs of human life are not paid in currency.