1898-1970 · German novelist and First World War veteran, author of All Quiet on the Western Front
About Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) was born in Osnabrück, Germany, and was conscripted from school into the army in 1916; on the Western Front in 1917 he was wounded by shell splinters and spent much of the rest of the war in hospital. Im Westen nichts Neues (1929) made him world-famous. His books were burned in Germany in 1933, he left the country, became an American citizen in 1947, and wrote further novels including The Road Back (1931) and Three Comrades (1937).
“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.”
“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.”
1929 (German, Im Westen nichts Neues, serialized 1928) · Early 20th Century · Novel
Paul Bäumer, a young German infantryman not yet twenty, tells in the present tense of his last two years in the Great War. He and his classmates Albert Kropp, Müller and Leer enlisted together, urged on by their schoolmaster Kantorek, and now serve in a company that has just come out of the line with eighty men left of a hundred and fifty.