Erich Maria Remarque Biography

Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück, Germany, in 1898 into a lower-middle-class family. In 1916, he was drafted into the German army to fight in World War I, in which he was badly wounded. Ten years after the war ended, he published Im Westen Nichts Neues, translated into English a year later as All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel about the experiences of ordinary German soldiers during the war.

In presenting his grimly realistic version of a soldier’s experience, Remarque presented an un-romanticized war narrative in the staunchly antiwar All Quiet on the Western Front. The novel instantly became an international, critically-acclaimed success. An American movie based on the book was released in 1930.

After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in the early 1930s, the fiercely nationalistic Nazi regime attacked All Quiet on the Western Front and Remarque as unpatriotic. Remarque made no attempt to resist the Nazis’ attacks on his reputation because he feared retaliation. Despite Nazi hostilities toward him, in 1931 Remarque published a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, entitled The Road Back, which details the postwar experience of German citizens. This work provoked further Nazi opposition, and Remarque fled to Switzerland with his wife, Jutta Zambona, in 1932. In 1933, the Nazis banned Remarque’s two novels and held a bonfire to burn copies of the books.

Remarque and his wife divorced in Switzerland but eventually remarried so that she could retain her Swiss residency. In 1939, he followed the path of many persecuted German intellectuals and immigrated to the United States, where he obtained citizenship in 1947. His family was not so lucky: the Nazis killed his sister during World War II, in part because of her relationship to him. Remarque and his wife had separated; in 1951, they finally ended their estranged marriage.

In the United States, Remarque had a tempestuous affair with the actress Marlene Dietrich, which inspired his novel Arch of Triumph. In 1958, he married another film star, Paulette Goddard. They eventually left the United States and moved to Porto Ranco, Switzerland, where Remarque died on September 25, 1970.

Erich Maria Remarque Study Guides

All Quiet on the Western Front

Published

Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

No one can become stranger than the person you once loved.

Love cannot stand explanations. It requires actions.

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

Erich Maria Remarque Novels

Station at the Horizon

Published 1928

All Quiet on the Western Front

Published 1929

The Road Back

Published 1931

Three Comrades

Published 1937

Flotsam

Published 1941

Arch of Triumph

Published 1945

Spark of Life

Published 1952

A Time to Love and a Time to Die

Published 1954

The Black Obelisk

Published 1957

The Night in Lisbon

Published 1964

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