Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque
Born 22 June 1898(1898-06-22)
Osnabrück, Germany
Died 25 September 1970 (aged 72)
Locarno, Switzerland
Occupation Novelist
Nationality German
Notable work(s) All Quiet on the Western Front
Influences
Influenced

Erich Maria Remarque (Erich Paul Remark, 22 June 1898 – 25 September 1970) was a German author.

Contents

Life

Erich Paul Remark was born on June 22, 1898 in a working-class family in the German city of Osnabrück, the son of Peter Franz Remark (b. 14 June 1867, Kaiserswerth) and Anna Maria Remark, nee Stallknecht (b. 21 November 1871, Katernberg). He later took the middle name Maria in honor of his mother. At the age of sixteen or seventeen he also made his first attempts at writing: essays, poems, and the beginnings of a novel that was finished later and published in 1920 as The Dream Room (Die Traumbude).

At the age of eighteen Remarque was conscripted into the army. On 12 June, 1917 he was transferred to the Western Front, 2nd Company, Reserves, Field Depot of the 2nd Reserves Guards Division at Hem-Lenglet. On 26 June he was posted to the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment, 2nd Company of Trench Battalion Bethe, and was stationed between Torhout and Houthulst. On 31 July he was wounded by shrapnel in the left leg, right arm and neck, and was repatriated to an army hospital in Germany where he spent the rest of the war.[1]

After the war he changed his last name to Remarque, which had been the family name until his grandfather changed it in the 19th Century due to the German xenophobia of the time. He worked at a number of different jobs, including librarian, businessman, teacher, journalist and editor. He married his first wife, the actress Ilse Jutta Zambona in 1925.[2] The marriage was stormy and, on both sides, unfaithful. After a divorce, they remarried each other in 1938.

In 1927 Remarque made a second literary start with the novel Station at the Horizon (Station am Horizont), which was serialized in the sports journal "Sport im Bild" for which Remarque was working. It was published in book form only in 1998. His most famous book, All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) was written in a few months in 1927, but Remarque was not immediately able to find a publisher. [3] The novel, published in 1929, described the cruelty of the war from the perspective of a young soldier. A number of similar works followed; in simple, emotive language they described wartime and the postwar years.

In 1931, after finishing The Road Back (Der Weg zurück) Remarque left Germany. He bought a villa in Porto Ronco in Switzerland and lived both there and in France until 1939, when he left Europe for the United States of America with his wife and they became naturalized citizens of the United States in 1947.

In 1933, the Nazis banned and burned Remarque's works, and issued propaganda stating that he was a descendant of French Jews and that his real last name was Kramer, a Jewish-sounding name, his original name spelled backwards. This is still listed in some biographies despite the complete lack of evidence. Also despite clear evidence to the contrary, their assertion that he had never seen active service remains in some references. In 1943 the Nazis arrested his sister Elfriede, who had stayed behind in Germany with her husband and two children. After a short trial she was found guilty of "undermining morality". The verdict states verbatim that she is convicted, "as her brother is beyond our reach at this moment". Elfriede was decapitated with an axe on December 16, 1943.

Remarque's next novel, Three Comrades (Drei Kameraden) spans the years of Weimar Republic, from the hyperinflation of 1923 to the end of the decade. Remarque's fourth novel, Flotsam (Liebe deinen Nächsten), first appeared in a serial version in English translation in Collier's magazine in 1939, and Remarque spent another year revising the text for its book publication in 1941 both in English and German. His next novel Arch of Triumph, first published in 1945 in English translation and published in German as Arc de Triomphe in 1946, was another instant best-seller and reached worldwide sales of nearly five million copies.

In 1948 Remarque went back to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life. There was a gap of seven years--a long silence for Remarque--between Arch of Triumph and his next work, The Spark of Life (Der Funke Leben), which appeared both in German and in English in 1952. While he was writing The Spark of Life Remarque was also working on a novel he called Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (Time to Live and Time to Die). It was published first in English translation in 1954 with the not-quite-literal title A Time to Love and a Time to Die. In 1958, Douglas Sirk directed the film A Time to Love and a Time to Die in Germany, based on Remarque's novel A Time to Live and a Time to Die. Remarque makes a cameo appearance in this film in the role of the Professor.

In 1955 Remarque wrote the screenplay for an Austrian movie, The Last Act (Der letzte Akt), about Hitler's final days in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, which was based on the book Ten Days to Die (1950) by Michael Musmanno. In 1956 Remarque wrote a drama for the stage, Full Circle (Die letzte Station), which played successfully both in Germany and on Broadway; an English translation was published in 1974. The Night in Lisbon (Die Nacht von Lissabon), published in 1962 is the last work Remarque finished. The novel sold some 900,000 copies in Germany and was a modest best-seller abroad as well.

He married the Hollywood actress Paulette Goddard in 1958 and they remained married until his death in the hospital at Locarno on 25 September 1970 at the age of 72 [4]. He is interred in the Ronco cemetery in Ronco, Ticino, Switzerland after a Catholic funeral, where Goddard is also interred. Goddard left a bequest of $20 million to New York University to fund an institute for European study which is named after Remarque. The first Director of The Remarque Institute was Professor Tony Judt.

List of Works

Note: the dates of English publications are those of the first publications in a book form

Novels

Other works

References

  1. ↑ Remarque Frieden-Zentrum.
  2. ↑ [1]
  3. ↑ Robertson, William. Erich Remarque. http://remarque.org/about_remarque.html.
  4. ↑ Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 56: German Fiction Writers, 1914-1945. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by James Hardin, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1987. pp. 222-241.

Further reading

External links

Persondata
NAME Remarque, Erich Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Remark, Erich Paul
SHORT DESCRIPTION German Novelist
DATE OF BIRTH June 22, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Osnabrück, Germany
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 1970
PLACE OF DEATH Locarno, Switzerland