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Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) - pseudonym for Erich Paul Remark |
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German writer, who became famous with his novel Im Westen nichts Neues (tr. All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929), which depicted the horrors of war from the point of view of the ordinary soldiers. In his books Remarque focused largely on the collapse of the old European world and values. Although his later works also were successful, Remarque lived in the shadow of his "big" first book. "It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck." (in All Quiet on the Western Front) Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, into modest circumstances. His ancestors were French, the family name was 'Germanized' early in the nineteeth century. Peter Franz Remark, Remarque's father, was a poorly paid bookbinder. Although Franz Remark did not show much interest in intellectual activities, except his interest in the occult, the family had a piano, and at one point in his life Remarque planned a musical career. Once he played the organ in an insane asylum. In 1904, at the age of six, Remarque entered the Domschule (cathedral school), and four years later he moved to the Johannisschle. Remarque was "always the best in class", as one of his closest school friends later recalled. For a time Remarque studied at the University of Münster, but had to enlist in the German army at the age of 18. He was trained in Osnabrück and at a camp on the Lüneburg Heath, and then sent to the Western Front. In Flanders he witnessed the start of the offensive known as Third Ypres battle; the German losses are generally estimated at between 500,000 and 660,000. Remarque was wounded by British forces at Dixmunde and the rest of the war he spent virtually in a milirary hospital in Duisburg. After his discharge Remarque took a teacher's course offered to veterans by the government. He taught for a year in a school, and tried also his hand as a stonecutter and a test-cardriver for a Berlin tire company. Remarque began his writing career as a sporting journalist, eventually becoming the assistant editor of Sportbild. During this period he developed a lifelong passion for racing cars, especially he loved Italian Lancias. Among his friends was Leni Riefenstahl, who later made the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935), and the two-part Olympia (1938), about the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. In 1925 Remarque married Jutta Ilse Ingeborg Ellen Zambona, "tall, slender as a fashion model, and strikingly dressed", as Riefenstahl described Jutta in her book of memoir. From the beginning, their marriage was stormy, both had extra-marital activities, too. After divorce in 1930 Remarque remarried her in 1938; this time to help her to move from Germany to Switzwerland. Officially they divorced in 1957. His longest, intercontinental affair Remarque had with Dietrich; they met at the Venice Lido in the late 1930s. For some reason, Remarque told her that he was impotent. "Oh, how wonderful!" Dietrich said and followed him to Paris. She was married to Rudi Sieber, an assistant director. Rudi's presence did not bother Remarque, but when Dietrich entered into a liaison with Marion Carstairs, a tattoed, rich heiress, he began to drink heavily. "I always thought he had the look of a debonair fox, like an illustration of the Fables of La Fontaine, even the tops of his ears pointed slightly", recalled Dietrich's daughter in her biography of her mother. All Quiet on the Westerns Front touched a nerve of the time, and sparkled off a storm of political controversy. The book, which first had been rejected by one publisher, sold 1.2 million copies in its first year. H.L. Mencken called it "unquestionably the best story of the World War." Its sequel, Der Weg zurück (The Way Back), came out in 1931. It dealt with the collapse of the German Army after the war, and the fate of the surviving heroes, Ernst and his friends. All Quiet on the Western Front is the most famous novel dealing with World War I. The book starts in 1917 after a battle, in which half of Paul Bäumer's company has been killed. Bäumer is mostly the narrator and Remarque goes through his life in flashbacks. Paul and his classmates have been encouraged by their teacher, Kantorek, to enlist the German army. Bäumer's group includes some school fellows, and Katczinsky, an older man. The group goes through basic training and go to the front. Bäumer tries to understand what is going on. He realizes that back home "no one had the vaguest idea what we were in for. The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy." Paul visits home on leave, returns to the trenches, is wounded and sent to a military hospital. In the summer of 1918 German front is pushed back, and the soldiers are waiting for the end of the war. In October, when there is nothing much to report on the western front, Paul is killed, a week or so before the armistice. The story is narrated in first person in a cool style, a contrast to patriotic rhetoric. Remarque records the daily horrors in the trenches, where machine guns killed millions, in laconic understatement. "At the next war let all the Kaisers, Presidents and Generals and diplomats go into a big field and fight it out first among themselves. That will satisfy us and keep us home." (Katzinsky) Lewis Milestone's adaptation from the novel, is a landmark of American cinema of the 1930s. One of the best scenes is when Paul (Lew Ayres) returns to his school and tells new students the truth. "When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all." The film was denounced by Goebbels as anti-German, but the Poles banned it for being pro-German. Particularly effective were the tracking shots of soldiers attacking enemy lines. In France it was prohibited until 1962. The close-up of Paul's hand reaching for the butterfly at the end, is actually the hand of the director Milestone. A sequel, The Road Back, was made in 1937. With All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque became a spokesman of "a generation that was destroyed by war, even though it might have escaped its shells," as he said himself. The German defeat inspired two major war films of the year 1930 – G.W. Pabst's Westfront 1918, adapted from a novel by Ernest Johannsen and Lewis Milestone's film based on Remarque's novel. Milestone was unhappy with the original script – he saw it changed the point of the book, and he hired his friend Del Andrews and George Abbott, a stage director, the shape the final script. The producer Carl Laemmle Junior and Milestone both hated the original ending of the book, in which Paul Baumer dies heroically. Karl Freund, the cameraman, put forward the idea of the hand stretching out toward the butterfly. In the 1930s Remarque's books were banned in Germany by the government. All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Back were among the works consigned to be publicly burnt in 1933. Stores were ordered to stop selling his works. The film's premiere was disrupted by Nazi gangs; Remarque was accused of pacifism and slandering the German soldier. It was not until the 1950s the film was shown again in West Germany. The Nazis tortured and guillotined Remarque's sister, Elfriede Scholz, in 1943. The judge reputedly commenting that if the brother could not be caught, the sister would stand in his place. Remarque lost his citizenship in 1938, but he had moved to Switzerland in 1932 and in 1939, following Marlene Dietrich, he emigrated to the United States. In Hollywood, Remarque had close relationships with such stars as Dolores del Rio, Maureen O'Sullivan, and Paulette Goddard (1911-1990), whom he married in 1958; she had been Charlie Chaplin's third wife. Soon after moving to New York, Remarque had a romance with Greta Garbo. On their first recorded date they went to the movies to see That Hamilton Woman, a love story starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. While watching the film, they munched popcorn. Remarque's favorite night clubs in New York were the Stork Club, Ciro's, and 21. After the war he settled eventually back in Switzerland, where he made his residence at Porto Ronco on the Swiss shore of Lake Maggiore. Remarque spent also much time in Italy. His play, Die letzte Station, about the fall of the Third Reich, was produced in Berlin in 1956. When the city of Osnabrück decided to award Remarque the Julius Möser Medal, he did not answer to this call to visit his birthplace. Eventually the authorities traveled to Porto Ronco. "Touching and boring," Remarque noted, though as a perfect host, he had a special cake made for the delegation, decorated with the city's coat of arms and the titles of all of his novels in marzipan. In 1967 he received the Grosses Verdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany. Remarque died at the Sant Agnese clinic at Locarno, on September 25, 1970. He had suffered for months from aneurysm. "If things went according to the death notices, man would be absolutely perfect. There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish, self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egoist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers – in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it." (in The Black Obelisk, 1956) Remarque's later works, depicting the political upheavals of Europe from the 1920s to the cold war, did not achieve the critical acclaim of his first novel. However, his skill to create interesting characters, fascinating plots, and balancing between realistic and sentimental scenes made him a highly popular writer. Drei Kameraden (1937) received good reviews and was made into a film in 1938, directed by Frank Borzage. The screenplay was written by Edward A. Paramore and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was determined to do a good job. Fitzgerald kept completely sober, for a while. However, his contract with M-G-M was not renewed. The final scene in which the two friends of the story are joined by their ghostly comrade, has still a strong emotional charge. Several of Remarque's later novels dealt with people struggling under Nazi rule. Arc de Triomphe (Arch of Triumph, 1946) was about a German refugee physician and an actress, Joan Madou, who was modelled after Marlene Dietrich: "He saw a pale face, high cheek-bones and wide-set eyes. The face was rigid and masklike . . . a face whose openness was its secret. It neither hid nor revealed anything. It promised nothing and thereby everything." The story was adapted into screen in 1947, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. Remarque himself played the schoolmaster Pohlmann in A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), based on his novel Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (1954). In the story a German soldier, Ernst Graeber, on furlough from the Russian front, falls in love with his childhood friend, Elisabeth. But he must return to the trenches. The German edition was censored for its "unnational" passages. Douglas Sirk's film version, beautifully photographed in CinemaScope, ends dramatically in Graeber's death. Spark of Life (1952) was a fictional documentary about life in Nazi concentration camps. The Black Obelisk (1956) was a tragi-comedy, in which Remarque explored the chaotic Germany of in the 1920s. Remarque's screenplay The Last 10 Days for G.W. Pabst's film from 1956, was based Judge Michael A. Musmanno's book 10 Days to Die, a study of the death of Hitler in a Berlin bunker. Die Nacht von Lissabon (1962, The Night in Lisbon), in which two refugees from Nazism flee in Portugal, and Schatten im Paradies, depicting refugees in the United Sates, were published posthumously in English in 1971. For further reading: The Novels of Erich Maria Remarque: Sparks of Life by Brian Murdoch (2006); Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic by Hilton Tims (2004); Readings on All Quiet on the Western Front, ed. by Terry O'Neill (1999); Als wäre alles das letzte Mal by W. von Sternberg (1998); Opposite Attraction: The Lives of Erich Maria Remarque and Paulette Goddard by Julie Goldsmith Gilbert (1995); World Authors 1900-1950, Vol. 3, ed. Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmes (1995); All Quiet on the Western Front by R.A. Firda (1993); Understanding Erich Maria Remarque by Hans Wagener (1991); Erich Maria Remarque by U.H. Taylor (1989); Erich Maria Remarque: A Critical Bio-Bibliography by C.R. Owen (1984); Erich Maria Remarque by F. Baumer (1976) - See also: Lennart Meri. First World War in literature: Jaroslav Hašek: The Good Soldier Schweik; R.H. Mottram: The Spanish Farm Trilogy; Ford Madox Ford: Paradise's End; Arnold Zweig: The Case of Sergeant Grisha; Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero; Robert Graves: Good-bye to All That; Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms; Siegfried Sassoon: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Henry Williamson: The Patriot's Progress; Frederick Manning: The Middle Parts of Fortune; John Don Passos: Three Soldiers; e.e. cumming: The Enormous Room; Henri Barbusse: Under Fire Selected works:
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