Erich Maria Remarque
June 22, 1898 – September 25, 1970
Erich Maria Remarque, real name Erich Paul Remark, was a German pacifist writer who wrote many works about the horrors of war. His best-known novel is On the Western Front, Calm (1928), a book about German soldiers in World War I, which later served as the subject of an Oscar-winning film. His pacifism and antiwar approach made him an enemy of the Nazi regime.
Erich Maria Remarque was born on 22 June 1898 in Osnabrück, Germany, the son of bookbinder Paul Remarque and his wife Anna Maria. He grew up with his sisters Erna (*1900, †1978), Elfriede (*1903, †1943) and his two years older brother Theodore (*1896, †1901). Paul Remarque's family belonged to the lower middle class and moved frequently. He completed his compulsory schooling in 1912 and later, at his mother's request, entered a teachers' seminary. He was interested in poetry, the visual arts and playing the piano. On the advice of a friend, the poet and painter Fritz Hörstemeier, he began to write. His first work was Von den Freuden und Mühen der Jugendwehr (1916), followed by the smaller Ich und Du (1918).
After the outbreak of World War I, he interrupted his studies, was conscripted into the army and on 22 November 1916 enlisted in the German army (Reichswehr). He was assigned to the 78th Infantry Regiment. He received training at the barracks at Caprivi near Osnabrück and Celle. On 12 June 1917 he was transferred to the Western Front at Ham-Lenglet, but left on 31 July 1917, when he was wounded by shell splinters on his left leg, right shoulder and neck. From the 309th St. Joseph's Field Hospital in Thorhut he was transferred to St. Vincent's Hospital in Duisburg, where he passed the time by writing poems and an autobiographical novel, Die Traumbude (1920). He was discharged from the hospital at the end of October 1917. He returned to his unit in Osnabrück, but before they were transferred to the west, the Germans signed an armistice. At the beginning of the new year - awarded the Iron Cross First Class, he began attending the seminary and university in Westphalian Münster again, graduating on 25 June 1919. He was discharged from the army on 5 January 1919, and on this occasion he renounced all his military decorations.
Remarque felt the end of the war dismally. His mother, struggling with cancer, died on September 9, 1917. On 6 March 1918, his friend Fritz Hörstemeier died. From August 1918 he worked in the elementary schools in the villages around Osnabrück. At the end of November 1920, he retired from teaching and returned to Osnabrück. Here he managed to find several different jobs. He worked as a tombstone salesman, accountant, organist, traveling salesman, and piano teacher. From March 1921 he began writing theatre reviews for the Osnabrück newspaper. In April 1922, he found a job as an editor at the magazine Echo Continental in Hanover. He first began to sign his work under the pseudonym Erich Maria Remarque. In addition to his journalistic work, he devoted himself to writing his next novel, Gam (1923-1924).
When the Nazis were consolidating their power in Bavaria, Remarque worked (from 1925) as an editor at the newspaper Sport im Bild in Berlin. He wrote humorous articles mostly about motoring. In Berlin he met his first wife, the dancer and actress Ilse Jutta "Jeanne" Zambona, whom he married on 14 October 1925. They divorced five years later. He married Ilse a second time in 1938 because of her emigration from Germany. They divorced a second time in 1957. FROM E. M. Remarque was becoming a successful writer. The newspaper Sport im Bild published another novel, Station am Horizont 1927 (in Slovak: Vábivé horizonty, 1999), which, like most of his works before the publication of Nothing New in the West, was not one of his better works. The author himself later admitted that he was glad his earlier works had been forgotten.
His novel Im Westen nichts Neues 1929 (in Slovak: Nothing New in the West 1968) introduced him to the world of professional writers. Paradoxically, the first publisher approached, the Sport im Bild newspaper, refused to publish it. The owner of the publishing house, Fisher Verlag, was not sure whether people were interested in reading about a war that had ended ten years earlier. The novel was eventually published as a sequel in the rival newspaper Vossische Zeitung, for which Remarque was immediately fired by Fisher. In April he published another wartime book, Der Weg zurück, 1931 (English: The Way Back, 1967), in which he described the return of soldiers from the front and their difficult integration into society. In 1931 he moved to Switzerland, using the money from book and film sales to buy a villa, Casa Monte Tabor, in Porto Ronco on Lake Maggiore (Ticino, Switzerland), where he settled permanently in 1932 and later sheltered other German émigrés. The enormous success of his works made him a wealthy man. In addition to his villa, he became the owner of a luxurious Lancia, indulged in fine food and drink, and was generous with his wives. Especially to the young actress Ruth Alba. For several decades he bought, collected and sold paintings, sculptures, antiques, oriental carpets and other art objects. His collection included paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne, works by P. A. Renoir, Rubens and others.
The Nazi book-burning did not bypass Remarque's novels Nothing New in the West and The Way Back. Fascist propaganda against Remarque spread false information, much of which has survived to this day. For example, the myth of his original name. The Nazis created a story about Kramer, a Jew, who "had never been to war and therefore his novel In the West Nothing New, which he wrote under the pseudonym Remarque, does not describe the real situation of the Germans on the Western Front." The name Erich Paul Kramer can even be found in the editor's note to Na západe nic nové (In the West Nothing New, 2002), or in school textbooks. The fact remains that Erich Paul Remark was born in Osnabrück on 22 June 1898. He probably took his pseudonym from the Francophone transcription of the surname of his great-great-grandfather Johann Adam Remarque. In 1935, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring personally visited him and offered him a return to the Third Reich. Remarque refused, as did most artists who chose to leave Germany. He confirmed his decision with another successful novel, Drei Kamaraden, 1936 (in English: Three Friends, 1965), whose main idea is friendship and love, and even in this novel he cannot resist his pacifist ideas, which irritated Nazism.
After Hitler occupied Poland and France, Remarque moved from Switzerland to the United States in 1939. His novels Liebe Deinen Nächsten, 1941, and Arc de Triomphe, 1946 (in Slovak: Arc de Triomphe, 1947, 1963, 1974), in which he described his life on the run across Europe to the United States, date from this period. His sister Elfrieda did not escape persecution. "Your brother may have escaped us, but you won't," declared Roland Freisler, president of the civil court and a rabid Nazi, who accused her of crimes against Hitler and the regime and sentenced her to death. She was executed by beheading in Berlin in 1943. She left behind a husband and two children. Remarque did not learn of his sister's death until after the war. In her hometown, Elfriede-Scholz-Straße has been named after her since 1968. In the United States, Remarque met many famous cultural figures. Remarque had several passionate love affairs with popular Hollywood actresses Marlene Dietrich, Natasha Paley, Greta Garbo, Lupe Velez and Charlie Chaplin's ex-wife Paulette Goddard, who became his last wife. They were married on 25 February 1958 in Brandford (Connecticut, USA).
New contacts also meant new opportunities for his novels to be filmed. During the war, Remarque collaborated on various film projects, and in 1941 So Ends Our Night (John Cromwell, director), based on the novel Liebe Deinen Nächsten, premiered. In addition to film and writing, Remarque was involved in charity work with the European Film Found, an organisation supporting destitute emigrants in the USA, and held exhibitions of his extensive collection of paintings. As the end of the war approached, he committed himself to writing his novel Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (1958). In it, he described the struggle of a German soldier who doubted the rightness of the ideas for which he had given his life, against the backdrop of the fighting of the Second World War. Although the book was not published until after the war, it was still a sensitive subject. Remarque had to revise the novel several times. It was published in Germany in a censored form. Remarque did not return to Europe until nine years later, in May 1948. On that occasion he visited his father Paul Remarque, who later died in Germany in 1954 at the age of 95. He learned all the details concerning the death of his sister Elfriede. Apparently these facts led to the writing of the concentration camp novel Der Funke Leben (1952). He returned again to his native Osnabrück almost twenty years later, in 1952. He did not settle in Germany, living alternately in America and Switzerland.
Later Remarque devoted himself to writing articles and novels such as Der schwarze Obelisk, 1952 (in Slovak: The Black Obelisk, 1980) and Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge, 1961 (in Slovak: Heaven Knows No Favourites, 1971) or Die Nacht von Lisbon, 1962 (in Slovak: The Night in Lisbon, 1973). He worked on the plays Die letzte Act, Die letzte Station, or Die Heimkehr des Enoch J. Jones and on film projects. In 1958 the film A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Douglas Sirk, director) was released - an adaptation of the novel Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (in Slovak: Time of Living and Time of Dying, 1958). In this film Remarque portrayed the character of the teacher Pohlmann. He found himself still working on the film in 1962, when he took part in the filming of The Longest Day, a war epic about the Normandy landings, as a script consultant. Although he did not win the Nobel Prize during his lifetime, for which he was twice nominated (September 1929, 1930), he did win the Möser Medal, which was awarded to him by the city of Osnabrück in 1963. Four years later he received the Großes Verdienstkreuz, the highest award for merit from the Federal Republic of Germany. He became an honorary citizen of Ronco and Ascona in Switzerland. His health began to deteriorate as he grew older. He suffered several heart attacks, was diagnosed with Meniere's syndrome and diabetes. He died on 25 September 1970 in a hospital in Locarno, Switzerland, of heart failure. He is buried in the Porto Ronco cemetery.