Erich Maria Remarque was a German author best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front. He served in WWI and was wounded, drawing on his experiences for his novel. All Quiet was a huge success but also drew Nazi ire, leading Remarque to flee Germany. He had affairs with famous actresses and settled in Switzerland, where he wrote numerous other novels exploring the psychological impacts of war before dying in 1970.
2. NAME: Erich Maria Remarque
OCCUPATION: Author
BIRTH DATE: June 22, 1898
DEATH DATE: September 25, 1970
PLACE OF BIRTH: Osnabr端ck,
Germany
PLACE OF DEATH: Locarno,
Switzerland
ORIGINALLY: Erich Paul Remark
His ancestors were French. Peter Franz
Remark, Remarque's father, was a poorly paid
bookbinder.
The few extant letters indicate that the
Remarks were never a close-knit family.
Young Remarque was a loving and emotional
child, but the Remark home did not provide an
environment where he could take root.
Remarque was "always the best in class", as
one of his closest school friends later recalled.
Biography
3. THE FIRST
WORLD WAR
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know
nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous
superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see
how peoples are set against one another, and in
silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently,
innocently slay one another.
( Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front)
Remarque was conscripted into the army
at the age of 18. On 12 June 1917, he was
transferred to the Western Front
In Flanders he witnessed the start of the
offensive known as Third Ypres battle
Remarque was wounded by British forces
at Dixmunde and the rest of the war he
spent virtually in a military hospital in
Duisburg
went through difficulties and the
horrors of war, Remarque wrote his
best-known novel All Quiet on the
Western Front
4. All Quiet on the Westerns Front
"unquestionably the best story of the World
War."
H.L. Mencken
the language of All Quiet on the Western Front is
simple, and the events are portrayed without any
attempt to "poeticize" them.
This is radical realism without sentimentality.
Using war as a metaphor, All Quiet gives voice to
the underlying psychological meaning these
events had for Remarque and for his generation.
All Quiet was an immediate success, making its
author a literary star overnight. Within three
months, half a million copies had been sold, and
after one year, more than one million copies in
Germany alone.
Just one year after the book was published, it
became a Hollywood movie
5. The effect of All quite on
Western front
it brought to the author sudden wealth and he
never again experienced financial
difficulties. He bought himself a fancy car and a
house in Porto Ronco, Switzerland
Not that Remarque doubted his ability to plot a
good novel, but he never quite believed he
deserved the literary stature attributed to him
after his "first" novel.
Life did not intend to make us
perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs
in a museum.
Erich Maria Remarque
7. List of works
(1920) The
Dream Room
(1928) Station
at the Horizon
(written 1924,
published
1998) Gam
(1931) The
Road Back
1929) All Quiet
on the Western
Front
(1936) Three
Comrades (1939) Flotsam
1945) : Arch of
Triumph
(1952) Spark of
Life
(1954) A Time
to Love and a
Time to Die
(1956) The Black
Obelisk
(1961) Heaven
Has No
Favorites
(1962) The
Night in Lisbon
(1970) The
Promised Land
(1971) Shadows
in Paradise
8. Immigration
In the 1930s Remarque's books were banned in
Germany by the government. The film's
premiere was disrupted by Nazi gangs;
Remarque was accused of pacifism and
slandering the German soldier The Nazis
tortured and guillotined Remarque's sister,
Elfriede Scholz, in 1943.
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.
After the war he settled eventually back in
Switzerland, where he made his residence at
Porto Ronco on the Swiss shore of Lake
Maggiore.
9. Remarque and his
women Remarque was known for having passionate love
affairs with the most beautiful Goddesses of Classic
Hollywood, he had affairs with Heddy Lamarr Dolores
del Rio, Greta Garbo, and lastly Paulette Goddard, to
name but a few.
Marlene Dietrich was considered by Remarque The
Apotheosis of Beauty after falling in love with her
during the Venice Film Festival, on September 7th,
1937. A selection of their letters were published in
2003 in the book "Sag Mir, Dass Du Mich Liebst"("Tell
Me That You Love Me") and then in the 2011
play Puma.
While Remarque complained about Dietrich's "stupid
desire to inflict pain," he was obsessed with her. "He
lived for the sound of her car pulling up in front of her
bungalow,- recalled Dietrich's daughter Maria Riva
10. CONCLUSION
Caught between the intense nineteenth-century
nationalism of his youth and the dissolution and
despair brought on by World War I, Remarque
embodies the psychological and existential
dilemmas of his generation
Though Remarque is remembered in the United
States primarily
as the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, his
life and work intersect nearly every important
moment of this century
His literary career made him the center of the
publishing world for decades. It also opened the
door of world of cinema, through which he entered
the world of glamor.