- Born
- Died
- Birth nameErich Paul Remark
- Nickname
- Buni
- The German novelist Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück in 1898. His first novel, the famous anti-war epic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), was written based on his experiences as a soldier in WWI, and published in 1929. He moved to Switzerland until 1939 and later emigrated to the US. He died in 1970 in Locarno, Switzerland.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Eileen Berdon <eberdon@aol.com>
- Remarque, whose real name is Erich Paul Remark, attended the Catholic teachers' college in Osnabrück after school. In 1916 he was drafted as a volunteer to fight on the Western Front. He was wounded and was sent to a hospital in his homeland until the end of the war. After the war he took on various jobs, for example as a dealer, organist, teacher or theater and concert critic for the "Osnabrücker Tageszeitung". He also published poems and prose texts. In 1920 his impressionistic artist novel "The Dream Booth" was published. On behalf of a factory newspaper, Remarque traveled to Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Italy, England and Belgium.
From 1925 he worked as an editor for the Berlin newspaper "Sport im Bild". His novel "Nothing New in the West" was published in 1929. He became a global success. The writer portrays his own war experiences through the figure of the 19-year-old soldier Paul Bäumer, through his suffering and death. In doing so, he exposes the sublime heroic death, flattered from above as propaganda, as an involuntary, cruel death on the battlefield. His realistic portrayal becomes an accusatory call against the madness of war. The title has been translated into more than thirty languages and filmed a total of three times. In Germany, the book provoked divided opinions: on the one hand, the pacifists were enthusiastic about the anti-war depictions, on the other hand, the militarists were outraged by the descriptions of the front-line soldiers, which they saw as an insult.
The National Socialists also shared this opinion and burned Remarque's books. In 1930, the first film adaptation of "All Quiet on the West" was made by the American director Lewis Milestone. In 1931 the author wrote a sequel to his worldwide success entitled "The Way Back" as a description of those returning from the war. In 1932 Remarque emigrated to Switzerland. There he lived in the former villa of the Swiss painter Alfred Böcklin. Together with the writer Elke Lasker-Schuler he is looking for escape routes for emigrants. In May of the following year, his books were banned from public libraries and publicly burned. They were branded with the note "Literary betrayal of the soldier of the World War".
In 1937 his novel "Three Comrades" was published in London, and a year later in Amsterdam in German. In 1938 his German citizenship was revoked. In the same year the book "Three Comrades" was published, which was also made into a film. A year later he fled to the USA. Many of his novels were filmed there, including a star cast with David Niven and Barbara Stanwyck. He himself played a small supporting role in his English anti-fascist book "A Time to Love and a Time to Die" alongside Liselotte Pulver, Dieter Borsche, Barbara Rüttig and Klaus Kinski. While his first global success, "Nothing New in the West," made him financially independent, he became a well-known writer in the USA. Two years later, in 1941, his English-language novel "Flotsam" was published in London. In German the title was presented as "Love Your Neighbor" in Stockholm.
From 1945, Remarque lived alternately in New York and in Porto Ronco, Switzerland. In 1946, his second global literary success came out, the exile novel "Arch of Triumph", initially published in the USA. In it he describes the lives of German emigrants before the Nazi invasion. His other books could no longer match his two literary successes. A year later, Remarque became an American citizen. In 1952 his anti-war novel "Spark of Life" was published. The book "Time to Live and Time to Die" followed in 1954, the action of which takes place in National Socialist Germany. Two years later, "The Black Obelisk" was published, a novel from the Weimar Republic period.
In 1963 the novel "The Night of Lisbon" was published, which is also against the war. In 1967, Erich Maria Remarque was honored with the Federal Cross of Merit.
His last novel, Shadows in Paradise, was published posthumously in 1971. The Erich Maria Remarque Archive in the city of Osnabrück contains 30,000 material documents relating to the author's life and work, including the manuscript for "Nothing New in the West".- IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth
- SpousesPaulette Goddard(February 25, 1958 - September 25, 1970) (his death)Jutta Ilse Zambona(January 22, 1938 - May 20, 1957) (divorced)Jutta Ilse Zambona(October 14, 1925 - January 4, 1930) (divorced)
- A native of Rhineland, born Erich Paul Remark. He is a descendant of a refugee from Revolutionary France. He changed his name to Erich Maria Remarque when he wrote his first major novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Maria was the name of his late mother, and "Remarque" was the original spelling used by his French ancestors. Some biographies still wrongly state that Remarque's original name was Kramer and he spelled his real name backward. This is largely based on a pre-World War II Nazi propaganda claiming that Remarque really descended from a family of French Jews named Kramer.
- The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is just a statistic.
- There is nothing more tiring than to attend how a person demonstrates his mind. In particular, if there is no mind.
- The Longest Day (1962) - $5,000
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