Life:
Erich Maria Remarque was born in into a working-class family in the German town of Osnabrück on 22 June 1898. His original name was Erich Paul Remark, but when he published All Quiet on the Western Front he changed his middle name in memory of his mother, and reverted to an earlier spelling of the family name to dissociate himself from a novel that he had published in 1920, Die Traumbude, about art and decadence (the title of which means 'The den of Dreams'). It has not been published in English. Remarque's name was not Kramer - Remark spelled backwards - even though this tale is still found in reference works from time to time.
Remarque was sixteen, then, when the First World War broke out, and he was educated - since his family was Catholic - at Catholic schools, and then at teachers' seminary in Osnabrück, until he was calles up for military service on 26 November 1916. After training in the Caprivi Barracks in Osnabrück, he was sent on 12 June, 1917 to a position behind the Arras front. During the offensive in the Flanders which began on 31 July 1917 and is usually known in English as 'Third Ypres' or 'Passchendaele', Remarque was wounded by British shell-splinters, and eventually taken to military hospital in Duisburg. During this period his mother died. He stayed on for some more time as a clerk in the hospital, returned for training to Osnabrück in October 1918., and was there when the war ended.
After the war he completed his teacher training and taught for a fairly short time, and then worked in various different jobs, including advertising, and in 1924 began working on a magazine called Sport im Bild(Sport in Pictures) in Berlin. In 1925 he married a dancer, (Jutta) Ilse Zambona, from whom he divorced in 1931. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 (and burned his books, claiming that All Quiet n the Western Frontwas a betrayal of the German front-line soldier), Remarque went to Switzerland. The Nazis deprived him of his citizenship in 1938, and in that year he remarried Ilse Zambona so that she, too, could get away, though they seem to have lived apart. They were divorced eventually in 1951. With the assistance of his friend, Marlene Dietrich, he was given a visa for United States, and left France in 1939 on the last transatlantic sailing of the Queen Mary before the war.
He settled in America, spending time in Hollywood, and then New York. Remarque was a high-profile figure, and very much part of the Hollywood and the European émigré celebrity circuit (though he was unable to make close contact with two other famous literary émigrés, Brecht and Thomas Mann). His close friendship with Marlene Dietrich continued, and his other exotic companions included Greta Garbo.
In 1943, his sister Elfriede was executed by the NAzis, ostensibly for making defeatist comments, and presumably also for being the sister of the then unreachable Remarque. The author himself said that she had been involved with the resistance against the Nazis, and was pleased when a street in Osnabrück was named after her in 1968. Remarque became an American citizen in 1947, and refused to apply for the return of his German citizenship on the grounds that it had been taken from him illegally. In 1948 he returned to Switzerland, and lived there much of the time for the rest of his life. He married the film actress Paulette Goddard in 1958. On 25 September 1970, he died of heart failure, and is buried in Switzerland.
Works:
Remarque wrote about a dozen novels in all, and several have to do with the theme of war and its aftermath, although none had quite the successof All Quiet on the Western Front. Many of them are filmed, sometimes with a script by Remarque himself, and occasionally with Remarque acting in them
