Discover the Best Books Written by Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque, born Erich Paul Remark, was a German-born novelist. His landmark novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), based on his experience in the Imperial German Army during World War I, was an international bestseller that created a new literary genre and was adapted into multiple films. Remarque's anti-war themes led to his condemnation by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as "unpatriotic." He was able to use his literary success to relocate to Switzerland and the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen.

Remarque was born on 22 June 1898 as Erich Paul Remark to Peter Franz Remark and Anna Maria (née Stallknecht), a working-class Roman Catholic family in Osnabrück. He was never close with his father, a bookbinder, but he was close with his mother, and he began using the middle name Maria after World War I in her honor. Remarque was the third of four children of Peter and Anna. His siblings were his older sister Erna, older brother Theodor Arthur (who died at the age of five or six), and younger sister Elfriede.

The spelling of his last name was changed to Remarque when he published All Quiet on the Western Front in honor of his French ancestors and in order to dissociate himself from his earlier novel Die Traumbude. His grandfather had changed the spelling from Remarque to Remark in the 19th century. Research[when?] by Remarque's childhood and lifelong friend Hanns-Gerd Rabe proved that Remarque had French ancestors – his great-grandfather Johann Adam Remarque, who was born in 1789, came from a French family in Aachen. 

This is contrary to the falsehood – perpetuated by Nazi propaganda – that his real last name was Kramer ("Remark" spelled backward) and that he was Jewish. During World War I, Remarque was conscripted into the Imperial German Army at the age of 18. On 12 June 1917, he was transferred to the Western Front, 2nd Company, Reserves, Field Depot of the 2nd Guards Reserve Division at Hem-Lenglet. 

On 26 June 1917, he was posted to the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment, 2nd Company, Engineer Platoon Bethe, and fought in the trenches between Torhout and Houthulst. On 31 July 1917, he was wounded by shell shrapnel in the left leg, right arm, and neck, and after being medically evacuated from the field, was repatriated to an army hospital in Germany, where he spent the rest of the war, recovering from his wounds, before being demobilized from the army.

After the war, he continued his teacher training and worked from 1 August 1919 as a primary-school teacher in Lohne, then in the county of Lingen, and now in the county of Bentheim. From May 1920, he worked in Klein Berssen in the former County of Hümmling, now Emsland, and from August 1920 in Nahne, which has been a part of Osnabrück since 1972. On 20 November 1920, he applied for a leave of absence from teaching. 

He worked at a number of different jobs in this phase of his life, including librarian, businessman, journalist, and editor. His first paid writing job was as a technical writer for the Continental Rubber Company, a German tire manufacturer. Remarque made his first attempts at writing at the age of 16. Among them were essays, poems, and the beginnings of a novel that was finished later and published in 1920 as The Dream Room (Die Traumbude). Between 1923 and 1926, he also scripted a comic series, Der Contibuben, drawn by Hermann Schütz, published in the magazine Echo Continental, a publication by the rubber and tire company Continental AG.

After returning from the war, the atrocities of war and his mother’s death caused him a great deal of mental trauma and grief. In their later years as a professional writer, he started using "Maria" as his middle name instead of "Paul" to commemorate his mother. When he published All Quiet on the Western Front, he had his surname reverted to an earlier spelling – from Remark to Remarque – to dissociate himself from his novel Die Traumbude.

In 1927, he published the novel Station at the Horizon (Station am Horizont). It was serialized in the sports journal Sport im Bild, for which Remarque worked. (It was first published in book form in 1998.) All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) (1929), his career-defining work, was also written in 1927. Remarque was at first unable to find a publisher for it. Its text described the experiences of German soldiers during World War I. 

On publication, it became an international bestseller and a landmark work in twentieth-century literature. It inspired a new genre of veterans writing about conflict and the commercial publication of various war memoirs. It also inspired dramatic representations of the war in theatre and cinema in Germany and in countries that had fought in the conflict against the German Empire, particularly the United Kingdom and the United States.