History 332:  German History   

From: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/remarque.htm

ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

(1898 – 1970)

German writer, who became famous with his novel IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES (tr. All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929), which depicted the horrors of war from the point of view of the ordinary soldiers. In his works Remarque focused largely on the collapse of the old European world and values. Although his later novels also were successful, Remarque lived in the shadow of his "big" first book.

"It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck." (from All Quiet on the Western Front)

Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, into modest circumstances. His ancestors were French. Peter Maria Kramer, Remarque's father, was a bookbinder. He studied at the University of Münster, but had to enlist in the German army at the age of 18. Remarque fought on the Western Front and was wounded several times. After his discharge Remarque had taken a teacher's course offered to veterans by the government. He taught for a year in a school, and tried also his hand as a stonecutter and a test-cardriver for a Berlin tire company. Remarque began his writing career as a sporting journalist, eventually becoming the assistant editor of Sportbild. Fame came with his first novel, All Quiet on the Westerns Front, which touched a nerve of the time, and sparkled off a storm of political controversy. The book, which first had been rejected by one publisher, sold 1.2 million copies in its first year. H.L. Mencken called it "unquestionably the best story of the World War." Its sequel, DER WEG ZURÜCK (The Way Back), appeared in 1931. It dealt with the collapse of the German Army after the war, and the fate of the surviving heroes, Ernst and his friends.

All Quiet on the Western Front is the most famous novel dealing with World

War I. The book starts in 1917 after a battle, in which half of Paul Bäumer's company has been killed. Bäumer is mostly the narrator and Remarque goes through his life in flashbacks. Paul and his classmates have been encouraged by their teacher, Kantorek, to enlist the German army. Bäumer's group includes some school fellows, and Katczinsky, an older man. The group goes through basic training and go to the front. Bäumer tries to understand what is going on. He realizes that back home "no one had the vaguest idea what we were in for. The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy." Paul visits home on leave, returns to the trenches, is wounded and sent to a military hospital. In the summer of 1918 German front is pushed back, and the soldiers are waiting for the end of the war. In October, when there is nothing much to report on the western front, Paul is killed, a week or so before the armistice. - The story is narrated in first person in a cool style, a contrast to patriotic rhetoric. Remarque records the daily horrors in the trenches, where machine guns killed millions, in laconic understatement. - "At the next war let all the Kaisers, Presidents and Generals and diplomats go into a big field and fight it out first among themselves. That will satisfy us and keep us home." (Katzinsky) Lewis Milestone's film (1930), based on the novel, is a landmark of American cinema. One of the best scenes is when Paul (Lew Ayres) returns to his school and tells new students the truth. "When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all." The film was denounced by Goebbels as anti-German, but the Poles banned it for being pro-German. Particularly effective were the tracking shots of soldiers attacking enemy lines. In France it was prohibited until 1962. The close-up of Paul's hand reaching for the butterfly at the end, is actually the hand of the director Milestone. - A sequel, The Road Back, was made in 1937.

With All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque became a spokesman of "a generation that was destroyed by war, even though it might have escaped its shells," as he said himself. The German defeat inspired two major war films of the year 1930 - G.W. Pabst's Westfront 1918, adapted from a novel by Ernest Johannsen and Lewis Milestone's film based on Remarque's novel. Milestone was unhappy with the original script - he saw it changed the point of the book, and he hired his friend Del Andrews and George Abbott, a stage director, the shape the final script. The producer Carl Laemmle Junior and Milestone both hated the original ending of the book, in which Paul Baumer dies heroically. Karl Freund, the cameraman, put forward the idea of the hand stretching out toward the butterfly.

 

In the 1930s Remarque's books were banned in Germany by the government. All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Back were among the works consigned to be publicly burnt in 1933 by the Nazis. Stores were ordered to stop selling his books. The film's premiere was disrupted by Nazi gangs; Remarque was accused of pacifism. It was not until the 1950s the film was shown again in West Germany. In 1938 Remarque lost his citizenship. He had moved to Switzerland in 1932 and in 1939 he emigrated to the United States, where in 1947 he became a citizen. In New York he spent much time at the Stork Club and at 21. In Hollywood he made friends with stars, including the actress Paulette Goddard (1911-1990), whom he married in 1958. Remarque had been married twice before, and to the same woman, Ilsa Jeanne Zamboul, in 1923 and again in 1938. After the war Remarque settled eventually back in Switzerland, where he made his residence at Porto Ronco on the Seiss shore of Lake Maggiore. His play, DIE LETZTE STATION, about the fall of the Third Reich, was produced in Berlin in 1956. Remarque died at the Sant Agnese clinic at Locarno, on September 25, 1970. He had suffered for months from aneurysm.

"If things went according to the death notices, man would be absolutely perfect. There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish, self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egoist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers - in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it." (from The Black Obelisk, 1956)

Remarque's later works, depicting the political upheavals of Europe from the 1920s to the cold war, did not achieve the critical acclaim of his first novel. However, his skill to create interesting characters, fascinating plots, and balancing between realistic and sentimental scenes made him a highly popular writer. DREI KAMERADEN (1937) received good reviews and was made into a film in 1938, directed by Frank Borzage. The screenplay was written by Edward A. Paramore and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was determined to do a good job. Fitzgerald kept completely sober, for a while. However, his contract with M-G-M was not renewed. The final scene in which the two friends of the story are joined by their ghostly comrade, has still a strong emotional charge. Several of Remarque's later novels dealt with people struggling under Nazi rule. Arch of Triumph (1946) told a story about a German refugee physician and an actress. The work was adapted into screen in 1947, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. Remarque himself played the schoolmaster Pohlmann in A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), based on his novel ZEIT ZU LEBEN UND ZEIT ZU STERBEN (1954). In the story a German soldier, Ernst Graeber, on furlough from the Russian front, falls in love with his childhood friend, Elisabeth. But he must return to the trenches. The German edition was censored for its "unnational" passages. Spark of Life (1952) was a fictional documentary about life in Nazi concentration camps. The Black Obelisk (1956) was a tragi-comedy, in which Remarque explored the chaotic Germany of in the 1920s. Remarque's screenplay The Last 10 Days for G.W. Pabst's film from 1956, was based Judge Michael A. Musmanno's book 10 Days to Die, a study of the death of Hitler in a Berlin bunker. DIE NACHT VON LISSABON (1962, The Night in Lisbon), in which two refugees from Nazism flee in Portugal, and SCHATTEN IN PARADIES, depicting refugees in the United Sates, were published posthumously in English in 1971.

For further reading: Readings on All Quiet on the Western Front, ed. by Terry O'Neill (1999); Als wäre alles das letzte Mal by W. von Sternberg (1998); Opposite Attraction: The Lives of Erich Maria Remarque and Paulette Goddard by Julie Goldsmith Gilbert (1995); World Authors 1900-1950, vol. three, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmes (1995); All Quiet on the Western Front by R.A. Firda (1993); Understanding Erich Maria Remarque by Hans Wagener (1991); Erich Maria Remarque by U.H. Taylor (1989); Erich Maria Remarque: A Critical Bio-Bibliography by C.R. Owen (1984); Erich Maria Remarque by F. Baumer (1976) - See also: Lennart Meri - First World War in literature: Jaroslav Hašek: The Good Soldier Schweik; R.H. Mottram: The Spanish Farm Trilogy; Ford Madox Ford: Paradise's End; Arnold Zweig: The Case of Sergeant Grisha; Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero; Robert Graves: Good-bye to All That; Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms; Siegfried Sassoon: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Henry Williamson: The Patriot's Progress; Frederick Manning: The Middle Parts of Fortune; John Don Passos: Three Soldiers; e.e. cumming: The Enormous Room; Henri Barbusse: Under Fire

Selected works:

 

From: http://us.imdb.com/Reviews/128/12830

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

reviewed by
Brian Koller  

"All Quiet on the Western Front" was the first great film of the sound era. It remains the greatest anti-war film ever made, and it is one of best war films ever, much better than more acclaimed films such as "Apocalypse Now" or "Bridge on the River Kwai".

Lew Ayres stars as a common German soldier during World War I. (This viewpoint is unusual since nearly all English-language world war films are from the allied perspective.) Politics such as what nation started the war are ignored, and the story is life on the front lines. Trenches, shelling, machine guns, hand-to-hand combat, hunger and death are all the soldier knows, and his only question is, when will it be my turn to die? One soldier is shown reading a math book, and is told by another, "What are you reading that for? Someday you'll stop a bullet and it will all be for nothing."

"All Quiet on the Western Front" rejects the patriotism behind war. Ayres' character even delivers the line "It is better not to die at all than to die for one's country." The film was banned in Germany until after World War II.

Hospitals near the battlefield fill with the wounded. Their limbs are amputated and they cry for doctors, who are too busy with other patients to tend to them. Most of wounded soldiers die, and their possessions such as watches and boots are taken from them while still living.

The best scenes are the front line battles. In an incredible sequence, French soldiers are shown rushing to German trenches, mowed down by the hundreds by German machine guns. The French soldiers reach the trenches, and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the Germans. Wrestling and spearing with bayonets follows. It is as if the viewer is in the German trenches as well. The horror and waste of trench warfare could not be better demonstrated.

"All Quiet on the Western Front" was initially filmed as silent. Influences of the silent era can be seen in some scenes, such as soldiers eating with exaggerated hand motions and facial expressions.

The film won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director (Lewis Milestone), and was nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Writing.

 

















 


 
 
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