Erich Maria Remarque Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Name
Erich Maria Remarque, born Erich Paul Remark on 22 June 1898 in Osnabruck, Germany, grew up in modest circumstances and attended local Catholic schools. As a young man he prepared for a teaching career, a path interrupted by the First World War. In the 1920s he restored an older family spelling of his surname as Remarque and adopted the middle name Maria in honor of his mother, a choice that would come to symbolize the personal and moral commitments behind his work.

War, Wounds, and Beginnings as a Writer
Drafted during the First World War, he served on the Western Front and was seriously wounded in 1917, spending long periods in military hospitals. The trauma of the trenches, the helplessness of the injured, and the disorientation of returning soldiers became the wellspring of his literary vision. After the war he briefly taught, then turned to journalism and editing, including work as a sports writer and magazine editor. He began publishing fiction in newspapers and magazines, refining a spare, observational prose that carried the immediacy of reportage into the novel.

All Quiet on the Western Front
His breakthrough came with All Quiet on the Western Front, first serialized in 1928 and published as a book in 1929. The novel follows young German soldiers whose initial patriotism dissolves in the mechanized slaughter of trench warfare. Its unsentimental clarity and refusal of heroics resonated across national lines, becoming a worldwide success. The 1930 film adaptation, directed by Lewis Milestone and produced at Universal by Carl Laemmle Jr., extended its reach; actor Lew Ayres's performance helped define the story's haunted tone. In Germany, the book and film met fierce opposition from militarists. Joseph Goebbels orchestrated protests against screenings, and after 1933 the regime consigned Remarque's works to the flames during the book burnings, denouncing him as unpatriotic.

Exile and Personal Upheaval
Remarque left Germany for Switzerland in 1932 as the political climate darkened. His German citizenship was revoked in 1938, and he emigrated to the United States the following year, later becoming a U.S. citizen in 1947. His first marriage, to Jutta Ilse Zambona, ended in divorce in 1930; they remarried in 1938, a step that helped her find safety in exile, and later separated again. In the late 1930s he shared a passionate, artistically charged bond with Marlene Dietrich, another German exile whose own public stance against Nazism paralleled his. The war's toll struck his family directly when his sister, Elfriede Scholz, was executed by the Nazis in 1943 for alleged undermining of morale, a private catastrophe that deepened the moral gravity of his later work.

Further Novels and Film Adaptations
Remarque followed his first great success with The Road Back, about veterans struggling to reenter civilian life, and Three Comrades, a melancholic portrait of friendship amid the crumbling Weimar years; the latter's 1938 film adaptation featured a screenplay touched by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Flotsam (also known as Love Thy Neighbor) portrayed refugees shuttling across hostile borders; Arch of Triumph, set in Paris on the eve of war, traced the precarious existence of an exiled surgeon and was later filmed with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. A Time to Love and a Time to Die examined a soldier's conscience on the collapsing Eastern Front and reached the screen under director Douglas Sirk in 1958. Postwar he published The Black Obelisk, a mordant chronicle of inflation-era Germany, and later Heaven Has No Favorites, returning to themes of love, illness, and the urge to live fully in the shadow of mortality. Shadows in Paradise, centered on refugees in New York, appeared posthumously.

Style, Themes, and Reputation
Remarque's prose fused journalistic precision with emotional restraint. He chronicled ordinary people hemmed in by war, dictatorship, and exile, eschewing grand theory in favor of lived detail: a muddy trench, the silence after an explosion, the awkward decencies that survive amid fear. Again and again he asked what becomes of a generation forced to grow up under fire, and what it means to carry the war within after the guns fall silent. Admirers and critics sometimes debated the limits of his plain style, yet few denied his capacity to give private anguish a universal shape.

Life in America and Return to Switzerland
During his American years he lived in New York and worked in and around the film world while continuing to publish. He moved in circles that included other European exiles and Hollywood figures who helped bring his stories to the screen. In 1958 he married the actress Paulette Goddard; the couple later made their home on Lake Maggiore in the Swiss canton of Ticino, where Remarque wrote, collected art, and welcomed friends and fellow artists. The serene setting contrasted with the history that had formed him, but his fiction continued to return to the crucible of the early twentieth century and to the long aftermath of violence and displacement.

Final Years and Legacy
Remarque died on 25 September 1970 in Locarno, Switzerland, and was laid to rest near his Swiss home. Paulette Goddard would eventually be buried beside him. By then All Quiet on the Western Front had become a touchstone in the literature of the First World War, and his broader body of work stood as a sustained meditation on the fate of a generation marked by catastrophe. As reader and viewer publics changed, new adaptations kept his stories in circulation, but the core of his legacy remained literary: an unblinking testimony to the wounds of the twentieth century and to the fragile solidarities people forge in order to endure them.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by Erich, under the main topics: Military & Soldier - Human Rights - Kindness - War.