
Erich Maria Remarque
German novelist
Date of Birth | : | 22 Jun, 1898 |
Date of Death | : | 25 Sep, 1970 |
Place of Birth | : | Osnabrück, Germany |
Profession | : | Novelist |
Nationality | : | Germany |
Erich Maria Remarque was a novelist who is chiefly remembered as the author of Im Westen nichts Neues (1929; All Quiet on the Western Front), which became perhaps the best-known and most representative novel dealing with World War I.
Remarque was drafted into the German army at the age of 18 and was wounded several times. After the war he worked as a racing-car driver and as a sportswriter while working on All Quiet on the Western Front. The novel’s events are those in the daily routine of soldiers who seem to have no past or future apart from their life in the trenches. Its title, the language of routine communiqués, is typical of its cool, terse style, which records the daily horrors of war in laconic understatement. Its casual amorality was in shocking contrast to patriotic rhetoric. The book was an immediate international success, as was the American film made from it in 1930. It was followed by a sequel, Der Weg zurück (1931; The Road Back), dealing with the collapse of Germany in 1918. Remarque wrote several other novels, most of them dealing with victims of the political upheavals of Europe during World Wars I and II. Some had popular success and were filmed (e.g., Arc de Triomphe, 1946), but none achieved the critical prestige of his first book.
Remarque left Germany for Switzerland in 1932. His books were banned by the Nazis in 1933. In 1939 he went to the United States, where he was naturalized in 1947. After World War II he settled in Porto Ronco, Switz., on Lake Maggiore, where he lived with his second wife, the American actress Paulette Goddard, until his death.
Quotes
Total 20 Quotes
Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.
Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.
We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.
Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.
Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.
Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.
Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.