Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque[1] (born Erich Paul Remark; German: [ˈeːʁɪç maˈʁiːa ʁeˈmaʁk] (About this soundlisten); 22 June 1898 – 25 September 1970) was a German novelist. His landmark novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), about the German military experience of World War I, was an international best-seller which created a new literary genre, and was subsequently adapted into a film of the same name in 1930.
Erich Maria Remarque was born on 22 June 1898 into a working class Roman Catholic family in the German city of Osnabrück to Peter Franz Remark (b. 14 June 1867, Kaiserswerth) and Anna Maria (née Stallknecht; born 21 November 1871, Katernberg).[2] Remarque was the third of four children of Peter and Anna. His other siblings were his older sister Erna, older brother Theodor Arthur (who died at the age of five), and younger sister Elfriede (born 1903).[3]
Research by Remarque’s childhood and lifelong friend Hanns-Gerd Rabe proved that in fact Remarque had French ancestors—his great-grandfather Johann Adam Remarque, who was born in 1789, came from a French family in Aachen.[4] At some point in time the last name Remark (Remarque, French version) was derived from Kramer (reversed to Remark), likely to hide his true nationality from his fellow Germans.
During World War I, Remarque was conscripted into the German Imperial 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.[citation needed]
After the war he continued his teacher training and worked from 1 August 1919 as a primary school teacher in Lohne, at that time in the county of Lingen, 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 leave of absence from teaching. Remarque 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.[5]
Remarque had 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).
After coming back from the war, the atrocities of war along with his mother’s death caused him a great deal of mental trauma and grief. In later years as a professional writer, he started using “Maria” as his middle name instead of “Paul,” to commemorate his mother.[3] 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.[6]
In 1927, he published the novel Station at the Horizon (Station am Horizont). It was serialised in the sports journal Sport im Bild for which Remarque was working. (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 written in 1927. Remarque was at first unable to find a publisher for it.[2] 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 a wide variety of war memoirs. It also inspired dramatic representations of the war in theatre and cinema, in Germany as well as in countries that had fought in the conflict against the German Empire, particularly the United Kingdom and the United States.
