Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque wrote the most widely read novel of the First World War and had his citizenship revoked for it. Born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabrück in 1898 to a Catholic bookbinder's family, he was conscripted at eighteen and sent to the Western Front in June 1917, where he was wounded by shell splinters within six weeks and spent the rest of the war in a military hospital. He worked afterwards as a teacher, a stonecutter of memorials, a test driver and a motoring journalist, and changed his name, adopting his mother's first name and a French spelling of the surname. All Quiet on the Western Front was written in a few weeks in 1927 and published in 1929. It follows a class of schoolboys pushed into enlisting by a patriotic teacher, and refuses every convention of war writing: there is no strategy, no heroism, no cause, and the narrator dies on a day the communiqués describe as quiet. It sold well over a million copies within a year and was translated into dozens of languages. The Nazis attacked it immediately as a betrayal of the front generation, disrupted screenings of the 1930 film with stink bombs and mice, burned the book publicly in 1933, and revoked his citizenship in 1938. He moved to Switzerland and then the United States. His sister Elfriede was tried and beheaded in Berlin in 1943, and the family was billed for the execution. He wrote further novels on exile and the camps, and died in Switzerland in 1970.

• Lived: 1898 CE – 1970 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: writer