German · b. 1898
Medal of Honor (City of Osnabrück)
Erich Maria Remarque was a German author whose All Quiet on the Western Front became the defining anti-war novel of the twentieth century and one of the most widely read works of fiction ever published.
Erich Maria Remarque served in the German Army during World War One, was wounded multiple times, and returned to civilian life with experiences that would take him a decade to process into fiction. All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) narrates the war from the perspective of Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier, in prose so direct and so merciless in its detail that it remains the standard against which all subsequent war novels are measured. It was immediately controversial — banned and burned by the Nazis, who understood exactly what it was saying.
The Road Back (1931) follows the survivors into a civilian life that cannot accommodate what they have seen, and Three Comrades (1937) extends the social critique into the Weimar Republic’s death spiral. Remarque’s subject across his career was survival — physical, moral, and psychological — in conditions designed to destroy it. Arch of Triumph (1945), set in Paris in 1939 among stateless refugees, may be his most accomplished late novel: a love story set against political catastrophe, with an inevitability that feels genuinely tragic rather than contrived.
Remarque escaped Germany in 1932 and had his German citizenship revoked by the Nazis in 1938. His sister Elfriede Scholz was executed by the Nazi regime in 1943, the court explicitly stating that her execution was punishment for her brother’s continued anti-war writing. He became an American citizen in 1947. His literary reputation remains tied to All Quiet on the Western Front — which sold 2.5 million copies in its first year — but his broader body of work repays reading.
by Erich Maria Remarque
Paul Bäumer enlists in the German army at 18, full of patriotic idealism, and spends the next few years watching his friends die one by one on the Western Front while the world that sent them there carries on. Remarque's novel is the definitive anti-war testimony: written in the flat, precise language of men who have stopped expecting rescue.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Erich Maria Remarque
Ravic, a German surgeon living illegally in Paris in 1939, practises medicine under a false name and pursues the Gestapo officer who destroyed his life. Remarque's wartime novel was written in American exile and captures the atmosphere of Paris just before the German occupation with the precision of someone who knew the city and understood what was about to happen to it.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Erich Maria Remarque
Three veterans of the First World War try to build ordinary lives in the Weimar Republic while Nazi violence rises around them, and one of them falls in love with a woman dying of tuberculosis. Remarque's most romantic novel is also his most political — the personal tenderness and the historical catastrophe are inseparable, and the love story is written with the knowledge of what is coming.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Erich Maria Remarque
A German soldier on the Eastern Front is given three weeks' leave, returns to his bombed city, falls in love, marries, and must return to the front. Remarque's most compassionate novel about the Second World War gives a German protagonist genuine humanity in a story almost no fiction had attempted: the ordinary German soldier who is neither hero nor monster, simply a man caught in what his country has done.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Erich Maria Remarque
The direct sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front follows the surviving soldiers as they return to a Germany that has changed beyond recognition — where their sacrifice is simultaneously celebrated and disregarded, and where the civilian world has no framework for what they have seen. Remarque's second novel asks what happens after the war ends: harder to read and less celebrated than its predecessor, but in some ways more honest.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Disclosure: Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.