Where to Start with Erich Maria Remarque: A Reading Guide

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) was the German novelist who — with All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) — wrote the definitive anti-war novel of the twentieth century and became, almost immediately, one of the most famous writers in the world. His books were banned and burned by the Nazis; he was stripped of his German citizenship and lived in exile, first in Switzerland and then in America, for the rest of his life. His fiction constitutes a comprehensive literary portrait of Germany’s catastrophe: the First World War, the Weimar Republic’s collapse under the weight of inflation and Nazi violence, and the exile experience. He wrote with moral clarity, controlled emotion, and an atmospheric precision that was most fully realised in Arch of Triumph (1945), his most accomplished purely novelistic achievement.

Where to Start: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

The essential Remarque — and the definitive anti-war novel. Paul Bäumer enlists in the German army at eighteen, moved by his teacher’s patriotic speeches; the novel follows him and his school friends through the experience of the Western Front, as the idealism with which they enlisted is stripped away layer by layer and the friends die one by one. The prose is spare and flat, entirely without editorial comment: Remarque never tells you what to feel because the facts, rendered with complete accuracy, already do that work.

Among the most important novels of the twentieth century — morally necessary, technically precise, and undiminished after nearly a century. Banned and burned by the Nazis in 1933; became a bestseller in every country where it could be sold. Begin here.

Arch of Triumph (1945)

Remarque’s most atmospheric and most novelistically accomplished work. Ravic, a German surgeon stripped of his papers, living illegally in Paris under a false name and practising medicine without a licence, occupies the city’s prewar underworld — the hotels of Montparnasse, the illegal restaurants, the black market doctors. He falls in love with Joan Madou; he pursues the Gestapo officer who destroyed his earlier life.

The Paris Remarque depicts — written from American exile — is a city living its last months before the German occupation, and the love that Ravic knows he cannot preserve has the beauty and the fragility of everything that is about to end. His most fully realised later novel.

Three Comrades (1937)

Remarque’s most romantic novel — and his most politically charged. Three veterans of the First World War, sharing an automobile repair shop in the mid-1920s Weimar Republic, try to build ordinary lives while Nazi violence rises around them. One falls in love with Pat, a woman dying of tuberculosis. The love story is written with extraordinary tenderness; the historical context — the knowledge that the world in which their love is possible is ending — makes it heartbreaking.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay (though the film was heavily altered). One of Remarque’s most fully realised and most emotionally direct novels.

The Road Back (1931)

The direct sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front — following some of the surviving characters back to Germany and their attempt to re-enter civilian life after the war. The transition proves impossible: the men who survived the Front cannot be absorbed back into a society that preferred not to understand what the war was, and the novel is an account of that failure of reintegration. Best read immediately after All Quiet on the Western Front.

Reading Erich Maria Remarque

Remarque’s fiction is a continuous literary engagement with the catastrophe of twentieth-century German history: what the First World War did to the men who fought it, what the Weimar Republic failed to do for the men who survived it, what exile felt like for those who understood what was happening to Germany before it was too late to leave. His prose is controlled, his emotion is genuine, and his moral position — that nationalism and war are crimes perpetrated by the old against the young — is expressed through character and event rather than polemic. Begin with All Quiet on the Western Front; everything else flows from it.