Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) was a German novelist whose first major book, All Quiet on the Western Front, became one of the most widely read accounts of the First World War and a target of Nazi censorship within five years of its appearance. Born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabrück to a Catholic working-class family, he was conscripted into the German army in 1916 and wounded on the Western Front.

After the war he worked as a teacher, mechanic, racing-car promoter, and editor for a sport journal, gradually building a literary career under the spelling Remarque, the older French form of the family name. Im Westen nichts Neues, published in 1929, sold over a million copies in its first year in Germany and was translated into dozens of languages. Lewis Milestone's 1930 American film won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

The Nazi regime banned and burned his books in 1933, stripped him of German citizenship in 1938, and later executed his sister Elfriede Scholz on a fabricated charge in 1943. Remarque had already left Germany; he settled in Switzerland and from 1939 in the United States, becoming a naturalized American citizen.

Later novels including Three Comrades, Arch of Triumph, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, and The Night in Lisbon followed German exiles, soldiers, and refugees through the wars and dictatorships of the twentieth century. He spent his final decades between New York and Porto Ronco on Lake Maggiore.

The given name Erich is a German form of Eric, from Old Norse Eiríkr, combining ei, meaning ever, with rīkr, meaning ruler. He added Maria, his mother's name, in tribute after her death. The surname Remarque is the older French spelling of his family's name, which he restored in place of the Germanized Remark.