It is the anti-war novel par excellence, is sold, translated into more than 50 languages worldwide with over 20 million Times. Remarque really was through and through a pacifist – or even a fraud?
Remarque’s book is the portrait of a Generation that went from the school bench euphoric at the Front and at the end of a murderous war machine perished. The First world war – the beginning of the 20th century. He was longed for by many men literally.
It was the time of great upheaval and uncertainty. The technical progress of the clock – factories, cars, scientific discoveries. The Patriarchal society got cracks, women rebelled against predefined roles, called loudly for more rights.
The Old came to an end, New to came in a rush on the people and overwhelmed – especially in the world of men. War, they hoped, could be the “cleansing power”, resist change. They cheered the outbreak of the war in the summer of 1914, and firmly believed to be Christmas back home. But it came different.
“We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. First, the Drill amazed, then exasperated, and finally indifferent, we recognised that it is not the spirit seemed to be decisive, but [ … ].”
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“In the West nothing New” by Erich Maria Remarque
Everyday life in the trenches
The carnage in the trenches that night in a hail of Grenades, the boredom between the storm attacks – all with experienced Remarque’s narrator, a young recruit, up close and personal. From subtle students to pass the truncated is being Half.
“A private […] drags the shattered knee behind him; another goes to the Association, and about his holding hands sources the intestines. […] The Horror one can endure, as long as you down easy, but it kills, if you think about it.”
White lie to the world success
So drastically, the war, Remarque described to happen, he had to fight only a short time at the Front. In 1916, he was. as the student is forcibly moved in, shortly after, wounded and in a hospital laid There, he listened to the front stories of the severely injured, making notes which would later be world famous novel. But the marketing boost, claimed Remarque, all self-experienced.”In the West nothing New” came out first in 1929 as a book and became an overnight to one of the greatest achievements of German literature. Critics around the world celebrated the novel as a “pacifist indictment of war”. A short time later, he was made into a movie even from Hollywood.
Banned and burned by the
Rights circles in Germany saw the memory of your soldiers in the Mud. In 1933, after the seizure of power by the national socialists, was Remarque burned the book publicly and banned. Its author was emigrated a long time ago in Switzerland.
Stink bombs and mice – at the German Premiere of the novel adaptation of the NSDAP in 1930, caused a scandal
Until his death, Remarque enjoyed his Image as a pacifist and took a toll of his early fame. Because he could not tie. Years later he confessed that he had always been a non-political person.
Erich Maria Remarque: In the West nothing New (1929), Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag
Erich Maria Remarque came in 1898, in Osnabrück, the son of a French immigrant family to the world. In 1933 he emigrated to Switzerland. His Works were outlawed under the Nazis, his writings during the burning of books thrown into the fire. From 1939 on, he lived in the United States, after the war, alternately in the United States and Switzerland. He died in 1970 in Locarno.