Erich Maria Remarque was born on 22 June 1898. His own name is Erich Paul Remark. Erich Paul
Remark was born into a working-class family in the German city of Osnabrück to Peter Franz Remark and Anna Maria. At the age of 16 he made his first attempts at writing:
essays, poems, and the beginnings of a novel that was finished later and published in 1920 as The Dream Room.
At 18, Remarque
was conscripted into the army and later he was transferred to the Western Front.
In 1927, Remarque wrote the novel Station at the
Horizon (Station am Horizont), which was serialized in the sports journal "Sport im Bild" for which Remarque was working. It was
published in book form only in 1998. His best known work, All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) was written in a few
months in 1927. When he published All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque changed his middle name in memory of his mother.
In 1931,
after finishing The Road Back (Der Weg zurück) Remarque left Germany.He bought a villa in Porto Ronco in Switzerland and lived both there
and in France until 1939, when he left Europe for the United States of America with his wife. Erich Maria Remarque died on 25 September
1970.
The book tells the story of Paul Bäumer, a soldier
who—urged on by his school teacher—joins the German army shortly after the start of World War I. Bäumer arrives at the Western Front with
his friends and schoolmates (Tjaden, Müller, Kropp and a number of other characters). There they meet Stanislaus Katczinsky, an older soldier,
nicknamed Kat, who becomes Paul's mentor. The book shows us the cruel reality of war, when Paul´s friends fall one by one. . In the final
chapter, he comments that peace is coming soon, but he does not see the future as bright and shining with hope. Paul feels that he has no aims left
in life and that their generation will be different and misunderstood. When he unfortunatly dies at the end of the novel, the situation report from
the frontline states, "All is Quiet on the Western Front," symbolizing the cheapness of human life in war.
Paul Bäumer is
the main character and narrator. At 19 years of age, Paul enlists in the German Army and is deployed to the Western Front where he experiences the
severe psychological and physical effects of the war. Before the War, Paul was a creative, sensitive, and passionate person, writing poems and having
a clear love for his family. But as the war changed his attitude and personality, poems and other aspects of his past life become something Paul
could not remember having any link to, and he learns to disconnect himself from his feelings. He feels he can't tell anyone about his experiences,
and feels like an outsider where his family is concerned.
By the end of the book, Paul realizes that he no longer knows what to do with himself and decides that he has nothing more to lose After years of fighting, Paul is finally killed in October 1918, on an extraordinarily quiet, peaceful day. The army report that day contains only one phrase: “All quiet on the Western Front.” As Paul dies, his face is calm, “as though almost glad the end had come.”