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BARRON'S BOOK NOTES (tm) on CD-ROM Windows (tm) Ver. 2.0

All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque

---------------------------------------------------------

1929

ERICH MARIA REMARQUE'S

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

by Rose Kam

SERIES EDITOR

Michael Spring

Editor, Literary Cavalcade

Scholastic, Inc.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the many painstaking hours of work

Holly and Thomas F. Hirsch have devoted to making the Book Notes

series a success.

(C) Copyright 1984 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc.

Electronically Enhanced Text (C) Copyright 1993, World Library, Inc.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

SECTION.......................... SEARCH ON

THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES................. RALLAUTH

THE NOVEL

The Plot................................. RALLPLOT

The Characters........................... RALLCHAR

Other Elements

Setting............................. RALLSETT

Theme............................... RALLTHEM

Style and Structure................. RALLSTYL

Point of View....................... RALLVIEW

Form................................ RALLFORM

THE STORY................................ RALLSTOR

A STEP BEYOND

Tests and Answers........................ RALLTEST

Term Paper Ideas......................... RALLTERM

Glossary................................. RALLGLOS

The Critics.............................. RALLCRIT

Advisory Board........................... RALLADVB

Bibliography............................. RALLBIBL

AUTHOR_AND_HIS_TIMES

THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES (RALLAUTH)

-

Born Erich Paul Remark on June 22, 1898, he grew up in a Roman

Catholic family in Osnabruck in the province of Westphalia, Germany- a

city in the northwest part of what is now West Germany. He adored

his mother, Anna Maria, but was never close to his father, Peter.

The First World War effectively shut him off from his sisters,

Elfriede and Erna. Peter Remark, descended from a family that fled

to Germany after the French Revolution, earned so little as a

bookbinder that the family had to move 11 times between 1898 and 1912.

The family's poverty drove Remarque as a teenager to earn his own

clothes money (giving piano lessons). He developed a craving for

luxury, which he never outgrew. His piano playing and other interests,

such as collecting butterflies and exploring streams and forests,

later appeared in his fictional characters. His love of writing earned

him the nickname Smudge.

Because of the frequent moving, Remarque attended two different

elementary schools and then the Catholic Praparande (preparatory

school). He loved the drama of Catholic rituals, the beauty of

churches, the flowers in cloister gardens, and works of art. He

later wrote with a sense of theater, and he featured churches and

museums, flowers and trees as symbols of enduring peace. While in

school, he had problems with teachers, however, and eventually paid

them back by ridiculing them in his novels. At the Praparande he

argued so much with one teacher that he used the man's personality and

another's name (Konschorek) to produce a specific character in Ail

Quiet on the Western Front: Schoolmaster Kantorek.

In November 1916, when Remarque was eighteen and a third-year

student at Osnabruck's Lehrerseminar (teachers college), he was

drafted for World War I. After basic training at the Westerberg in

Osnabruck (the Klosterberg of All Quiet), he was assigned to a reserve

battalion, but often given leave to visit his seriously ill mother. In

June 1917, he was assigned to a trench unit near the Western Front. He

was a calm, self-possessed soldier, and when his classmate Troske

was wounded by grenade splinters, Remarque carried him to safety. He

was devastated when Troske died in the hospital of head wounds that

had gone unnoticed. Still, he rescued another comrade before he

himself was severely injured- also by grenade splinters- and sent to

the St. Vincenz hospital in Duisburg for much of 1917-1918. He was

there when his mother died in September 1917. A year later, still

grieving for her, he returned to Osnabruck for further training. After

the war he substituted her middle name, Maria, for his own, Paul.

The war ended before Remarque could return to active service, but

even though he had not experienced frontline fighting at its worst,

the war had changed his attitudes forever. He had learned to realize

the value- and fragility- of each individual life, and had become

disillusioned with a patriotism that ignored the individual. To him

and many of his companions, civilian careers no longer held any

meaning.

The next few years in Germany brought shortages, profiteering,

runaway inflation, unemployment, riots, and extremist politics-

including the rise of National Socialism from the postwar German

Workers Party, a group almost fanatic in stressing nationalism. For

lack of anything better to do, Remarque and several friends returned

to the Seminar, but they found the studies and the older teachers'

attitudes ridiculous. Remarque became involved in many disputes. For

example, to ridicule the town authorities for their continued belief

in the glory of war, he had himself photographed with his dog for

the local paper- he in an officer's uniform decorated with two Iron

Crosses and other medals. The scandalized Osnabruck officials demanded

a public apology.

Still, at graduation he was given the customary letter of

recommendation (although it did describe him as more freethinking than

the average teacher), and in June 1919 he began two years' work as a

substitute for teachers on leave. He was blond, strikingly

goodlooking, and very muscular, and managed to dress elegantly

whatever his income. He stayed out of politics but became interested

in all sports, especially cars and racing. Finally, bored with

teaching, he wandered from job to job: playing organ on Sundays in

an insane asylum, working for a tombstone firm, working as a

small-town drama critic, writing advertising copy for an automotive

firm. He married an actress, Jutta Ilse Zambona, in 1925, shortly

after taking a job in Berlin as associate editor of the illustrated

magazine, Sport im Bild, and became a regular in Berlin society, often

sporting a monocle, superficially happy.

Early in 1920, as Erich Remark, he published a novel so poorly

received that the embarrassment caused him to adopt his great

grandfather's spelling of Remarque. His journalistic writing was stiff

often mediocre and overly sentimental. Thus, the great success of

his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929,

astonished him and everyone else. He hadn't even set out to write a

bestseller but had written, instead, to rid himself of the bleak moods

that he and his friends were still experiencing. "The shadow of war

hung over us," he said, "especially when we tried to shut our minds to

it." The result, known in German as Im Westen nichts Neues, deeply

moved people on both sides of the Atlantic who were also still seeking

to make sense of the war.

In its first year, German readers alone bought more than one million

copies of All Quiet; and the British, French, and Americans bought

thousands more. The novel also attained success as an American

motion picture. (One of the first "talkies," the film, starring Lew

Ayres and Lewis Wolheim, is still considered a classic. A 1979

made-for-television version starred Richard Thomas as Paul, Patricia

Neal as Mrs. Baumer, and Ernest Borgnine as Katczinsky.) By 1932 All

Quiet had been translated into 29 languages, and the unknown

journalist had been transformed into a world-famous author.

Despite its popularity, the book generated a storm of controversy.

Some people charged that Remarque had written solely to shock and to

sell. Others called the book sentimental pacifism. The Nazis chose

to read it as an attack on the greatness of the German nation.

Ignoring the book as literature, they spread rumors to undermine

Remarque's popularity. They variously claimed that he was a French

Jew, an old man who had never seen a battlefield, or the worthless son

of millionaire parents. Remarque refused to comment, later telling

an interviewer, "I was only misunderstood where people went out of

their way to misunderstand me."

During the controversy Remarque and his wife lived in Berlin. They

were divorced in the early 1930s after the Nazis exiled him but

remarried almost immediately so that Ilse, who suffered from

tuberculosis, would not lose her Swiss residence permit. They lived

separately until their final divorce in 1951.

Remarque's sequel to All Quiet, based on his and his friends'

experiences after they returned from the front, was published in 1931.

It was called Der Weg zuruck, or The Road Back. At the time,

Remarque was neutral (or noncommittal) rather than a convinced

anti-Nazi, but the sequel aroused further Nazi persecution.

Goebbels, chief organizer of the witch-hunt, had first brought

things to a head in 1930, when the American film version of All

Quiet was screened in Berlin. His bands of Hitler Youth had rampaged

through the theater hurling stink bombs, scattering white mice, and

shouting, "Germany, awake!" The film was banned, and in 1931

Remarque was forced to leave Germany, where both his novels were

thrown into the fire during the infamous bookburning of 1933.

Remarque commented in 1962, "I had to leave Germany because my

life was threatened. I was neither a Jew nor orientated towards the

left politically. I was the same then as I am today: a militant

pacifist." It is said that Goebbels later invited Remarque back, but

that Remarque replied, "What? Sixty-five million people would like

to get away and I'm to go back of my own free will? Not on your life!"

In 1932 German officials seized his Berlin bank account-

supposedly for back taxes- but he had transferred most of his money as

well as his Impressionist paintings to Switzerland, where he bought

a villa at Porto Ronco on Lake Maggiore, gradually filling it with

valuable antiques.

By the time Remarque was actually deprived of his German citizenship

in 1938, his first three books had already been made into films in

America and he was sometimes called the King of Hollywood. Until

1939 he divided his time between Porto Ronco and France; from 1939

to 1942 he rented a bungalow in Hollywood. His female companions

included Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo; his male friends, Charles

Chaplin, Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.

Eventually, he tired of the Hollywood glitter, and in 1942 began to

divide his time between New York and Porto Ronco. In 1957 he

received critical acclaim as an actor for his role in the film version