Erich Maria Remarque

Independent activity Pacifism 1898–1970 ○ Died of illness in Locarno

Author of the anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, stripped of his citizenship by the Nazis

German novelist, born in 1898 into a working-class Catholic family in Osnabrück. Wounded by shell splinters on the Western Front in 1917, he wrote the anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) about soldiers' experience of the war, and it became a worldwide bestseller. In 1931 he bought a villa at Porto Ronco in Switzerland, and he left Germany for good at the end of January 1933, a day before Hitler became chancellor. At the book burning of 10 May his writings were thrown into the flames with the cry "Against literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War!" In 1938 he was stripped of his German citizenship; in 1939 he went to the United States and became an American citizen in 1947. His sister Elfriede, who had stayed in Germany, was sentenced to death and executed in 1943 for saying the war was already lost. He returned to Switzerland in 1948 and died in Locarno in 1970.

Also known as: Erich Paul Remark