1/Remarque

A night in Lisbon in 1942: The German emigrant Josef Schwarz persuades a nameless fellow emigrant to listen to his story. In return, Schwarz will give to the one-person audience both his passport and his boat ticket to the United States.

That night Schwarz tells the story of his secret return to fascist Osnabrück to see his wife Helen again and take her with him. It is the story of exile in France, the outbreak of the Second World War, internment in a French camp, the adventurous escape over the Spanish border and finally Helen’s death in Lisbon. Without her, the plan to escape to the United States has become pointless.

After one night and the story told, the nameless emigrant receives the passport and adopts the identity of Josef Schwarz. As it turns out, this is not the first time, his identity has been passed on but the third. The passport originally belonged to yet another emigrant, an art dealer.

The novel comments on how, in the twentieth century, identities are exchangeable, but how each fate must be remembered and preserved as a warning for future generations.

The Night in Lisbon, first published in 1962, is Remarque’s most ambitious novel in terms of narrative technique, and it shows more clearly than any of his other writings the importance of remembering the fates of individual human beings. The great significance and quality of the novel were immediately recognised. In 1961, before the book came out, a shorter version was serialized in several languages and remains available throughout the world alongside the longer book, which Remarque substantially revised.

A German concentration camp in the spring of 1945, shortly before liberation by the Allies. A group of prisoners in a section of the camp for the dying tries to preserve its human dignity. They make contact with the inmates of the main camp and assume an important function in the preparations for an uprising against the already demoralized SS. Thus, they regain their dignity, and one of the protagonists, known as “Skeleton 509,” remembers his actual name.

Spark of Life is not a documentary account of a historic concentration camp. The novel takes the Buchenwald camp as a model and portrays fictional events.

Remarque reveals not only the perspective of the prisoners, but also that of the perpetrators, in particular that of the camp commandant.

The story deals with survival in the face of hopelessness in a concentration camp as well as the motives of the perpetrators, who lack all sense of right and wrong. Remarque conducted research for eight years and interviewed countless survivors.

Although he himself was never imprisoned in a camp, Remarque succeeded in producing an authentic account, verified by eyewitnesses, of the conditions in a German concentration camp. Many of the facts remain little known today and are the subjects of controversies, such as the conflicts between groups of prisoners, the existence of camp brothels for inmates or the communists’ direct conversion of the Nazi camps into camps for political opponents in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Because of its difficult subject matter, Spark of Life, despite its outstanding quality, did not receive the response it deserved during Remarque’s lifetime. 

Paul Bäumer had enthusiastically volunteered. He left school early to enlist and participate what soon turns out to be the hell and horror of warfare in the trenches. Bäumer understands that humanity is rendering itself worthless and all of its achievements worthless. The only thing that counts is survival and comradery.

In one famous scene, Bäumer witnesses the slow death of a French soldier named Duval whom he stabbed. Nothing that justifies war remains valid after such an horrific act.

Shortly before, when all is quiet on the western front, Bäumer gets killed.

This timeless classic of antiwar literature tells the story of a generation that was destroyed by war, including those that escaped the shelling. It is the basis of several movies, stage adaptions, graphic novels, and it inspires millions of readers throughout the world. It was translated into over 50 languages.

Originally published in 1928 in serial form, then as volume, the novel sold half a million copies within the first three months since its publication and was burned by the Nazis in 1933. It has sold over 20 million copies world wide.

Paris, 1938: The German doctor Ravic works illegally as a surgeon for a French doctor. He lives in a hotel for emigrants and attends to French prostitutes. His wife was tortured to death by the Nazis, but he managed to escape from a concentration camp. Ravic has repressed his past, even his own name. Only his love for the singer Joan Madou gives him a new enthusiasm for life and a fresh outlook. By chance he catches a glimpse on the street of Haake, his wife’s murderer, who tortured him as well. Ravic is obsessed with the idea of revenge. He plans the murder of Haake and finally carries it out. In the process, Ravic doesn’t notice how Joan Madou slips away from him; she dies at the hands of her new lover. When the Second World War breaks out and France is at war with Germany, Ravic is interned as an enemy alien; in the early morning haze even the Arc de Triomphe can no longer be made out – it’s a multilayered symbol for monumental human hubris. Europe has descended once and for all into the darkness of barbarity. 

In the early 1950s the race car driver Clerfayt meets and falls in love with the tuberculosis patient Lillian Dunkerque in a Swiss sanatorium. They leave the sanatorium to live in Paris, but without prospects: Lillian is deathly ill and Clerfayt, being a race car driver, is constantly in mortal danger. When Clerfayt plans to quit his racing career and establish a lasting bourgeois relationship with Lillian, she is plunged into a crisis. Her decision to leave him is preempted by Clerfayt’s death in an accident during a race in Monte Carlo. Lillian returns to the sanatorium and dies.

First published in 1959 in the magazine Kristall under the title Geborgtes Leben (Borrowed Life), the substantially revised book version Heaven Has No Favorites did not appear until 1961. Both versions are available internationally in translation.

Long neglected by the critical literature, this novel’s significance as a great love story with a detailed depiction of car racing in the 1950s has been recognized only recently.

Most importantly, the novel reflects the quintessence of Remarque’s philosophical convictions, because it sums up his most crucial questions: The hopeless confrontation of every human being with death, the unconditional duty and responsibility of every individual for his or her life choices, and love outside of social conventions as a possible way out of an otherwise senseless existence.

After years of fighting in the Second World War, German soldier Ernst Graeber goes home on furlough for the first time. He had witnessed and participated in war crimes the Wehrmacht committed against Soviet civilians. He discovers that his hometown has been destroyed by bombings, cannot find his parents and is confronted with civilians living in fear of Nazi terror and allied bombing. Graeber realizes that there is no longer any difference between the war on the front and the one at home. It has truly become total war.

In seeking answers to his questions about guilt and responsibility, he encounters a former classmate who has made a career in the local Nazi hierarchy. And his former teacher of religion Pohlmann is active in the resistance hiding Jews. But even Pohlmann cannot give Graeber an answer.

Graeber and his girl-friend Elisabeth retreat to an "island of hope" which is the original title of this novel. But the idyll doesn't last long, Graeber has to return to the Eastern Front. There, he saves Russian civilians from an arbitrary act of killing and, in doing so, kills a Nazi henchman. He cannot decide whether to desert and change sides and gets killed by one of the civilians he saved.

Remarque's novel depicts the war on the front and at home in 1943.

Originally published in 1954 in a redacted version, this is Remarque's most controversial novel about Second World War.

During hyperinflation in 1923 Ludwig Bodmer sells tomb stones in a small German city. When, on a Sunday, he plays the organ in city's chapel of the insane asylum where he meets the schizophrenic Isabelle. She emboides a counter-world to the economic and social chaos of the city and pulls Ludwig into her world. There is the asylum's rational director, the priest and Isabelle's endearing world. When Isabelle is considered healed and dismissed from the asylum, Ludwig moves to another city. In a concluding chapter, the novel's characters are shown after the National Socialists have taken over the country.

This timelss novel was written as a warning against a repetition of history: never again.

Berlin, in the 1920s. The former soldiers and comrades -Robert, Gottfried and Otto- have stayed together after the war to run a car repair shop. They live in the milieu of the impoverished middle class, the jobless, the unsuccessful artists and the prostitutes.

Robert finds solace in his love to Patricia but when she's diagnosed with tuberculosis, the friendship of the three men is put to a test. They sell their workshop to pay for Patricia's treatment in a sanatorium. But when she dies and Gottfried gets killed during a poloitical rally, the friendship comes to an end.

This novel deals with the inevitability of death and its significance as the basis of life. Life must always come to an end. What remains is friendship and love.

This is Remarque's first novel published in exile, in 1936. Despite its pessimism it remains one of his most popular and most important works.

Before the outbreak of the Second World War, German political emigrant Steiner and the Jewish students Ludwig Kern and Ruth Holland wander through Europe without papers. Between deportation and detention, they are confronted with a pitiless bureaucracy in every country they go: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and France. Ultimately, after the war, Steiner returns to Germany to see his dying wife one last time. He knows that he won't survive this last visit. In hospital, he drags his former Nazi tormentor with him to death. The novel asks: is there revenge and redemption? How can the individual attain justice in a lawless world and a corrupt system?

The group of former soldiers around the protagonist Ernst Birkholz returs from the Western Front to their hometown in Germany where they encounter the changed political, social and economic situation. The war has had an impact on everyone, whether they were on the front or at home. Marriages have failed to to the long absence of the men. Economic hardship affects social relations. Ernst Birkholz tries to find his place in this society, but fails in his original occupation as an elementary school teacher when he discovers that he can no longer teach his puils the old pre-war values that the curriculum requires. Other members of his group look again to join paramilitary units or the regular army where they suppress revolutionary uprisings. Former comrades shoot at each other. With the exception of former soldiers who become involved in the black market or war profiteering, almost all the members of Ernst's group fail to reintegrate; some commit suicide.After a nervous breakdown, Ernst Birkholz finds himself on his own: only of his own volition, with his own strength and with a return to the basic values of life can he achieve a new beginning. Yet, in the final scene of the novel, in which Birkholz encounters a group of young men during a paramilitary exercise, it becomes clear that a new war is already in preparation.

The Road Back shows that every war has long-term consequences for the individual and for society. Like ALL QUIET, the novel points beyond the historical events of the immediate postwar period of the First World War and is just as relevant to contemporary conflicts and their consequences.

Remarque died before finishing this story of a German emigrant to New York. The world wanted a "last great" novel by the famous bestselling writer, so the manuscript was heavily edited and completed to become a bestseller. It was published in 1971 as SHADOWS IN PARADISE (German: Schatten im Paradies). Almost twenty-five years later, in 1998, the original manuscript was reconstructed and published as a fragment under its original title, THE PROMISED LAND (Das gelobte Land).

It is about a German emigrant and holocaust survivor in New York. It examines the sacrifices and compromises he has to make. It culminates in the bigger question: is criminal action from the past still punishable? Does guilt persist? Remarque's clear advance is: yes.