Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque (German: Erich Maria Remarque, born Erich Paul Remark) was one of the best-known and most widely read German writers of the twentieth century.

He was born on 22 June 1898 in Osnabrück. He was the second of five children of the bookbinder Peter Franz Remarque (1867–1954) and Anna Maria Remarque, née Stallknecht (1871–1917). In his youth, Remarque was fascinated by the works of Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, and Johann Goethe.

In 1904 he entered a church school, and in 1915 a Catholic teachers’ seminary. In 1916 he was drafted into the army and sent to the Western Front on 17 June. On 31 July 1917 he was wounded in the left leg, right arm, and neck, and spent the rest of the war in a military hospital in Germany.

After his mother’s death in 1918, he changed his middle name in her honor.

In 1919 he worked as a teacher, and by the end of 1920 he had changed a number of professions, including working as a salesman of gravestones and as a Sunday organist in the chapel of a mental hospital.

In 1921 he began working as an editor at the magazine Echo Continental; around the same time, as one of his letters attests, he adopted the pseudonym Erich Maria Remarque.

In October 1925 he married Ilse Jutta Zambona, a former dancer. Jutta suffered from tuberculosis for many years. She became the prototype for several female characters in Remarque’s works, including Pat in The Three Comrades. The marriage lasted a little over four years, after which they divorced. However, in 1938 Remarque married Jutta again in order to help her leave Germany and obtain the possibility of living in Switzerland, where he was then living himself, and later they moved together to the United States. The divorce was officially finalized only in 1957. The writer continued to provide Jutta with financial support until the end of his life, and also left her $50,000 in his will.