Despite the reaction of the book burners, Three Comrades, a sequel to All Quiet extolling the virtues of battlefield friendships, was published in 1931. This pre-World War II novel showed a glimpse of Remarque’s love for Jeanne Zambona and moved beyond male bonding to a sweet, but doomed, romantic interest. In January 1938, to spare Jeanne the loss of her Swiss visa and a forced return to Germany, Remarque married her a second time and negotiated an open relationship, giving each of them the freedom they desired. In June, Remarque was stripped of his German citizenship. Throughout his life, he remained sensitive to his nationality, proclaiming, “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.” Later, he moved farther south, settling in Paris and Antibes with longtime companion Marlene Dietrich, cultivating a coterie of expatriates, and drinking heavily. Publicity about Remarque’s lifestyle on the French Riviera boosted sales of his books. In response to growing anti-Nazi sentiment, the 1930 film of All Quiet was reissued in the United States in 1939. Padded with voice-overs, prologue, and epilogue, this version proved less emphatic than the original. Shown the world over, it did not appear in Remarque’s homeland until 1952, when it was shown in Berlin.
Movies would continue to spread Remarque’s pacifism. Two films were made of Remarque’s novels in 1937 and 1938. First, Universal Studios filmed The Road Back, starring John King, Richard Cromwell, Slim Summerville, Andy Devine, Spring Byington, and Noah Beery. The film so inflamed the German embassy that the director was forced to minimize Remarque’s anti-Fascist themes. The following year, MGM released Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s version of Three Comrades, using a screenplay by F. Scott Fitzgerald and starring Robert Taylor, Robert Young, Franchot Tone, and Margaret Sullavan, whose performance received an Oscar nomination. Reviews from Time and the National Board of Review remarked on the film’s beauty, skillful actors, and sensitive direction.
Life in America
A new life and citizenship awaited Remarque in America. Shortly before Hitler precipitated war by invading Poland, Remarque, too proud to accept proffered German citizenship, escaped the Gestapo by traveling the back roads through France, sailed on a Panamanian passport aboard the Queen Mary, and entered New York as a literary star. To reporters, Remarque predicted World War II and looked to President Franklin Roosevelt as the world’s only hope. In 1941, he published Flotsam (entitled “Love Thy Neighbor” in German), in a serialized version in Collier’s. It featured the sufferings of exiles fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Remarque collected material for the work from numerous poignant stories that were standard fare among his many expatriate friends. The same year it appeared with a new name as United Artists’ So Ends Our Night, but it was unsuccessful as a movie and received only one Academy Award nomination, for Louis Gruenberg’s music. The film starred Fredric March, Frances Dee, Glenn Ford, Margaret Sullavan, and Erich von Stroheim.
Remarque’s time in Los Angeles was followed by a celebrated social life on the east coast. While working for various movie studios, Remarque lived in a colony of German expatriates in west Los Angeles until 1942, when he moved to New York’s Ambassador Hotel and eventually to an apartment on East 57th Street, which he considered his permanent home. A lover of beauty, Remarque squired starlets to the Stork Club, Ciro’s, and 21, making friends with Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. He felt at home with the style and companionship of the “glittering people.” However, even at this safe distance from Hitler’s menace, Remarque was not spared the beheading of his sister, fashion designer Elfriede Scholz, in a Berlin prison. The Nazis’ perverted insult to her grisly demise was a bill for ninety marks sent by the executioner to Remarque, the brother whose pacifism had precipitated their unstinting spite.
The next few years would bring more books and films but also great sadness. When the war ended, Remarque published Arch of Triumph (1945), a major novel that depicted the struggles of pre-World War II exiles and was set in Remarque’s beloved Paris. The novel highlighted the stoic, existential strength of Ravic, one of his most memorable protagonists. Later, in 1952, he would revisit his sister Elfriede’s death in dedicating his next novel to her, a victim of Nazi vengeance. Spark of Life, describing concentration camps, was the first of Remarque’s works to remain unfilmed. In the author’s description, he wrote “. . . if it is a good book it will be widely read and through it, some people who did not understand before may be made to understand what the Nazis were like and what they did and what their kind will try to do again.” During the years between these two novels, Remarque saw two more of his books made into film, the recently published Arch of Triumph and The Other Love. The latter was a 1947 movie about a melodramatic failed romance starring David Niven and Barbara Stanwyck. In 1948, Lewis Milestone again directed a Remarque title when Arch of Triumph was brought to the screen by United Artists. Starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Louis Calhern, and Charles Laughton, the teary pre-World War II reflection lost three and a half million dollars. However, like All Quiet, it would later be revived for television.
