Born Erich Paul Remark (he later changed his name out of embarrassment over a novel he published in 1920), the novelist was the son of bookbinder and master machinist Peter Franz Remark and his wife, Anna Maria Stallknecht Remark, both descendants of devout French Catholic expatriates to the Rhineland following the French Revolution. He was born June 22, 1898, in Osnabrück, Westphalia, a prosperous industrial town in northwestern Germany, twenty-five miles from the Netherlands. As members of the hard-pressed lower end of the working class, the Remarks shuffled almost annually among a series of quarters between 1898 and 1912, once residing in rooms above Prelle, the publishing company where his father was employed.
A bookish lad known affectionately as Schmieren, or “Smudge,” to his contemporaries, Remarque was the third child of a family of four. His older sister Erna was followed by Theodor Arthur in 1896, who died at the age of five. In 1903, Elfriede, his ill-fated baby sister, completed the family. The Remark children, brought up in a strict Catholic household, attended the local Präparande, a parochial school where Erich often got into scrapes with school authorities, particularly Professor Konschorek, whom he later skewered in the seriocomic character Kantorek. To pay for school books, fish for his aquarium, and a few boyhood niceties, Remarque, a talented pianist and organist, gave piano lessons to young girls who often seemed more drawn to his Aryan good looks than to his pedagogy. When time allowed, he collected butterflies, stones, and stamps, joined a gymnastics club, fished for sticklebacks in the Poggenbach River, performed magic tricks, and composed poems and essays.
Except for school teaching, few professional choices lay ahead for men of Remarque’s social class. Accepting necessity, he entered elementary education courses at the Lehrerseminar in 1913. In 1915, he and several other idealists formed a literary brotherhood around mentor Fritz Hörstemeier. The following year, his essay about young cadets, “From the Time of Youth,” a poem titled “I and You,” and a short story, “The Lady with the Golden Eyes,” were printed in the Osnabruck newspaper.
The Great War
On November 26, 1916, shortly after winning thirty marks in an essay contest, Remarque was drafted as a musketeer, or infantryman, and completed basic training at Osnabrück’s Westerberg Camp. He then was transferred to Celle, from which he visited his mother, hospitalized for cancer, which ended her life on September 9, 1917.
Earlier that June, as a “sapper,” or lineman in an engineering unit, Remarque had begun building bunkers, pillboxes, and dugouts behind the Arras Front, east of the Houthulst Forest and south of Handzaeme, frequently working at night to avoid sniper fire.
On July 15, 1917, Remarque’s company advanced to Flanders for some of the most savage fighting of World War I. Trench warfare dispelled his youthful idealism, particularly after he carried his buddy Troske out of enemy fire and Troske died like the fictional character Kat. He was treated for minor shrapnel injuries and later died of a head wound from a shrapnel splinter while he was being carried to a medic.
During five months of heavy rain, the Allied and German armies hammered away at each other, gaining little ground; in four months, the two armies chalked up 770,000 casualties, many of them noncombatants. Spattered with grenade splinters in his neck, left knee, and right wrist, Remarque exited the fray on July 31, evacuated by troop train from the aid station in Thourout to St. Vincenz Hospital, Duisburg, outside Essen. A competent, respected soldier, Remarque was treated well and worked briefly as an orderly room clerk. On his off hours, he dated an officer’s daughter, began writing his first novel, and set the poems of Ludwig Bäte to music. Rejoining the 78th Infantry in October, he was declared fit for duty only four days before the armistice.
