As a sapper, Remarque experienced this firsthand building bunkers, pillboxes and dugouts behind the Arras Front.Īfter a month on the front lines Remarque was wounded by flying shrapnel in his left leg, right arm and neck. For 5 months of heavy rain, the Allies and Germans bombarded each other mercilessly. Posted to an engineering regiment in Flanders on the Western Front, Remarque’s regiment suffered some of the most intense trench fighting of the war. Yet in November 1916, he was dragged from study at the University of Munster and conscripted into the German Army. Known affectionately as Schmieren or ‘Smudge’, the young Remarque enjoyed reading and pursued teaching. Striking a chord with surviving soldiers across the world, All Quiet On the Western Front was adapted for the screen just two years after its publication, then again in 1979 and in 2022.īut who was the man behind one of the early 20th century’s best known and most remarkable pieces of war literature? Did Remarque fight in World War One?Įrich Paul Remark was born on 22 June 1898 to a working-class Roman Catholic family in Osnabrück, Germany. It was Remarque’s experience of brutal modern warfare, and the struggle to come to terms with it after returning to civilian life, that inspired his landmark novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928). The next summer he was transferred to a regiment posted on the Western Front – one of the main theatres of World War One. In 1916 aged 18, Erich Maria Remarque was conscripted into the Imperial German Army.
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