Im Westen Nichts Neues, Dem Welterfolg, Der Quasi Aus Dem Nichts Kam
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Introduction This study sets out to analyse and present the formal qualities of the novels of Erich Maria Remarque. The aim is to show that these works cannot justifiably be classified as lowbrow literature or Trivialliteratur, as has often been done. Particular attention will be paid to the narrative perspective, although other aspects of the form – structural and textural – will likewise be incorporated in the examination. The analysis will form the basis for the consideration as to whether Remarque’s narrative techniques remain relatively unvarying throughout the novels – does the author adhere to an Erfolgsrezept? – or whether they are characterized by development. For this purpose the novels will be presented in chronological order, with each thesis-chapter covering one or two of Remarque’s books. The decision as to which novels should be treated together rests on similarity in content and form to the extent this is possible whilst still preserving the original sequence of the novels. The thoughts behind the division points will be elaborated upon in the individual chapters. Due to his unprecedented commercial success with Im Westen nichts Neues,1 Remarque has remained almost entirely associated with this particular work. However, over five decades, he authored a total of fourteen novels, several essays, plays and more than three hundred and fifty short stories and poems. Following his success with Im Westen, however, Remarque dedicated himself almost exclusively to the novel form. Thomas F. Schneider perceives Remarque’s oeuvre as consisting of two parts. Im Westen constitutes the dividing point. The part written prior to Remarque’s breakthrough with Im Westen in 1929 and which has remained largely unknown to the 1 wider readership, Schneider refers to as the Frühwerk. The other half, that is, from Im Westen and onwards, Schneider calls the Hauptwerk, the Spätwerk or das eigentliche Werk.2 In compliance with Schneider’s definitions, this study will apply the terms Frühwerk and Spätwerk. It should be noted, however, that for the sake of clarification and due to the lack of a more suitable expression, the word Hauptwerk will be used as signifying solely the eleven novels from Im Westen and onwards which earned Remarque his fame and on the basis of which his authorial skills have largely been judged. Remarque was born in the German town of Osnabrück 22 June 1898 and was named Erich Paul Remark. As a child, he attended first the Domschule and later the Johannisschule, both situated in Osnabrück. Remarque’s lower middle-class background eliminated the possibility of obtaining private education, but his completion of the three year Catholic Präparande in 1915 allowed him to enter the Catholic teaching training seminary in Osnabrück. However, a year into the course, in 1916, Remarque was conscripted for the army. The preliminary military training took place at the Caprivi barracks in Westerberg near Osnabrück, and later Remarque attended Celle training camp on the Lüneburg Heath. In mid-June 1917, Remarque was sent to Flanders on the Western Front where he was assigned to sapper duty. Approximately six weeks after his arrival at the front, on 31 July 1917, Remarque was wounded. After three weeks in an army hospital in Thorhut, he was transferred to St. Vinzenz Hospital in Duisburg where he remained until the end of October 1918. He did not return to the front, but spent the last days of the war in a reserve regiment in Osnabrück. A letter composed by the hospitalized Remarque in the autumn 1917 and addressed to his friend on the front, Georg Middendorf, suggests that the former was working on a war novel. ‘Schreib sich doch mal vom Leben, wie sich ist jetzt. Hat sich großes 2 Interesse, weil sich schreibt Roman.’3 Remarque additionally gathered information about the front experience by questioning fellow patients in the hospital. However, the war novel did not materialize until a decade later in the form of Im Westen. In the hospital episode of this work, an array of possible war injuries is described. The narrator concludes that ‘[e]rst das Lazarett zeigt, was der Krieg ist’ (Im Westen, p. 177). The statement suggests that the injuries and individual war accounts Remarque came across at St. Vinzenz contributed to his turn to pacifism. There are, for instance, no moral doubts to detect about the paramilitary Jugendwehr in the short prose text, Von den Freuden und Mühen der Jugendwehr, which Remarque produced only months before being conscripted in 1916.4 Rather, the short account portrays the organization’s militaristic activities with a tone of excitement and as an adventurous game. The tone contrasts sharply with that of Im Westen and the novels thereafter, which suggests that Remarque’s anti-war viewpoint developed as a result of his participation in the Great War and particularly his witnessing of individual victims. The focus of individual suffering against a background of major political occurrences indeed came to characterize most of Remarque’s novels. The first of the three novels contained in the Frühwerk, Die Traumbude (1920),5 was intended as a literary celebration of one of Osnabrück’s artists, Fritz Hörstemeier, around whom a small circle of local youths with an interest in art and a fascination for Hörstemeier’s personality had formed. Remarque was part of this crowd and his profound sense of loss when Hörstemeier died prematurely in March 1918 can be read from his personal diaries of that year.6 Die Traumbude incorporates a number of Hörstemeier’s poems which, combined with the overly precious expressions of Remarque’s narrative, give the novel an atmosphere of decadence. Die Traumbude has therefore, justifiably, been rejected as Remarque’s ‘Jugendsünde’,7 and been said to 3 ‘[try] the patience of even the most willing reader’.8 Only few critics have subsequently paid this work any attention.9 After the war Remarque completed his teaching training and, in the period from August 1919 to November 1920, was employed as a substitute teacher in three different schools. He thereafter left the teaching profession and, for a short period of time, had miscellaneous jobs in Osnabrück. These included, for instance, employment as a sales assistant in a stone masonry, and playing the organ in a psychiatric institution; both experiences are echoed in the later novel, Der schwarze Obelisk. More importantly, during this period, Remarque also began to write as a means of making a living. Employed by the Osnabrücker Tageblatt and the Osnabrücker Landeszeitung, he functioned as a theatre and concert critic, but he was also successful in getting his own work – poems and short pieces of prose – published in a number of newspapers and magazines. In 1922, Remarque moved to Hanover to work as a copywriter and editor at the Echo Continental, the magazine of the rubber manufacturer and tyre company Continental. In his spare time, Remarque worked on his second novel, Gam, which would remain unpublished until 1998. A short story by Remarque, Steppengewitter, which is lifted more or less directly from Gam, did, however, appear in the Munich magazine Jugend in July 1924.10 Although Remarque never completed Gam, the novel fragment reflects – in parts – the succinct, journalistic style which later came to characterize the Hauptwerk. Whilst employed in Hanover, Remarque’s continued composing of short, sharp essays and short stories for the Echo Continental clearly contributed to the author’s immense but positive stylistic leap from Die Traumbude to Gam. As a matter of fact, many elements of Gam reappear later in Remarque’s oeuvre.11 The names of Clerfayt and Ravic constitute two such examples,12 but also the overall theme of Gam’s 4 self-exploration and search for life is found later in the Hauptwerk. There is, for instance, a striking similarity between Gam and the protagonist, Lillian, in Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge. In December 1924, Remarque moved to Berlin to fill the post as editor for the Hugenberg publication, Sport im Bild: Das Blatt für die gute Gesellschaft. Whilst living in the capital, Remarque wrote his next novel, Station am Horizont.13 The work was serialized in Sport im Bild during the winter 1927/ 28, but despite being relatively successful, Station am Horizont was not published in book form until 1998. As in the earlier short story, Das Rennen Vanderveldes,14 which Remarque had produced in 1924, the plot of Station am Horizont revolves around car-racing.15 Remarque resumes this theme several times during the Hauptwerk. It forms the basis for the film treatment The Other Love which was turned into a film and released under the same title in 1947,16 and it is also at the centre of the novel Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge from 1961. The car theme is only one of many recurring elements which are found throughout Remarque’s oeuvre and which, at times, connect the seemingly most unrelated works.17 Remarque was prolific as a writer throughout the 1920s, and many of his essays, poems and short stories were published in various newspapers and magazines throughout Germany. Station am Horizont had appeared in Sport im Bild, which could boast of having featured writers such as Robert Walser, Axel Eggebrecht, Carl Zuckmayer, Robert Musil and even Bertolt Brecht. Despite the opposite claim from Ullstein Publishing House, Remarque had therefore become part of the Weimar ‘Crème der Literaturszene’ even prior to the origin of Im Westen.18 In its advertising campaign for Im Westen, Ullstein introduced Remarque as a debut author, whose psychological struggle to come to terms with his experiences on the Western Front had resulted in the writing of a war novel.19 Neither the jet-set life style 5 of the characters in Station am Horizont, nor the long-winded philosophizing in Die Traumbude, was compatible with this picture of Remarque as a war-traumatized man.