Im Westen Nichts Neues

IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES TWENTIETH CENTURY GERMAN TEXTS ANSICHTEN EINES CLOWNS by Heinrich Böll Edited by William Hanson UND SAGTE KEIN EINZIGES WORT by Heinrich Böll Edited by William Hanson DER GUTE MENSCH VON SEZUAN by Bertolt Brecht Edited by Bruce Thompson DER KAUKASISCHE KREIDEKREIS by Bertolt Brecht Edited by Bruce Thompson DER BESUCH DER ALTEN DAME by Friedrich Dürrenmatt Edited by Paul Ackermann ANDORRA by Max Frisch Edited by Peter Hutchinson BIEDERMANN UND DIE BRANDSTIFTER by Max Frisch Edited by Peter Hutchinson DER JÜNGSTE TAG by Odön von Horváth Edited by Ian Huish DIE VERWANDLUNG by Franz Kafka Edited by Peter Hutchinson and Michael Minden IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES by E.M.Remarque Edited by Brian O.Murdoch GANZ UNTEN by Günter Wallraff Edited by Arthur Nockels DER GETEILTE HIMMEL by Christa Wolf Edited by Agnes Cardinal DER HAUPTMANN VON KÖPENICK by Carl Zuckmayer Edited by H.F.Garten SCHACHNOVELLE by Stefan Zweig Edited by Brian O.Murdoch TWENTIETH CENTURY TEXTS Erich Maria Remarque IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES Edited by Brian Murdoch Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of German University of Stirling London First published in this edition in 1984 by Methuen Educational Ltd This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Text © 1959 Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch Koln Introduction and notes © 1984 Brian Murdoch All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Remarque, Erich Maria Im Westen nichts Neues.— (Methuen’s twentieth century texts) I. Title II. Murdoch, Brian 833′.912 PT2635.E68 ISBN 0-203-97773-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-02791-8 (Print Edition) CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT vii INTRODUCTION 1 A German best-seller 1 Erich Maria Remarque 2 The literary furore 4 The First World War and the trenches 6 Literature and the war 8 Im Westen nichts Neues 11 Composition and structure 11 Themes 15 Characters 19 Perspectives and style 21 Remarque’s picture of the war 22 The novel and its sequel 24 NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 26 BIBLIOGRAPHY 28 ILLUSTRATIONS 33 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES 36 vi NOTES TO THE TEXT 219 SELECT VOCABULARY 239 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The editor and publishers are grateful to Verlag Kiepenheuer and Witsch for permission to reproduce the text of 1959 in this edition. INTRODUCTION A GERMAN BEST-SELLER Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues has a distinction that may be claimed by few other major works of German literature: that of being an international best-seller. Having first appeared in book form early in 1929, it sold half a million copies within six months, and was translated almost immediately into a number of other languages. Banned by the Nazis in Germany between 1933 and 1945, its reputation internationally has maintained itself. The figure of ten million copies in forty-five different languages is quoted on the cover of the current German paperback, an edition which had itself sold over half a million copies by 1980, some fifty years after the original publication and still longer after the events it describes. The current English-language paperback claims for the work simply ‘the largest sale of any war novel’. That the English title—All Quiet on the Western Front—has become part of the currency of general speech is another rare distinction. The novel has been filmed twice (both times in the USA), and although a recent version in 1979 was not well received, the version distributed in 1930, not long after the beginning of the sound era, is a classic which is still often shown. The fact that Im Westen nichts Neues is a best-seller has, however, led to problems. Modern best-sellers are sometimes deliberately sensationalist, or are of inferior literary quality, and this has been assumed from time to time of Im Westen nichts Neues, an uncritical prejudice voiced without analysis of the text. A point that is often 2 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES missed, too, is that the novel has an aim: to make clear the evil of war. However worthy the aim of any literary work may be, it becomes irrelevant if the work is not read, but it is merely literary snobbery to equate writing that is accessible to the widest range of people with writing that is somehow of inferior quality. Some early critics, finally, struck by the vividness of the presentation of the war, felt indignation upon discovering that the work was not autobiographical, and condemned Remarque, in effect, for not having fallen on the Western Front in 1918.1 Erich Maria Remarque Remarque was born Erich Paul Remark on 22 June 1898 in Osnabrück. He adopted the middle name in honour of his mother (who died in 1917), and changed the spelling of his surname to an older family form (that he was really called Kramer is a myth), partly to dissociate himself from a novel called Die Traumbude, which he published in 1920, but came later to reject. He studied at Catholic schools and at a teacher-training college until he was conscripted, with the rest of his class, in November 1916. After basic training in Osnabrück he was sent to Flanders in 1917 and reached the front on June 26. Just over a month later he was wounded, however, and taken to a hospital in Duisburg, where he spent, effectively, the rest of the war in various capacities. After the war he worked at various jobs, including teaching and writing advertising copy, and in 1925 he married an actress and dancer, Jutta Ilse Zambona. 1927 saw the writing of Im Westen nichts Neues, and in 1928 the work was accepted for publication by the firm of Ullstein in Berlin. It was brought out first as a serial in Ullstein’s magazine, the Vossische Zeitung, at the end of 1928, and then in book form under Ullstein’s Propyläen imprint in January 1929. The sequel, Der Weg zurück (The Road Back) followed in 1931, but without the huge success of the earlier novel. The storm which Im Westen nichts Neues had provoked in literary circles continued to rage, however, until Remarque’s work was banned by the Nazis when they came to power in Germany in 1933. Early in the 1930s, Remarque took up residence in Switzerland, and although at this time his marriage INTRODUCTION 3 ended in divorce, the couple remarried in order that Remarque’s wife could keep a residence permit for Switzerland. The novel Drei Kameraden (Three Comrades) was published in 1937, the German version in Holland, but in 1938 the Nazi regime in Germany (who were to execute Remarque’s sister Elfriede in 1943) deprived him of his citizenship, and a year later he left for America. Remarque lived in Hollywood, becoming much involved with the world of films and its glamour. Finally divorced in 1951, he married the film actress Paulette Goddard in 1958. He had become an American citizen in 1947, and he alternated between America and Switzerland (and also Italy) until his death on 25 September 1970.2 His later novels, many of which were filmed, sometimes appeared in English first. Liebe deinen Nächsten appeared as Flotsam in 1941, in German only in 1953. Arc de Triomphe was published in Switzerland in 1946, but had come out as Arch of Triumph in the previous year. After the Second World War Remarque produced first a striking novel showing the struggle for life in a concentration camp, Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life, 1952), and then a work set on the Eastern Front in the Second World War, Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (A Time to Love and a Time to Die, 1954). Remarque himself appears in the 1957 film of this work. His final novels were Der schwarze Obelisk, 1956 (The Black Obelisk, 1957), Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge (Heaven has no Favourites, both 1961), Die Nacht von Lissabon, 1963 (The Night in Lisbon, 1964), and Schatten im Paradies, posthumously published in 1971, the translation, Shadows in Paradise appearing in 1972. Remarque also wrote one stage play, and screenplays based on shorter writings, but his novels remain his major achievement. They are characterized by a frequently astonishingly realistic portrayal of the darkest aspects of our century: of war, of concentration camps, of refugees. There is in them, it is true, a repeated ray of hope, a Funke Leben; but there is also a deep pessimism, manifest for example in the death of Paul Bäumer, or of the hero in Der Funke Leben. The spark of life is all too easily extinguished. Remarque drew frequently on his own experiences in his novels. Im Westen nichts Neues, for example, contains names (and sometimes character-traits) taken from people Remarque had 4 IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES known. Paul Bäumer’s home town, too, is identifiably Osnabrück, even if it is not named. For this and for the other novels, however, it must be remembered that Remarque is merely using his experiences as background. His vivid writing (especially with a first-person narrator), makes autobiographical searching a temptation, but Bäumer is not Remarque, and the home town is only Osnabrück in so far as it gains thereby a firmer plausibility. It is not the ‘real’ Osnabrück.

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