Erich maria remarque biography breve coffee
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Welcome
“I pictured life so different.”
“We all have.”
Robert Lohkamp is one of those whom Gertrude Stein called the ‘lost generation’. Embittered by his years in the trenches, Bob has lost faith in everything: God, the political leadership, high-sounding concepts like patriotism and nationalism. All he is sure of is the friendship of those comrades who were with him in the war and had endured what he himself did. He is especially close to two friends: the silent Otto Koster and the loquacious Gottfried Lenz.
The novel opens on his thirtieth birthday in the year 1928 with Bob feeling wasted. He sees the years stretching ahead of him in the same monotony: working together in a car workshop along with Otto and Lenz; playing the piano at the International where he mingles with the prostitutes, getting drunk and spending the nights fitfully:
But it was better not to think too much about all that—when alone, at any rate; and especially at night. For every now and then things had a way of rising up suddenly out of the past and staring at one with dead eyes. It was against such times that one kept a bottle of schnapps.
Otto and Lenz who realise the melancholic mood their friend has fallen into decide to take him out for celebration.
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In 1916 aged 18, Erich Maria Remarque was conscripted into the Imperial German Army. The next summer he was transferred to a regiment posted on the Western Front – one of the main theatres of World War One.
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 book was an immediate success. 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.
But 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?
Erich Paul Remark was born on 22 June 1898 to a working-class Roman Catholic family in Osnabrück, Germany. Known affectionately as Schmieren or ‘Smudge’, the young Remarque enjoyed reading and pursued teaching. Yet in November 1916, he was dragged from study at the University of Munster and conscripted into the German Army.
Posted to an engineering regiment in Flanders on the Western Front, Remarque’s regiment suffered some of the most intense trench fighting of