A new life and citizenship awaited Remarque in America. Shortly before Hitler precipitated war by invading Poland, Remarque, too proud to accept proffered German citizenship, escaped the Gestapo by traveling the back roads through France, sailed on a Panamanian passport aboard the Queen Mary , and entered New York as a literary star. It featured the sufferings of exiles fleeing Hitler's Germany. Remarque collected material for the work from numerous poignant stories that were standard fare among his many expatriate friends.
The same year it appeared with a new name as United Artists' So Ends Our Night , but it was unsuccessful as a movie and received only one Academy Award nomination, for Louis Gruenberg's music. Remarque's time in Los Angeles was followed by a celebrated social life on the east coast. While working for various movie studios, Remarque lived in a colony of German expatriates in west Los Angeles until , when he moved to New York's Ambassador Hotel and eventually to an apartment on East 57th Street, which he considered his permanent home.
Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. He felt at home with the style and companionship of the "glittering people. The Nazis' perverted insult to her grisly demise was a bill for ninety marks sent by the executioner to Remarque, the brother whose pacifism had precipitated their unstinting spite. The next few years would bring more books and films but also great sadness.
When the war ended, Remarque published Arch of Triumph , a major novel that depicted the struggles of pre-World War II exiles and was set in Remarque's beloved Paris. The novel highlighted the stoic, existential strength of Ravic, one of his most memorable protagonists. Later, in , he would revisit his sister Elfriede's death in dedicating his next novel to her, a victim of Nazi vengeance. Spark of Life , describing concentration camps, was the first of Remarque's works to remain unfilmed.
In the author's description, he wrote ". The latter was a movie about a melodramatic failed romance starring David Niven and Barbara Stanwyck. However, like All Quiet , it would later be revived for television. Life became less oppressive for Remarque in his last two decades. This novel achieved popular success as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
Its focus, the effect of Gestapo tactics on civilians, bares the scars inflicted by Germans who chose complicity with the Nazis as a means of coping. The abridged German version of this novel incurred controversy because the editors excised the full horrors of Remarque's incisive view of the Nazi perversion of the national soul. An effective vehicle, it starred Oskar Werner and earned appreciative comment at the Edinburgh Film Festival. A second Remarque book-to-film, The Black Obelisk , quickly followed in , and its setting returned to hometown scenes following World War I.
It contains more ribaldry and humor than Remarque generally incorporated in his writing. That same year, The Last Station , Remarque's only play, was performed under the title Berlin at Berlin's Renaissance Theatre during a cultural festival.
A reenactment of the Russian takeover of Berlin, the play pitted two conquering armies against the greater good of democracy and free speech, one of Remarque's more heartfelt issues. It would be revived in America two decades later. An American citizen since , Remarque sought an amicable divorce from Jeanne in Juarez, Mexico, in On February 25, , he married actress Paulette Goddard.
A trim, vibrant, virile man, Remarque enjoyed peace and contentment in his final marriage, which appeared to be a match of true love. A reader of Malraux, Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Poe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Rilke, London, Wilder, and Zen philosophy, he also devoted himself to book discussions, long walks, and collecting Iranian rugs and Chinese bronze figurines, which his wife later sold to relieve the burden of guarding his costly treasures. During the s, Remarque expanded the short story "Beyond" into a novel, which he titled Heaven Has No Favorites It described a star-crossed love story between a young sanitarium patient and a race car driver.
The following year, he wrote Night in Lisbon , which centered around the theme of stateless emigrants and captured the rootlessness of many of his compatriots. Remarque and his work remained close to the film industry during the s. Filmed in , it brought together a youthful John Gavin and Swiss starlet Lilo Pulver, plus Keenan Wynn, Don Defore, Jock Mahoney, and Remarque, who wrote part of the dialogue and played Professor Pohlmann, earning worthy reviews for his acting skills.
The movie, although frequently compared to All Quiet and to Hemingway's successful The Sun Also Rises , failed to meet critical expectations. Few days remained for Remarque. Goddard remained at his side through rehabilitative respites from arthritis, stroke, and congestive heart failure, until his death from an aortic aneurysm in St.
Agnese Hospital, Locarno, Switzerland, on September 25, She respected his wishes to be buried privately near Lake Maggiore, in the land that had become his home when Germany rejected him, and never disclosed to the public his private papers and journals.
However, two works were published posthumously and Remarque's novels continued to be filmed or revived in various forms. In , Shadows in Paradise replayed his familiar theme of postwar trauma for exiled Europeans. It riveted audiences in New York and Washington, D. Although directed and produced by Sydney Pollack and starring Al Pacino as the Grand Prix racer opposite Marthe Keller as his dying love interest, the film was a flawed effort. Several years later, a second version of Arch of Triumph was reshot for television in France in , following an abortive attempt in New York: Pantheon, Toggle navigation.
User Contributions: 1. I Want to know the support of the novel "three komandors"and if someone had read it please teel me the story because I dont have the books. Anatoly Bendersky. Good article, except the sentence above. France as a defeater of Germany was a joke. Just count fallen soldiers among the Allies.
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Send comment. Regional Section s. Thematic Section s. Classification Group. Images Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 December Erich Maria Remarque Related Articles. External Links. All Partners. Beacon Index. RSS Feed.
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