Erich Maria Remarque is one of the best known and most widely read authors of German literature in the twentieth century. Remarque's biography is essentially marked and his writing fundamentally influenced by German history of the twentieth century: Childhood and youth in imperial Osnabrück, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and most of all his exile in Switzerland and the United States. With the novel All Quiet On the Western Front, first published in 1929, Remarque attained world-wide recognition continuing today. Examples of his other novels also internationally published are: The Road Back (1931), Three Comrades (1936, 38), Arch of Triumph (1945), The Black Obelisk (1956), and Night in Lisbon (1962). Remarque's novels have been translated in more than fifty languages; globally the total edition comes up to several million copies. The complete works of Remarque are both highly interrelated with his Osnabrück background and speaking thematically of a critical examination of German history, whereby the preservation of human dignity and humanity in times of oppression, terror and war always was at the forefront of his literary creation.
