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2 The life and work of E. M. Remarque and E. M. Hemingway 2.1 The life and work of E. M. Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück in 1898, the son of a bookbinder. I went through the war as an ordinary soldier. He was an elementary school teacher, a sales clerk, a traveling salesman, a reporter, and tried to write tabloid novels. In 1928, he published his first novel about the First World War, On the Western Front without Changes. In this book, with great completeness and artistic insight, the direct perception of the terrible everyday life of the war, such as the people of the "lost generation"experienced them, was embodied. It brought Remarque worldwide fame. The next novel, "The Return" (1931), was devoted to the first months after the war. The hopeless despair, the hopeless longing of people who did not know, did not see a way to escape from the inhumane, senselessly cruel reality, was even more pronounced in him; at the same time, Remarque's aversion to all politics, including revolutionary ones, was manifested in him.
After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Remarque had to leave his homeland. For some time he lived in Switzerland, then in France, then moved to the United States, where he remained. Nazi propagandists furiously hounded him, accusing him primarily of "undermining the military spirit", of discrediting the German soldiers.
Already in exile, the novel "Three Comrades" (1938) was published. In 1941, the novels "Love your Neighbor" and "Flottsam" about the life of anti-Fascist emigrants were published. The same theme is covered in the novel Arc de Triomphe (1946). In the books A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1954) – about the Second World War and The Black Obelisk (1956) – about the years of inflation – the writer's purposeful, irreconcilable hatred of fascism and militarism is more and more clearly felt.
Erich Maria Remarque left the gymnasium bench as a volunteer for the front, was wounded five times. After the war, he worked as a teacher, stonemason, accountant, salesman, and reporter. In 1932, after failing health, Remarque left for Italian Switzerland, where he learned about the burning of books by the Nazis and the deprivation of his German citizenship. In 1939, the writer moved to the United States, in 1942 he took American citizenship, after World War II, Remarque settled in Porto Ronco (Switzerland).
The appearance of the novel "On the Western Front without Change" puts Remarque among the writers who presented the image of the war as a loss of illusions and the death of an entire generation (Hemingway, Aldington, Fitzgerald). This work is largely autobiographical, the main character Paul Boimer, succumbing to propaganda, goes to the front with his friends Muller, Kropp, Leer, Kemmerich. A naive young man goes through the hardest road of losing friends, in the dirty trenches he loses his enthusiastic desire to protect the "happiness of the people".
Arriving on vacation, Paul Boimer is confronted in a peaceful town with the fact that the Germans do not understand war, they do not suffer from lice, cold, constant fear, but aggressively demand a bravura victory from the hero. Paul cannot enter into a peaceful life, because his bitter experience, a different vision of reality does not coincide with the perception of the war in the rear. For the characters of Remarque, friendship, "trench solidarity", which the writer idealizes, becomes existentially important. The author shows the senselessness and brutality of war through the eyes of an ordinary person, focusing on changing the psychology of personality in extreme conditions.
The pathos of military heroism is destroyed in the novel of a German prose writer, a person ceases to be a person, he becomes a faceless cog of a militaristic machine. Remarque, emphasizing the dehumanization of the world, resorts in this work to an interesting narrative device - the creation of a "new thinginess", when objects replace the individual, because their age is longer than a human life in war.
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