Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque wrote "All Quiet on the Western Front" in 1929 — and showed war through the eyes of a soldier rather than a general. The Germans burned his books in 1933. The Nazis stripped him of his citizenship.

He was born in Osnabrück in 1898. Called up in 1916, he fought on the Western Front and was wounded. When he came home, for a long time he could not speak of what he had seen.

"All Quiet on the Western Front": Paul Bäumer and his comrades go off as volunteers — and die one by one. Not heroically: by accident, senselessly. Paul dies on a quiet day, when the army communiqués read "all quiet on the Western Front."

"Three Comrades," "Arch of Triumph," "The Night in Lisbon" — émigrés and war. He died in Locarno in 1970.