Between 1928 and 1930 Germany and Great Britain especially, and France and America to a lesser extent, experienced a sudden and remarkable 'boom' in war books, plays, and films. For a decade after the end of the war, publishers, theatre directors, and film makers had treated war material gingerly, viewing it as a poor commercial proposition, on the assumption that the public wished, contrary to annual remembrance day exhortations, to forget the war…. What some felt to have been a ...

"Only the unhappy man appreciates happiness. The happy man … displays it merely." These are words spoken in "Three Comrades," the novel by Erich Maria Remarque which would seem farthest from his latest because it is set in peace and relates young men's revels. Yet they are words that would make an accurate epigraph to "A Time to Love and a Time to Die," as well as to every other major work Remarque has written. As he returns, for the first time since &...

The way [Andrew] Wyeth paints: no thunder in his picture, just a modulation of blues to make you see the sky's a bit strange and, like a letter shoved under the door, the dog's white muzzle lifted to the far-off sound. Truth got at sideways to ease the pain in it. Quick storms of terror flash past in [Shadows in Paradise] and suddenly are gone, like eerie tableaux set into the wall of the subway…. I think that Remarque, in this last of his novels …, was trying—with a noble...

There is a victory beyond defeat which the victorious know nothing of. A bourne, a shore of refuge beyond the lost battles, the bronze names and the lead tombs, guarded and indicated not by the triumphant and man-limbed goddess with palm and sword, but by some musing and motionless handmaiden of despair itself…. It is the defeat which, serving him against his belief and his desire, turns him back upon that alone which can sustain him: his fellows, his racial homogeneity; himself; the earth, the impla...

The world has gained a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. Of that there can be no longer any question. On the two themes which he has thus far chosen, Remarque has surpassed all his contemporaries. "All Quiet on the Western Front" justly won its place as the best picture of the common soldier in the war to be done in any language; now, in "The Road Back," Remarque has given the most powerful handling it has had to the story of that soldier in the post-war years. "The Ro...

Remarque's subject [in "Flotsam"] is profoundly important and alive with tragedy: the fate of the exiles, the refugees, the many thousands who have been made homeless in recent years because of race or political sentiments. It is from Hitler's Germany that most of these unfortunates have been uprooted, and it is with Hitler's victims that "Flotsam" is chiefly concerned…. Remarque has fully depicted or briefly illuminated almost every aspect of the exil...

Surely everyone, again and again, has asked himself with misgiving and horror what is this conspiracy of silence maintained Jerry Bauerby the men who returned from the War? For it is true that, in spite of the many professional books written, no convincing revelation has been made of the heroism, the treachery, the foul intimacies, the brutality and coarseness, the gradual moral, social, and emotional decay, which made up, with a myriad other happier factors...

Except for a few scenes set in Hollywood, Robert Ross, the principal character in ["Shadows in Paradise"], explores and uses the sights, sounds and people of Manhattan, as Remarque himself knew them in the closing years of the Second World War. For readers of our own time, all-too-conscious of what has become of Gotham or, if you will, Mayor Lindsay's inadvertently ironic "Fun City," Remarque's title smacks of poignancy, if not sarcasm….

"Spark of Life" is a grim, agonizing but terribly wonderful story of what happened to the political and religious nonconformists in Hitler's Germany. It concerns itself with the horrible reality of a concentration camp as it was in 1945, but the six years that have intervened are not strong enough to dilute the importance of his theme. Remarque is crying angrily, "Watch out or this may again come to pass. Be on guard against those who would curb your liberties, for this is the in...

On its lacquered surface, Shadows in Paradise shows all the familiar Remarque gloss. There is the typically commercial title, second only to Heaven Has No Favorites. There is the often wordy dialogue—pretentiously sophisticated, as if spoken by an impostor duke. There is the slightly too chic setting: in this case, places like El Morocco, the fashion-and-art salons of New York and the swimming pools of Hollywood in 1944. A young German wearing the new name of Robert Ross has just arrived in America, ...