Erich Maria Remarque

(1898 - 1970)

Erich Maria Remarque worked as a race-car driver and sportswriter while writing All Quiet on the Western Front, the novel inspired by his World War I service in the German army. The book records the daily horrors of war with deliberate understatement, calling into question blind nationalism and the romanticization of war. Remarque left Germany in 1932 and spent the rest of his life in the United States and Switzerland; the Nazis banned all of Remarque’s books in 1933. In 2016 Donald Trump was asked in an interview to name his favorite book, excluding his own and the Bible. His answer: All Quiet on the Western Front.