The German Genius

rationalizations of the world giving rise to the Third Reich.
    Feuchtwanger’s assets were seized by the Nazis, but he fled to France where, in 1940, he was held in a concentration camp. This time he escaped dressed as a woman and went first to Spain, then to the United States (“God’s own country”), where he joined the growing band of talented exiles who would become known as “Hitler’s Gift.” 18
     
     
    In Chapter 29, we saw that the experiences of men in modern technological warfare in the Great War were so extreme as to bring about a whole new set of psychological problems among the admittedly brave men in the trenches. Do these subconscious anxieties account for the delay in the appearance of so many war-related novels, a delay that occurred on both sides? Ford Maddox Ford’s No More Parades was published in 1925, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises , about an injured war veteran, appeared in 1926, while Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer , was not released until 1930. Between these last two, in 1928, there was the most successful of them all, at any rate commercially— Im Westen Nichts Neues ( All Quiet on the Western Front ), by Erich Maria Remarque.
    Christine Barker and R. W. Last argue that All Quiet is one of the most important books of the twentieth century, but neither one of the greatest, nor yet the best work of Remarque himself. Born in 1898 in Osnabrück, Remarque was dogged by controversy, in particular concerning what he actually did in World War I and whether he won the medals he said he did. He was never stationed at the Front, but it appears he did perform heroically, helping carry wounded soldiers out of danger.
    After the war he began writing short stories and sketches, moved to Berlin in 1925, and worked as a journalist on Sport im Bild ( Sport in Pictures ). 19 All Quiet was written two years later, serialized in the Vossische Zeitung at the end of 1928 (eleven other papers turned it down) and appeared between hard covers in January 1929, where its overnight success altered Remarque’s life forever. 20
    The novel tells the story of a class of young men who are sent to the war, are much depleted, and carry on the fight with older, more experienced men. There are many passages when the men/boys contemplate life back home, and the world of love which—for most of them—hasn’t really opened up yet. The claustrophobia of war gradually closes in on the men as, out of the original eight school friends, only one remains. Remarque explores the different ways that the men/boys are alienated, as they try to grasp whether they are cowards or heroes, individuals or comrades-in-arms, proud combatants, or ashamed and disappointed. They come to realize how being in such a terrible war has cut them off from people who will never have this experience. Although the book has it share of clichés, some of the images have become famous, as that of the dying cigarette hissing on the lips of its already-dead owner. 21
    All Quiet was bleak, very bleak, but it stimulated a boom in war novels and provoked enormous controversy, for its writing style, its “defeatism,” and its unpatriotic depiction of war. About a year after publication, by which time the book had sold close to a million copies and been translated (or was in the course of translation) into several languages, the Nazis turned on Remarque, making the book into a political issue because he had challenged the myth of individual heroism in armed conflict. The campaign was spearheaded by Goebbels himself and began when Hitler Youth disrupted the screening of the American film of the book in 1930. 22
    Remarque left Germany and eventually reached America. His bank account was seized, but he had wisely already moved most of his money, together with his collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings—Cézanne, van Gogh, Degas, Renoir. All Quiet was burned in the notorious book-burning in Berlin in May 1933, but in some ways Remarque had the last laugh. In America he went to Hollywood, where he formed firm friendships with Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. He even acquired the title “King of Hollywood” because of the number of films made from his books, including The Road Back , Three Comrades , A Time to Love and a Time to Die , Heaven Has No Favorites, and Shadows in Paradise . For Remarque, in these books nothing endures—each