“A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.”

German novelist

Erich Maria Remarque was a German novelist whose work became closely associated with the experience of World War I. He is best known for All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1928, a novel drawn from his service in the Imperial German Army. All Quiet on the Western Front became an international bestseller and helped shape a new kind of war writing by veterans. Its anti-war outlook drew Nazi hostility, and Joseph Goebbels denounced Remarque as unpatriotic. He later lived in Switzerland as a refugee and moved on to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen.