“He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?”

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.