“Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting”

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.