Erich Maria Remarque, most known for writing the best-selling novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All quiet on the western front) was born 125 years ago in June 1898. His most famous work has come to our attention again recently because of the new award-winning film version released last year. When the book first came out in 1929 you might imagine that people had had enough of reading about war but Remarque’s raw and honest anti-war stance led to the book becoming a worldwide literary sensation with one million copies sold in the first year in Germany alone. Four years later in May 1933 it was among the books publicly burned by students in Berlin.

Much has been written about Remarque’s literary work but this blog post will focus on less well-known aspects of the man – his art collecting and relationships with interesting women – as evidenced by books in our collections.

The success of Im Westen nichts Neues made Remarque a very wealthy man, and in 1931 he bought a villa on the banks of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland. It was to here that he fled when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and from this point on he began to collect art, bringing together an extensive collection of works by mainly 19th century French artists, among them many by Cézanne, Degas and Renoir. He seems to have enjoyed living alongside his art collection rather than just collecting for investment purposes. Some of the works in his collection were shown in exhibitions during his lifetime. After his death in 1970 his widow sold off the collection systematically; most of the pictures are now owned privately.

The 2013 book Remarques Impressionisten: Kunstsammeln und Kunsthandel im Exil (S950.b.201.1303), with parallel German and English text, is the result of a fascinating project to reassemble the 150 or so paintings and works on paper that made up Remarque’s collection (including 40 that his widow had acquired before marriage) in inventory form within the book. Most of the book is devoted to this inventory, showing reproductions of the artworks but it also contains essays considering aspects of his collecting, including one by Walter M. Feilchenfeldt, the son of the art dealer Remarque bought many paintings from. As most of his collection ended up in private hands it is unsurprising that there are very few Creative Commons images available on the internet. However, here are two that I found:

It is clear from reading biographies of Remarque such as Erich Maria Remarque: the last romantic by Hilton Tims (748:37.c.200.41) that he was quite a ladies’ man. His first marriage in 1925 was to an actress, Ilse Jutta Zambona. They divorced only five years later after both had been unfaithful. However, he remained close to her and indeed remarried her in 1938, probably to offer her protection from the Nazis. The following year both of them travelled to the United States and spent the war years in exile there.

Throughout the 1930s Remarque travelled in Europe mixing with the famous and fashionable in places such as Venice, St Moritz, Antibes… He met (and may have had a brief relationship with) Hedy Lamarr. In 1937 he began an affair with Marlene Dietrich which lasted several years. Sag mir, dass du mich liebst…: Erich Maria Remarque-Marlene Dietrich: Zeugnisse einer Leidenschaft (C201.c.7872) is a book in our collections which documents their relationship through letters, although somewhat one-sidedly –  the majority of the letters are from him to her as most of her letters were later destroyed by his wife.*

Once in America and based in California, he continued to mix in fashionable circles and seems to have had a succession of relationships with Hollywood actresses, the best known of which now would be Greta Garbo and Maureen O’Sullivan. Another actress he met casually at this time was Paulette Goddard. By the time he came across her again in the early 1950s and they began a relationship, she had been married three times – her second husband was Charlie Chaplin. After his 1957 divorce from Zambona, Remarque and Goddard married in 1958 and spent most of their married life back at his villa in Switzerland.

Katharine Dicks

*[Amended after publication – see comment below]