The German writer Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet at the Front (1929), one of the most representative novels of the horrors of the First World War, was born in Osnabrück.
At the age of thirty-two, Remarque wrote the book that made him famous and a millionaire.
A soldier in World War I, Erich Paul Remark, his real name, had fought for a couple of weeks on the Flanders front in July 1917. After being wounded, he had spent most of the rest of the war in a sanatorium in Germany.
His novel Im Westen nichts Neues emerged from such a short and terrifying personal experience, which he published in 1929, and became a worldwide bestseller and a classic of anti-war literature. The protagonist, a young soldier named Paul Bäumer, recounts in the first person the gruesome existence in the trenches of the Western Front after enlisting with his classmates, ignited by the patriotic harangues of his teacher.
