Customer Reviews (1)

Stay Alive, Stay Alive, Stay Alive!
Erich Maria Remarque (1898 - 1970) was projected to popularity by his novel "All Quiet in the Western Front" (1929). He was a militant pacifist with no strong political views. Nevertheless the Nazis burned his books and he was forced into exile. He was stripped from German nationality in 1938 and never was returned to him. This was a deep wound in his soul that never healed.

I've read Spanish & English versions of this book, unfortunately I don't read German, but as there is no review for this work, I think a review on the contents of the novel is pertinent.

"Spark of Life" (1952) is not one of his most famous books, but is a deep heartbreaking tale of the life in a concentration camp.
509 is an old prisoner that miraculously survives year after year of daily horror. He feels war is ending and redouble his efforts to stay alive. His deeds and those of his campmates, Lebenthal and Ashver and Neubauer are described vividly by Remarque.
This is a dark and sorrowful literary piece; however is a monument to the "spark of life" that every human being treasures in his inner soul. Is a monolith to the "spark" of freedom that authoritarian regimes, of any sign, try always to quench and never succeed to achieve.

A recommended read for those interested in historical subject and more specifically in WWII and concentration camps.
Reviewed by Max Yofre.
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Product Description
Both of these classic novels were written during the Weimar period in Germany, 1919-1933. All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of Paul Baumer, a young soldier who enlisted in the German army with youthful enthusiasm just before World War I, only to find himself destroyed by the brutality of trench warfare. His poingnant tale is not a treatise on the inhumane nature of combat, but rather the story of one ordinary young man's life-changing experience. As Remarque opens his novel: "This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it."

Joseph Roth is a writer who, in the words of Joan Acocella in The New Yorker, is being rediscovered. Job, the Story of a Simple Man tells the tale of Mendel Singer, a Russian emigre on his way to New York. He is confronted by a series of devastating misfortunes that challenge his faith in God. Roth parallels the biblical books of Job in the style of a Yiddish story: his ordinary protagonist survives the worst before experiencing a miracle that restores his faith.

Both authors served during World War I, Remarque with the German army and Roth with the Austrians. The shared thread of hope and endurance through these stories serves as a reflection of their times: here are two versions of the young World War I soldier's experience-one a vivid depiction of the reality of combat, the other a parable of faith through life's trials. ... Read more

Product Description

What country sent 250,000 underage soldiers to fight in World War I? What happened to "cowards" in World War I? Why did Erich Maria Remarque have to flee his homeland? Discover how the horrors of World War I led to a novel praised by all sides in the confl

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Product Description
Erich Maria Remarque is a writer of great popularity who has rightly been described as a 'chronicler of the twentieth century.' He is both a German writer and a genuinely international one. Although he spent much of his life in exile from Germany, most of his novels reflect its twentieth-century history: the two world wars and the Weimar and Nazi regimes, and especially their effects on the individual. His portrayals of the lives of refugees from Nazi Germany are especially vivid. His themes are universal, dealing with human relationships, with love in particular, and with the provisional nature of life. Often seen as a one-novel writer due to the immense success of All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque wrote many other novels, major works that have nearly all been filmed and have remained popular. Nor should it be ignored that his works are above all else immensely readable: not a negligible criterion. This new study of Remarque's novels treats them as a chronicle of the century, but also looks at them as works that go beyond the reflection of historical events. ... Read more

Product Description
How did literature written, published and read in the Western and Soviet Zones of Occupation, in the Federal Republic of Germany and in the GDR, become two German literatures? For attempting a history of the changing relations between the two, this book looks at the conditions of producing, distributing and reading literature, dominant discourses and genres of writing. Because of links as well as separations, it suggests a periodisation which does neither question the caesura of 1945 nor rely on the concept of generation, but assumes decisive changes around 1949, 1961 and 1976. Thus the changes in, for instance, literary ways of thematising the Nazi past emerge with the discursive turns from >the question of guiltantifascismantitotalitarianismmodernisationnational identity<. For each sequence, one chapter scrutinises an element of the literary life (for instance, censorship), another one a dominant genre - from short story to documentary and autobiographical literature. Any analysis of an exemplary West German text will lead to an East German counterpart, e.g. Wolfgang Koeppen's The Death in Rome to Stephan Hermlin's The Female Commander (1954), taking into account their contemporary reception as well as later canonisation (and decanonisation). German text. ... Read more