22 June 1898
Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück, Germany. A veteran of World War I, he published All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929, perhaps the most famous anti-war novel of the 20th century.
It depicts the brutality of war through the eyes of a 20-year-old soldier. The novel was immediately translated into 26 languages, selling 1,5 million copies within a year. As early as 1930, the National Socialists, led by Goebbels, tried to sabotage the premiere of the Hollywood film adaptation in Berlin. Remarque was persecuted for "discrediting" the German army. After the NSDAP came to power in 1933, his books were publicly burned under the slogans: "No to scribblers who betray the heroes of the World War. Long live the education of youth in the spirit of true historicism!" Everyone knows how that story ended. And Remarque's novels, especially the aforementioned one, remain relevant today.
🔸All kinds of troubles and misfortunes in this world very often come from people of short stature; they have a much more energetic and quarrelsome character than tall people
They were still writing articles and making speeches, while we already saw hospitals and dying people; they were still saying that there was nothing higher than serving the state, while we already knew that the fear of death was stronger.
I'm young—twenty years old—but all I've seen in life is despair, death, fear, and a tangle of absurd, mindless stagnation and immeasurable torment. I see someone setting one nation against another, and people killing each other in a mad, blinded rage, submitting to someone else's will, unaware of what they're doing, unaware of their own guilt. I see the best minds of humanity inventing weapons to prolong this nightmare and finding words to justify it even more subtly.
🔸How senseless is everything that is written, done and thought by people, if such things are possible in the world!
🔸Ministers and generals from warring countries should enter the arena, wearing underwear and armed with clubs, and let them fight each other. Whoever survives will declare their country the winner. This would be simpler and fairer than what's happening here, where the wrong people are fighting each other.