We had to read Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front as part of a world history course in college. I was glad that we did, as it was a very moving read. I still have my copy of the book.
Jup, amazing literature. Remarque was one of those german authors whose books were burned by the nazis exactly 75 years ago, in his case because they didn’t like the pacifist attitude.
They even planted the rumor he was jewish and his real name was Kramer, which is even today still widespread. This always amazes me the most about certain aspects of the nazis, the longevity of some of their dark deeds.
His birthname was Remark, coincidentally an anagram of Kramer, maybe that’s why the people fell for that story.
THE HERITAGE OF THE GREAT WAR - The Great War in Color
Color pictures, rare colour photographs from the First World War 1914-1918,
autochrome, tinted, postcards, real Great War color pictures.
http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-color.html
Adolf Hitler and Erich Remarque in No Man’s Land
More Pictures Added
http://www.greatwar.nl/remarque/remarque-eng.html
Partial quote from a much larger article comparing the lives of Adolph Hitler and Erich Remarque from the trenches of the First World War through World War II. I recommend reading the entire article.
…Books
Ten years later, in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque publishes Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front; picture on the left shows the first English edition), wherein he romanticizes his war experiences. It is an anti-war book of a kind never written before. The circulation is also unheard of — until this moment more than 50 million books are sold, in fifty languages.Adolf Hitler (picture on the right) too publishes a book wherein he tells about his war-experiences: Mein Kampf it is called and anyone who reads the two books together fails to see that both are writing about the same war, the same No Man’s Land, the same trenches, the same soldiers, the same suffering and death.
Where Remarque blames the Kaiser, the generals, the warmongers at home, Hitler knows another cause: the Jews.
There has been said a lot about the content of Mein Kampf. But striking as well is what Hitler did not write in that book. For instance he does not mention the Christmas Truce, where he and his unit were involved in. It happened in those days that the 16th and 17th Bavarian reserve regiments were relieving each other in the frontline near Mesen (Belgium), where you can oversee the valley of the river Douve.
On Christmas morning, right after breakfast, suddenly there were about four hundred soldiers from both sides, brotherly standing together in No Man’s Land: soldiers from Bavaria in Germany and from Cheshire and Norfolk in England. First they felt a bit uneasy: Fröhe Weihnachten and Happy Christmas and hands were shaked and some dead were buried that were lying around; everybody helped. Then, suddenly, there was a football, coming from the German line. Some two hundred man ran, as young dogs, behind the ball, without a trace of hostility.
Singing together
The whole day the men hang around between the two frontlines. “I will never forget this view”, the Bavarian soldier Jozef Wenzl, fellow-soldier of Hitler, wrote to his parents: “An Englishman played the mouth-organ of a German pal, others were dancing. Somebody was very proud to put a German pin-helmet on his head. The English sang a song and we sang ‘Silent Night’. It was moving: arch-enemies singing together around a Christmas tree.”Events like this did not fit in Mein Kampf (picture on the left) and in Hitlers way of thinking. Im Westen nichts Neues too did not fit in — and the writer of that book not at all. In 1933, the moment that Germany elects Hitler to power, he opens the hunt for Remarque. In Hitlers eyes his former fellow-soldier has betrayed the Fatherland.
Remarque flees to America. He has already written two sequels to All quiet on the Western Front (The Road Back and Three Comrades) and other novels — and now he becomes even more productive.
Hero
In the United States Remarque becomes the hero of the pacifist movement — and of Hollywood, after a movie is made of Im Westen Nichts Neues. He has love-affaires with Marlene Dietrich (picture right), Greta Garbo and Paulette Goddard.[b]Safe and famous in America nothing can harm Remarque anymore.
That’s why the Nazi’s in 1943 snatch his sister Elfriede, who had stayed behind in Germany with her husband and two children. After a short trial she is found guilty of ‘undermining morality’.
The verdict states verbatim that she is convicted, “as her brother is beyond our reach at this moment”.
Elfriede is decapitated with an axe, thus on a specific order by Adolf Hitler.[/b]
http://www.greatwar.nl/remarque/remarque-eng.html#remark
[b]1) - There has been some confusion about the real name of Remarque. Is it Remark or Kramer?
These are the facts:
Erich Paul Remark was born on June 22, 1898 in Osnabrück, son of bookbinder Peter Franz Remark and Anna Maria Stallknecht. His grandfather Peter Aloys Remark was the son of the nailsmith Johann Adam Remarque, born in Aachen on October 28, 1789.
The myth that Remarque’s name was ‘Kramer’, stems from the Nazi’s who, embarrassed that a ‘German’ should have written a book like ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, attempted to re-constitute Remarque as a Jew, whose real name was Kramer and who had never been in the war.
Unfortunately, on the occasion of Remarque’s death in 1970, dozens of obituaries appeared, many of them still clinging to the legend of Remarque’s name being in reality the inversion of ‘Kramer’.[/b]
Very good links, I ll give a look to the red baron . 
You might find these clips that I uploaded onto YouTube interesting -