4 - The First Europeans: Liebe Deinen Nächsten and Arc de Triomphe

Summary

TWO OF REMARQUE'S NOVELS, both first published in America, are concerned with the precarious lives of refugees from the Nazis in Europe during the period from Hitler's coming to power to the outbreak of the Second World War. The emotional rootlessness of the Weimar novels has become real in these works. The first of them carried the motto, in the English version: “To live without roots takes a stout heart.” Long omitted from German editions, it has now been restored, albeit with a singular noun: “Man braucht ein starkes Herz, um ohne Wurzel zu leben —.” Liebe Deinen Nächsten (Flotsam) was written in 1938–39, when Remarque lived first in Vienna, then Paris, and Porto Ronco, after which he emigrated to the United States in August 1939. Although the English title is a good one, it loses the highly significant biblical reference to the second of the two commandments in Matthew 22:37–40 and Mark 12:29–31, the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” The novel is set in 1936 and early 1937: one of the central characters is employed before and after the turn of the year on the building of the Exposition Internationale, the Paris World's Fair, held from May to November 1937. The second, Arc de Triomphe (Arch of Triumph), was written over a long period, from 1940 to 1945, when it was finally published. Its action begins in November 1938, the twentieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, and concludes with the outbreak of a new war at the start of September 1939.

The historical events are closer in these novels than in any of Remarque's other works. Whereas Arc de Triomphe is set in Paris, the earlier work, which ends in Paris, is a novel of borders and border crossings — Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland, and France. The refugee, running from one regime and not admitted by other countries for lack of a visa and hence always on the move, is “ein Pionier des Weltbürgertums … einer der ersten Europäer (156–57, a pioneer of world citizenship … one of the first Europeans); the same phrase is applied at the end of Arc de Triomphe to a group of refugees at the start of the war.