3 - Rootless in Weimar: Der schwarze Obelisk and Drei Kameraden

Summary

WHERE DER WEG ZURÜCK IS SET around the birth of the Weimar Republic, two of Remarque's novels are set entirely within the period of the republic itself, although neither was written during its existence. Drei Kameraden (Three Comrades) appeared first in 1936 in a Danish translation, then in English in 1937, and was finally published in German in the Netherlands in 1938. It is possible to see it as the third part of a trilogy consisting of Im Westen nichts Neues and Der Weg zurück, and Remarque himself indicated as much in a preface attached to the earliest, unpublished version of his text in 1932–33. However, whereas the two earlier novels are closely focused on the war and its aftermath, Drei Kameraden, in the published version, is set nearly ten years later, in 1928. Although there are references to the war, and even brief allusions to characters in the other two novels, including a mention of the deaths of Kemmerich and Katczinsky, Drei Kameraden is in other respects removed in time and place from the two earlier novels. The earliest version seems to have been started in 1932, when Remarque was already living in Porto Ronco, and completed in January 1933. This version had the title Pat, and it did begin with a link to the lost generation and Der Weg zurück, but it was abandoned, and the text eventually published was written after the fall of the Weimar Republic and Remarque's own final move from Germany. Where the two earlier novels have the war as their theme, that of Drei Kameraden is the Weimar Republic itself, and specifically the beginning of its collapse.

In terms of historical setting, Drei Kameraden may be set side by side with a later novel concerned with politics and life in the Weimar Republic. Published in 1956, Der schwarze Obelisk (The Black Obelisk), significantly subtitled Geschichte einer verspäteten Jugend (Story of a Delayed Youth) is a more distanced historical novel, demanding different assumptions especially when treated outside the sequence of Remarque's writings, and there are emphases that would probably not have been present had it actually been written before the fall of Hitler.