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 Birth of Erich Maria Remarque, German novelist. 

His best-known novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), about German soldiers in the First World War, was made into an Oscar-winning movie. His book made him an enemy of the Nazis, who burned many of his works.

The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.

Remarque was a surprisingly thoughtful, and clearly extremely intelligent person with an extremely sensitive soul and subtle talent. His books are startlingly frank expressions of real feelings as well as vivid characters that sprang from the author’s own life and heart.

In Remarque’s novels, love is passionate, all-consuming and immortal. ’His’ war is terrible, it breaks one’s will, faith, and fate. His books are about a lost generation — ’lost’ in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world, and because its members felt they had no place among the living.

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