Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) was born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabruck, Lower Saxony. He was called up for active service in the Great War in November 1916 along with his classmates, and sent to the Western Front in June 1917. He was wounded several times and was at Flanders in July 1917 when he was wounded by a grenade and spent fourteen months in recovery where he worked as a hospital admissions clerk. Remarque admitted that he had been affected by the things that he saw on the battlefield and suffered from depression (most likely brought on by 'shellshock' or what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Writing the novel was therapeutic for Remarque and helped him to come to terms with some of the things that he had witnessed in battle.

After the war had finished, he taught for a time and then became a stone-cutter, a test driver for a car manufacturer, an advertising copy writer and the editor of a sports magazine before he wrote All Quiet on the Western Front. The novel created a great deal of controversy because war veterans argued about the accuracy of Remarque's recollections of the war and many people did not like the pacifist/anti-war message of the book. A film of the novel, directed by Lewis Milestone, was released in 1930 and was eventually banned in both Germany and Italy by the Nazis and Fascists for the same reasons that the book was disliked. Remarque was forced into exile by the Nazi government in 1938 when his citizenship was revoked.