A rather lurid looking Panther paperback of a sort which I associate with my adolescence, although according to the list at the back, the Panther list also includes the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, H E Bates, Sinclair Lewis, Isaac Asimov and Georges Simenon. Did Panther run literary sherry parties which brought all these good people together? In any event, Remarque is clearly in good company.
Turning to Wikipedia, I find that Remarque was more or less pushed out of Germany, with his books being burned by the Nazis, and spent some years in Switzerland before emigrating to the US about the time of the start of the second world war. His sister, who stayed behind, was guillotined in 1943. From which one can see where the material for this book, a tale of the lives of exiles floating about in a netherworld between Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and ultimately France, at that time something of a safe haven.
A tale which is somewhat redeemed by sparks of humanity from the people - for example the police and the customs officials - charged with implementing the harsh treatment meted out to those with no country, mostly in this book, Germans who had been expelled from or had fled from Germany,
I was uncomfortably conscious that things have not changed for the better, with there being more such refugees now than there ever were then. And while we might not bat people to and fro across borders, often at night, across large rivers without bridges, we still have many of the same problems. With racialism. With brain surgeons thinking themselves lucky to be flipping burgers for next to nothing an hour. With potential host countries thinking that they have far too many problems of their own, without taking in more. All a bit depressing.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2013/01/two-days-in-suburbia-and-two-blasts.html.
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