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Zusatztext “The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank! a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature! his touch is sensitive! firm! and sure.”— The New York Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor Erich Maria Remarque , who was born in Germany, was drafted into the German army during World War I. Through the hazardous years following the war he worked at many occupations: schoolteacher, small-town drama critic, race-car driver, editor of a sports magazine. His first novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, was published in Germany in 1928. A brilliant success, selling more than a million copies, it was the first of many literary triumphs. When the Nazis came to power, Remarque left Germany for Switzerland. He rejected all attempts to persuade him to return, and as a result he lost his German citizenship, his books were burned, and his films banned. He went to the United States in 1938 and became a citizen in 1947. He later lived in Switzerland with his second wife, the actress Paulette Goddard. He died in September 1970. Klappentext The sequel to the masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back is a classic novel of the slow return of peace to Europe in the years following World War I. After four grueling years, the Great War has finally ended. Now Ernst and the few men left from his company cannot help wondering what will become of them. The town they departed as eager young men seems colder, their homes smaller, the reasons their comrades had to die even more inexplicable. For Ernst and his friends, the road back to peace is more treacherous than they ever imagined. Suffering food shortages, political unrest, and a broken heart, Ernst undergoes a crisis that teaches him what there is to live for-and what he has that no one can ever take away. "The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure."-The New York Times Book ReviewPart One ROADS STRETCH FAR through the landscape, the villages lie in a grey light; trees rustle, leaves are falling, falling. Along the road, step upon step, in their faded, dirty uniforms tramp the grey columns. The unshaved faces beneath the steel helmets are haggard, wasted with hunger and long peril, pinched and dwindled to the lines drawn by terror and courage and death. They trudge along in silence; silently, as they have now marched over so many a road, have sat in so many a truck, squatted in so many a dugout, crouched in so many a shell hole—without many words; so too now they trudge along this road back home into peace. Without many words. Old men with beards and slim lads scarce twenty years of age, comrades without difference. Beside them their lieutenants, little more than children, yet the leaders of many a night raid. And behind them, the army of slain. Thus they tramp onward, step by step, sick, half-starving, without ammunition, in thin companies, with eyes that still fail to comprehend it: escaped out of that underworld, on the road back into life. 1 The company is marching slowly, for we are tired and have wounded with us. Little by little our group falls behind. The country is hilly, and when the road climbs we can see from the summit the last of our own troops withdrawing before us, and behind us the dense, endless columns that follow after. They are Americans. They pour on through the avenues of trees like a broad river and the restless glitter of their weapons plays over them. But around them lie the quiet fields, and the tree tops in their autumnal colours tower solemn and unconcerned above the oncoming flood. We stopped for the night in a...
