The German novelist Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück in 1898. His first novel, the famous anti-war epic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), was written based on his experiences as a soldier in WWI, and published in 1929. He moved to Switzerland until 1939 and later emigrated to the US. He died in 1970 in Locarno, Switzerland. A native of Rhineland, born Erich Paul Remark. He is a descendant of a refugee from Revolutionary France. He changed his name to Erich Maria Remarque when he wrote his first major novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Maria was the name of his late mother, and "Remarque" was the original spelling used by his French ancestors. Some biographies still wrongly state that Remarque's original name was Kramer and he spelled his real name backward. This is largely based on a pre-World War II Nazi propaganda claiming that Remarque really descended from a family of French Jews named Kramer.he death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is just a statistic.