Erich Paul Kramer was born in a working-class family in the German city of Osnabruck. He later took the middle name Maria from his mother, Anna Maria Kramer. At the age of sixteen or seventeen he also made his first attempts at writing: essays, poems, and the beginnings of an eminently forgettable novel. Finished later and published in 1920 as Die Traumbude: Ein Künstlerroman (The Dream Room or Dream Den).He was conscripted into the army at the age of 18.

On 12 June, 1917 he was transferred to the Western Front, 2nd Company, Reserves, Field Depot of the 2nd Reserves Guards Division at Hem-Lenglet. On 26 June, he was stationed between Torhout and Houthulst, Trench Battalion Bethe (Name of commander), 2nd Company of the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment. On 31 July he was wounded by shrapnel in the left leg, right arm and neck, and repatriated to an army hospital in Germany, where he spent the rest of the war.

After the war he changed his last name to Remarque, which had been the previous family name until his grandfather changed it in the 19th Century due to the German xenophobia of the time. He worked at a number of different jobs, including librarian, businessman, teacher, journalist and editor.

He married his first wife, the actress Jutta Zambona in 1925. Same year, He made a second literary start with the story"Stationen am Horizont" (Stations on the Horizon), which was serialized in the sports journal for which Remarque was working but was never published in book form.

Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was written in a few months in 1927, but Remarque was not immediately able to find a publisher. In 1929, Remarque published his most famous work, All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) under the name Erich Maria Remarque (changing his middle name in honor of his mother). The novel described the utter cruelty of the war from the perspective of a twenty year-old soldier. A number of similar works followed; in simple, emotive language they described wartime and the postwar years.

In 1933, the Nazis banned and burned Remarque`s works, and issued propaganda stating that he was a descendant of French Jews and that his real last name was Kramer, a Jewish-sounding name, and his original name spelled backwards. This is still listed in some biographies despite the complete lack of evidence. Also despite clear evidence to the contrary, their assertion that he had never seen active service remains in some references. In 1943 the Nazis arrested his sister Elfriede, who had stayed behind in Germany with her husband and two children. After a short trial she is found guilty of `undermining morality`. The verdict states verbatim that she is convicted, "as her brother is beyond our reach at this moment". Elfriede is decapitated with an axe, thus on a specific order by Adolf Hitler.

In 1931, after finishing Der Weg zurück (1931; translated as The Road Back, 1931), he left Germany. He bought a villa in Porto Ronco in Switzerland and lived both there and in France until 1939, when he left Europe for the United States.

Remarque had been living in Switzerland since 1931, and in 1939 he emigrated to the United States of America with his first wife, Ilsa Jeanne Zamboui, whom he married and divorced twice, and they became naturalized citizens of the United States in 1947. Remarque`s next novel, Drei Kameraden (1937; translated as Three Comrades, 1937) spans the years from the