IN 1974 A VOLUME APPEARED with the title 100 Great Books: Masterpieces of All Time. The last part of that title was clearly taken seriously, because the Old Testament was ranked chronologically only ninth. Of course, one can always object to the choices made for collections like this, but it is of interest that only three German-language writers are included in this particular, and rather useful, English compilation, and that only one of them is a novelist; beside Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud, the sole German literary figure is Erich Maria Remarque, who had died only a few years earlier. So too, polls are sometimes conducted in the English-speaking world to determine the world's greatest novels. The resultant list, which always contains French and Russian writings, usually includes little German literature. One novel by Remarque, however, is normally present, and he even drew attention to such a list, published by the New York Times, in a letter to his publisher in June 1961.

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) was a public figure, a celebrity writer, even something of a playboy in his adult life, and indeed the fairly recent biography of him in English by Hilton Tims pays much attention to his amorous adventures in Hollywood and elsewhere. As a novelist, however, Remarque is a genuinely international figure, while remaining a German writer, interpreting German and European problems for a world audience. Although an exile-writer — he wrote most of his novels outside Germany — he is never an outsider as far as Germany is concerned, but because of his émigré status, a status that lasted for more than half of his life, he is sometimes treated less fully than he might be in literary histories. His status as a popular — the word is sometimes taken pejoratively — writer has doubtless contributed to this as well, perhaps especially in Germany. How Remarque's works are to be integrated into the canon of German literature remains an interesting question.

The terms “exile literature” and “émigré writing” are only of limited use in literary categorization; it is true that a number of major writers shared the experience after 1933 of writing in German and often about Germany, while exiled from Germany itself, but its effects differed in nature and extent depending upon the individual — one need only to think of the proximity in Hollywood at one stage of Thomas Mann, Brecht, and Remarque.