REMARQUE's OCCASIONAL DISMISSAL as a trivial writer presumably rests upon the fact that some of his novels have seemed insignificant in terms of content. For most of his works this criticism clearly does not apply: their subjects are the defining political themes of twentieth-century history — war, refugees, the struggle for survival in situations of hardship. On the human level, however, there are overarching themes that link all of his novels, whether their setting is expressly political or not. Probably the most significant is that used by Remarque as a title for his concentration camp novel: Der Funke Leben, the spark of life. That vital impulse is attested to by most of Remarque's characters, even in the earliest stages of his writing. The simple, but not simplistic, existentialist philosophy that we should cling to life because it is all we have in the face of the inevitability of death functions as a base line in virtually all of his novels, and as the death of Bäumer makes clear, the urge to cling to that spark of life overrides even the personality of the individual. The philosophy carries with it the permanent awareness of death and separation as the other aspect of the human condition, thrown into sharper relief by anything that brings death noticeably closer, be it war, illness, or exposure to dangers of some other sort. The popularity of existentialism in much of the twentieth century has been well documented — the awareness, that is, that one's individual and finite existence is all that one can be sure of — and it can be heightened in what Karl Jaspers called Grenzsituationen (situations on the edge). It is an isolating philosophy, even or especially for the closest of lovers. The response to death is a separate matter; existentialism might or might not have a transcendental or religious dimension, although more typically it is at least agnostic. The imperative that one has to nurture the spark of life can on occasion, but only on occasion, seem in Remarque's novels to be given some kind of transcendental support.