Spark if Life by Erich Maria Remarque

German fiction

Original title – Der Funke Leben

Translator – James Stern

Source – Library book

I now reach the fifth and last book of this round of Simon’s and Karen’s year club. Last but not least is a powerful work from the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, He is best known for his book All Quiet on the Western Front, seen as one of the best books to capture the horror and utter madness of war. He fell victim to the Nazis when they came to power in Germany as they tried to smear his name and make out the events in All quiet fdidn’t happen and that he had fought in the war. Anyway, he left Germany and lived first in Switzerland and later in the US, where he became a citizen after Germany revoked his citizenship and banned his books. He in turn, changed the spelling of his surname from Remark to the French spelling Remarque. This book was dedicated to his sister, who had stayed in Germany and was killed for being a traitor by the Nazis Regime.

509 stared absent-mindedly at the wall. Silber, the Pole, while still lying in the barrack with bleeding intestines, had called it the Wailing Wall. He had also known most of the names by heart and in the beginning had even made bets as to which of them the spot of sun would reach first. Soon afterwards Silber had died; but on bright days the names had continued to wake to a ghostly life and then disappeared again into the dark. In summer when the sun stood higher others, scratched in lower down, became visible, and in winter the square moved higher up. But there were many more-Russian, Polish, Yiddish-which remained forever invisible because the light never reached them. The barrack had been put up so fast that the SS had not bothered to have the walls planed.

The inmates bothered even less, least of all about the inscriptions on the dark sections of the walls. These no one even attempted to decipher. Nobody was foolish enough to sacrifice a precious match simply to grow more desperate.

His fellow prisoners and how the ss came in

The book is set in the dying embers of World War II as the Allies and Russia are slowly putting a stranglehold on Germany. We join 509, he is a German political prisoner in a Concentration camp, they haven’t been lined up to be killed but just worked to the bone, he has been there for ten years. So when they get news that the war is coming to an end. There are snippets throughout the book, like the Bridge at Remagen, which had been taken, meaning they can cross into Germany. These men, the veterans of the time, started doing things that maybe a while ago would have got them killed, pushing the lines, hiding from fellow prisoners, as the feeling of the war got near, with the local towns now being regularly bombed. Can 5009 and his friends make it through the war? What will happen when the SS take over the running of the camp? There are some moment when they see one man talk about the washroom and how at another camp it had been a way to kill people and how when one soldier would come it measnmt one thing and then another soldier later on starts freeing some of his fellow prisoners this is the look at those german held in the death camps not killed but worked to they are virtually dead on the whole these are all educate menmiddle class souls broken by the camp

The roll call had already lasted more than an hour, but it still didn’t tally. It was due to the bombing. The labor gangs which worked in the copper foundry had suffered losses. One bomb had fallen into their division and a number of men had been killed and wounded. On top of this, after the first shock, the supervising SS-men had started firing on the prisoners who sought cover; they had feared they might escape. Thus a further half-dozen had perished.

After the bombing the prisoners had dragged out their dead from under the rubble and wreckage-or rather what was left of them. It was important for the roll call. Little as the life of a prisoner was valued and indifferent as the SS were to it, dead or alive the numbers at the roll call had to tally. Bureaucracy did not stop short at corpses.

This made me smile german effiency failing as madness starts to descend

I read All Quiet on the Western Front, and over the years, I’ve picked a few of his other books to read; they are still on my TBR. But when I looked up the books for this week, I saw what had happened to his sister and how it had led him to talk to some of the famous German survivors of these camps. He came up with 509, and this novel serves as a tribute to her. Unfortunately, when he published it in Germany, he initially removed the tribute to his sisters, as she was still viewed by many Germans as a traitor for what she had done. With recent events around the world, it may be worth reading this about what happens when a country turns against its own citizens with hate and lies! This is one of the reasons I love the club years is unearthign gems like this book. Have you read any of his other books besides All Quiet on the Western Front?