A time to love and a time to die

by Erich Maria Remarque

Book Overview

From the quintessential author of wartime Germany, A Time to Love and a Time to Die echoes the harrowing insights of his masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front . After two years at the Russian... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0000CIWM6
• Release Date: January 1954
• Publisher: Hutchinson
• Length: 378 Pages
• Weight: 1.72 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Time to Love and a Time to Die

I loved this book. It is definitly one Remargue's best. The way he describes the war and his surroundings is just perfect. He bends words to his will. I've read Remargue's Three comrades and it was pretty good, but not as captivating as a time to love. Me being a 15 year old girl I couldn't even imagin what a war would be like, but Remarque does excellent job of describing the affects of war on a person's life. How so much can be created and destroyed in 3 weeks of leave. Its now one of my favs. I recommend it to everyone.

Underrated

This book should be read in every high school in America. The shocking beauty of the words cannot help but transform the reader and his opinions about the effect of World War II on the ordinary German people. Remarque is sadly known only for "All Quiet on the Western Front". His best work and my personal favorite is "Arch of Triumph" but no ones time would be wasted on reading any of his work. If this man wrote the telephone book I would read it.

One of Remarque's Very Best

You might think, from what is usually said about him, that "ALL Quiet on the Western Front" was the only book Erich Remarque wrote. Yet some of his later novels are surprisingly good and profoundly memorable. I admire very much how he found his own territory of experience to write about-- not just the determined anti-war sentiments that made him justly famous with "All Quiet," but also his novels of veterans returning to the post-war home front and his stories of refugees fleeing the ravages of World War II. And "A Time to Love and a Time to Die" might be the best of these novels. Its setting is unique: a German soldier returns home on furlough during the latter stages of the war to find his hometown largely destroyed by allied bombing-- a scene as desperate as any on the eastern front which he has just left. The novel is powerfully sustained from beginning to end, filled with vivid detail, and pervaded by dread of the gestapo and a feeling of the overwhelming absurdity of war. Amid this wreckage, Remarque composes a beautiful and moving love story between the soldier and a young woman whose father is in a concentration camp. Some of Remarque's recurring themes can be seen at work here: decent people at the mercy of political upheaval and cruel ideologies, and the preciousness of life in a world where life is so cheaply held. The prose has many fine moments of dark beauty. This novel might make you think, as I do, that Remarque's reputation should be reassessed. I read somewhere recently that Chekhov said that great art could never be depressing. With that in mind, I urge everyone to read, and reclaim, this excellent novel.

Best Remarque's book

If you are not moved by this book - check if your heart is there! One of my all-time favorites! Inredible.

Germany struggles for hope, total defeat is unthinkable!

The story is of a German soldier on the Russian front after the turning point in the war. The Germans are in full retreat and the novel captures the desperation of an unbelieving Germany facing its inevitable and complete defeat. German culture is destroyed twice; once by the Nazis and then by the allies. As EMR's All Quiet on the Western Front's primary messege is anti-war, his later works seem to be about the need to destroy the Nazi regime and its unprecidented reign of fear and brutality.