Black Obelisk (Paperback)

In the office sits the young clerk-cum-salesman, Ludwig Bodmer (i. e. Remarque) pondering his future. The year is 1923 and the Reichmark rose during the year from 18,000 to the dollar to 4,200 billion and money lost its meaning. Suicide became endemic as people, already battered by one world war, struggled to come to terms with bankruptcy and the collapsing economy.

To make ends meet, Ludwig Bodmer plays the organ on Sundays in the chapel of the local insane asylum. There he falls in love with a beautiful young mental patient, Isabelle, whose 'reality' is no more insane than the fraught times they are passing through. He also gives music lessons to the son of the local bookseller and plays the piano in pubs occasionally.

This is the most biographical of all Remarque's novels and is a lapidary account of the Weimar years in the thinly-disguised town of Osnabrueck (Werdenbrueck in the novel) where Remarque grew up. Remarque employs acute historical insight combined with great wit and a sometimes savage irony to reveal the joy, the sadness, the hypocrisy and the insanity of the times. Humour abounds, but the background is dark and foreboding.

One can read about the machinations of the Werdenbrueck Poet's Club; the agitation of major Wolkenstein, symbolic of the rising National Socialists; Sergeant-Major Knopf who could tell where a corn-brandy came from merely by tasting it; the affair of Georg Kroll with Lisa the wife of the horse-butcher, Watzek. There is Renee de la Tour, the hermaphrodite night-club entertainer who could sing bass and soprano and bellow commands like an army drill instructor. Bodmer's arguments with Vicar Bodendieck, the chaplain of the insane asylum and Dr. Guido Wernicke chart his philosophical development. The brother Heinrich Kroll and Major Wolkenstein represent the older, more conservative Germans who looked to a more hard-line chauvinistic nationalism for the future. Ludwig Bodmer and Georg Kroll represent the more reasonable, humanistic side of Germany.

Remarque himself had been a gravestone salesman for the firm of Vogt in Osnabrueck's Suesterstrasse. He was also an accomplished pianist and organist and had actually played the organ in the chapel of the local insane asylum. He had been, like his alter ego Ludwig Bodmer, a member of the Osnabrueck Poet's Club. Also like Bodmer he had left the small town for the wider world of Berlin as the inflation ended.

This is undoubtedly Remarque's best book. It is charming, sad, funny, rich in characters and highly readable. It is Remarque, mellowed by the years, looking back with great wit, objectivity and irony at his younger days. Almost by way of an epilogue, he provides a chapter telling what happened to those he knew: how some were worn down and persecuted by the following Nazi regime, and how some had collaborated and feathered their own nest.