Remarque, Erich Maria

"Die Geschichte von der kleinen Tänzerin, die nach etwas suchte was es doch nicht gibt." Autograph manuscript fragment, 4 pages (13 x 8 1/8 in.; 330 x 205 mm). — Autograph postcard unsigned, 5 ¾ x 4 in.; 145 x 102 mm, addressed to “Angel”. — Autograph letter, unsigned, 1 page (11 x 8 ½ in.; 280 x 215 mm), on his letterhead, addressed to “You beloved face,” with accompanying envelope. — Autograph letter, unsigned, 7 pages (11 x 8 ½ in.; 2880 x 215 mm), on his letterhead from Porto Ronco, Switzerland, with accompanying stamped envelope, postmarked 27 December 1938. — Autograph letter signed (“Rem[arque]”), 1 page (11 1/2 x 8 1/4 in.; 292 x 210 mm), on his letterhead from Porto Ronco, Switzerland, 23 March 1962, addressed “Enchanting one” [“Zauber”]. — plus 5 others in his hand as Remarque, and 4 others as "Alfred", 2 as "Ravic", 1 untitled literary sketch (2 pages in pencil), and a single-line unsigned note. In all, 42 pages.

See S. Weingarten, "Madonna meines Blutes" in Der Spiegel 33(2001), 168-169 (a photocopy of which is included in the lot); other letters published in Werner Fuld und Thomas F. Schneider, eds. "Sag mir, daß Du mich liebst ...''. Erich Maria Remarque - Marlene Dietrich. Zeugnisse einer Leidenschaft. (Cologne: 2001)

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The author Erich Maria Remarque and the actress Marlene Dietrich were lovers from 1937 to 1940. Their correspondence, consisting of 300 letters was published in 2001. As characterized by Weingarten in Der Spiegel(13 August 2001), "it was no doubt a great love, and like any great love it ate away the lives of the lovers with excessive demands she made. She was drama and ecstasy, anguish, rage and longing, everyday horseplay, self-mortification, malice, and self-forgetting noise."

The present letters, from Dietrich's own collection, remain unpublished, yet fall easily into this characterization. All are written by Remarque in three different characters with different handwriting: as himself, as a school-boy named Alfred, and as a tempestous lover named Ravic. Alfred is a little boy writing to his "Tante Lena"; Ravic, who appears in the last two years of their erotic relationship, is also the hero of the novel Arc de Triomphe (1946) that Remarque is then working on.

Remarque's rapturous alternative world was far away from reality and current events; almost no trace can be found in these letters of the dramatic upheavals of those years. Remarque had left Germany for Switzerland in 1938 and on the outbreak of war fled immediately to the United States and Dietrich.