À l’Ouest rien de nouveau
One of 30 copies on Japanese paper (no. VI).
“Ce volume est l'un des exemplaires tirés à part dans le format in-18 colombier, à l'occasion de l'édition nouvelle et revue de l'ouvrage À l'Ouest rien de nouveau (juillet 1929)”: the same text had appeared, a few weeks earlier, under the plain Stock cover in in-12 format; a number of variants in the translation were fixed here, and this edition constitutes the definitive text.
It was in 1929 that Remarque became famous, thanks to the enormous success of his first novel, All Quiet on the Western Front: translated into twenty-five languages, the book reached a print run of 3.5 million copies within eighteen months. This French edition appeared the same year as the German original, Im Westen nichts Neues, published at the end of January 1929 — ten years after the end of the conflict.
Cinema seized upon the book immediately: on April 29, 1930, Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation premiered in the United States. The film opened in Germany on December 4: riots in cinemas were organized by Joseph Goebbels and Nazi party sympathizers, and on December 11 the film was banned in Germany by the Film-Oberprüfstelle, the film censorship board of the time. Remarque was forced to flee and settled in Switzerland, at Ascona, while his books were burned by the Nazis and his German citizenship was revoked. Lewis Milestone, for his part, won two Academy Awards (Best Director and Best Picture). Stigmatized and persecuted by the Nazis, he had to emigrate to the United States in 1939. One of his sisters, who was in hiding, was found by the Nazis and beheaded in 1943.
Remarque would return to Europe in the early 1960s, to Locarno, with his wife, the actress Paulette Goddard.
His next novel would be the first title to appear in the “Du monde entier” series at Éditions Gallimard. At the same time, it was the last of the réimposé in-4 Tellière format editions (apart from three later titles: André Malraux’s La Condition humaine in 1933, and the last two volumes of Roger Martin du Gard’s Les Thibault, in 1938).
A major translation by Alzir Hella, who had until then worked on the œuvre of Stefan Zweig, who congratulated him on his work on this translation: “Cher ami, Tu connaîtras un grand succès avec le livre de Remarque et j’espère également que tu t’es assuré matériellement pour les éditions successives […]. Tu as abattu un gros travail cette année encore et j’espère qu’un jour, il te sera donné de te retirer totalement de la correction et de vivre à la campagne, selon ton désir, muni d’une machine à écrire, et de ne venir à Paris que de temps à autre, tel le satyre sortant du bois. Nous nous reverrons bientôt car j’ai la ferme intention de venir voir à l’automne s’il n’y a ‘Rien de nouveau à l’ouest’. De tout cœur, ton vieux Stefan Zweig.”
An extremely rare deluxe copy on Japanese paper of this masterpiece.