Erich Maria Remarque

All Quiet on the Western Front sold more than a million copies in its first year and was written by a man whose own time at the front lasted a matter of weeks before he was wounded, which his enemies used against him for the rest of his life. The regime burned it publicly in 1933, stripped his citizenship, and in 1943 put his sister Elfriede to death after a trial in which the judge told her that her brother was beyond reach. Remarque had left for Switzerland and then America, wrote The Black Obelisk about the German inflation, and never went home to live. He died in Locarno in 1970.