Erich Maria Remarque’s final, unfinished novel, The Promised Land is finally being published with The Random House Group’s Vintage Classics releasing the novel on hardback in early 2015. Written over forty four years ago, just before the German writer’s death in September 1970, the novel completes a significant body of work on the crushing impacts of war on humanity with a story dedicated to the life of a refugee in the full swirling blitz of the Second World War.
The novel builds on the power of his best known book, All Quiet On The Western Front, which was published back in 1929 when Remarque was just 31-years-old, and covered the experiences of German soldiers during the First World War. Scheduled for release on hardback on the 12th February 2015, it’ll be interesting to see whether or not his last novel turns out to be as significant as one of his earliest as it hits the shelves at a time in which the world has just as big a war refugee problem as it has ever had.
The story takes us back to the fury of WWII as Ludwig Somner manages to escape the horrors of Europe in favour of a ticket to New York City in a bid to escape the nightmare of his recent past. His arrival across the Atlantic, following a long slog in Europe, inevitably starts out at the immigration inspection centre on Ellis Island in the Upper New York Bay, from where he gets his first glimpse of the big city sights and sounds of Manhattan as he awaits a decision on his attempts to enter the United States.
It’s the end of a long escape, but the life of a war refugee is never quite the same again after they’ve witnessed the horrors of inhumanity and all out warfare. It taints the potential of his new life almost instantly, before he even gets a chance to grow accustomed to the opulence and possibilities of the Big Apple. There’s still a lot of struggle left for Ludwig to face too as he’s left with the difficulty of false passport papers, an ongoing transience and the ever present memories of war that comes hand-in-hand with his place in the refugee community that has also made New York its home.
It’s a story that has parallels with the basic premise of another of his famous novels, The Road Back, which focused on the lives of German soldiers returning home after WWI. However, the themes of pain, loss, memory, adjustment and difficult integration are added to by the concept of being a stranger in a strange land where every new experience, trinket and love are overshadowed by the past.
The plot concept also has parallels with some of Erich Maria Remarque’s own life, as he was forced to emigrate to Switzerland before the war broke out as the Nazi regime banned and burned his books as a part of an initiative by the propaganda minister, Joseph Geobbels. While he got to grips with his new surroundings, his own past continued to haunt his days, further influencing his writing, and the increasing ferocity of the Nazi war machine prompted him to move to the US.
