Erich Maria Remarque'sIm Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), published in both German and English in 1929, is arguably the best-known of all Weimar novels. Certainly it is one of the few German novels of the period to have achieved the status of an international classic, and it remains, further, one of the most read antiwar novels in any language. Assessing the status of Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) specifically as a Weimar novelist, however, is not straightforward. In the simplest of definitions — a writer publishing between the formal declaration of the Weimar Republic in July 1919 and Hitler's election as chancellor in January 1933 — Remarque is represented by a limited number of novels only. Technically, the first of these is Die Traumbude (A Den of Dreams), which appeared in 1920, but it is a romantic Künstlerroman (artist's novel) that might equally well have appeared in the late nineteenth century, and was in any case published under the author's birth-name of Erich (Paul) Remark. It did appear, nevertheless, within the period of the Weimar Republic and in a sense it is of that time in that it represents a form of escapism back to a prewar period in which young aesthetes, artists and musicians, could be concerned about stormy affairs and then find true love at the deathbed of their closest friend.