Godina izdanja: Ostalo
ISBN: Ostalo
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Erich Maria Remarque - The black obelisk
Remark - Crni obelisk


Crest book, 1957. godine na 320. strana.


Knjiga je odlicno ocuvana.


The Black Obelisk (German: Der schwarze Obelisk) is a novel written in 1956 by the German author Erich Maria Remarque. This novel paints a portrait of Germany in the early 1920s, a period marked by hyperinflation and rising nationalism.

Ludwig, the protagonist, is in his mid twenties; just like most of his friends, he is a World War I veteran. Although aspiring to be a poet, he works for a friend, Georg, managing the office of a small tombstone company. He tries to earn some extra money as a private tutor to a son of a bookstore owner, and by playing the organ at the chapel of a local insane asylum.

Thanks to this diversity of activities, Ludwig interacts with a wide cross-section of the German population of his town and the surrounding villages and we are allowed to witness those interactions. We see, for example, businessmen – some trying to stick to the old principles and going bankrupt, others speculating on stocks, exploiting the system and becoming rich in morally ambiguous ways. We see war veterans – some highly critical of the old ways that led them to a failed war, others longing for the old days of military discipline and turning into inflexible nationalists hailing the virtues of their rising leader, Adolf Hitler.

A lot of events are connected to women. Two of them leave Ludwig, just because he cannot float in the contemporary world of greed and money. He chose to stay `clean`, maybe not by himself, but he cannot be anything other than true to his ideals and now he has to live with that choice. A third woman, probably the most important to him, is Genevieve Terhoven, whom he meets at the insane asylum. She is there for being schizophrenic and considers herself to be `Isabelle` most of the time. Ludwig gets more and more attached to her, feeling a `pure` love for her because she sees the world so differently.

The line `The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic` (Aber das ist wohl so, weil ein einzelner immer der Tod ist — und zwei Millionen immer nur eine Statistik.) is often not credited to the book but attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.