Three Comrades

Three Comrades Review

Robert Lohkamp, Gottfried Lenz, and Otto Köster are veterans of the First World War in the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s: they run a small auto repair shop, maintain their friendship with the intensity that only men who have survived extreme danger together can sustain, and navigate the increasingly violent instability of a Germany that is visibly coming apart. Into this world comes Pat — Patricia Hollmann — with whom Robert falls in love, and who is, as they both gradually understand, dying of tuberculosis.

The novel was written in American exile — Remarque left Germany in 1932, before the Nazis came to power, and was stripped of his citizenship in 1938 — and the retrospective knowledge of what happened to the Weimar Republic gives the book a particular quality of elegy. Remarque is writing about a world that is ending; he knows it is ending; and the love story between Robert and Pat is written in the light of that knowledge. The tenderness is inseparable from the grief.

The three comrades’ friendship is the novel’s most reliable emotional ground — it has the same quality as the soldiers’ camaraderie in All Quiet on the Western Front, the same intensity of loyalty among men who have been through something that cannot be explained to those who were not there. Against the rising Nazi violence — street fights, beatings, the progressive takeover of public space by political terror — the friendship is both refuge and resistance, a maintenance of human scale against the dehumanizing logic of political fanaticism. Gottfried’s death, at the hands of Nazi violence, is the novel’s most politically direct moment: the personal is destroyed by the political, the comradeship broken by the historical forces that the novel has been tracing from the beginning.

Pat’s tuberculosis is both medical fact and metaphor: she is a woman of grace and beauty dying from something internal, something that the best medicine cannot reverse. The Germany of the early 1930s is suffering from the same condition. Remarque does not press the parallel — it is present rather than stated — but it gives the love story its historical resonance. Robert’s devoted care for Pat in the final section of the novel is simultaneously a love story and a grief for a world that is beyond saving.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Remarque’s most emotionally full novel, and the one that most directly confronts the human cost of the historical catastrophe his other books approach more obliquely.

Fitzgerald and the Hollywood Adaptation

Three Comrades holds a curious distinction in literary history: the 1938 film adaptation, directed by Frank Borzage and starring Robert Taylor and Margaret Sullavan, carries the only screen credit F. Scott Fitzgerald received in his Hollywood career. Fitzgerald worked on the screenplay during his late, financially desperate years in California, and the collaboration is a poignant footnote — one great chronicler of the lost generation adapting another’s account of veterans trying to live in a world the war had broken. The studio softened the novel’s political content, downplaying the explicitly Nazi character of the street violence that destroys the comrades’ peace, a commercial caution that the source material resists at every turn.

Written in Exile, Read as Prophecy

The retrospective power of Three Comrades is inseparable from the conditions of its composition. Remarque had left Germany in 1932, before the Nazi seizure of power, and was writing his account of Weimar’s collapse from the safety and the grief of exile; he would be stripped of his German citizenship in 1938. The Germany of the novel — the inflation, the unemployment, the rising tide of organized political violence — is rendered by someone who watched it happen and then watched what it became. This is why the love story between Robert and Pat reads as elegy rather than romance. Their tenderness unfolds against a backdrop both of them, and the author, and the reader, understand to be ending. Pat’s slow death from tuberculosis and the slow death of the Weimar Republic are held in the same frame, not as a forced allegory but as a single atmosphere of beautiful, doomed things passing. Of all Remarque’s books, Three Comrades is the one that most fully fuses the private and the historical, insisting that there was never any separation between them.

Friendship in the Ruins of Weimar

Three Comrades (1936/1937) follows Robert Lohkamp, Otto Köster and Gottfried Lenz, veterans who run a struggling auto-repair shop in the wreckage of late-Weimar Germany, their loyalty to one another the only stable thing in a country sliding toward catastrophe. Robert’s love for the consumptive Patricia “Pat” Hollmann gives the novel its emotional center, and her illness lends the whole book the elegiac tenderness that marks Remarque’s best work. The economic desperation, street violence and creeping political menace are rendered without speeches — Remarque trusts the reader to recognise what is coming. The novel has a notable footnote in film history: F. Scott Fitzgerald was hired to adapt it for MGM’s 1938 production, his only screen credit, though much of his work was rewritten before the film reached the screen.

Written after Remarque had fled into exile, the novel carries an elegiac foreknowledge that gives even its tender scenes a shadow. The friends’ shared love of their souped-up racing car, Karl, stands in for everything fragile and joyful that the gathering darkness of the early 1930s is about to sweep away.