Remarque's range is limited, but within it he has no superior among living novelists. One skill he has conspicuously, an ability to make commonplaces evoke the profoundest emotion, to focus immensities through the smallest and simplest details…. In "Three Comrades," his new novel about the Germany of 1928, a gang fight between two garage staffs over the possession of a wrecked automobile comes close to epitomizing ten years of human and social deterioration. When Lenz, one of the three comrades, is killed for no reason except the impulse of a storm-trooper, one of the "young bastards who were still in their cradles then," he is buried in his old uniform blouse with the blood-stains and shrapnel tears of an earlier wound….

The shooting of Lenz is the only scene in which the theme of the disintegrating Germany is overt. Elsewhere it is neither phrased nor alluded to, but it...