Arc de Triomphe

We can try to forget the past, but the past will never forget us...

Ravic is a man without a face and without a country. A German surgeon who fled the Nazi hell is now living illegally in Paris. Undocumented, without a future, he operates under false names in private clinics, while at night he wanders the streets like a shadow. He wrapped his heart in ice and cynicism to survive in a world gone mad. He is driven by one desire alone: to find the Gestapo man who once drove his fiancée to her death. Not even a fateful meeting with Joan Madou, a woman as passionate and devastated as himself, can change that. Far from a romantic idyll, their relationship is more like a union of two desperate castaways in the middle of a crumbling old world. But the desire for revenge is stronger than the fear of deportation, stronger than the love for Joan, and the selfless doctor becomes a ruthless hunter.
One of the author's best-known books captures much of the fate of Remarque himself and his generational contemporaries, whose youth was marked by World War I and later the rise of Nazism. The novel, written in American exile, became a bestseller soon after its publication and was successful on the screen.