A night in Lisbon in 1942: The German emigrant Josef Schwarz persuades a nameless fellow emigrant to listen to his story. In return, Schwarz will give to the one-person audience both his passport and his boat ticket to the United States.

That night Schwarz tells the story of his secret return to fascist Osnabrück to see his wife Helen again and take her with him. It is the story of exile in France, the outbreak of the Second World War, internment in a French camp, the adventurous escape over the Spanish border and finally Helen’s death in Lisbon. Without her, the plan to escape to the United States has become pointless.

After one night and the story told, the nameless emigrant receives the passport and adopts the identity of Josef Schwarz. As it turns out, this is not the first time, his identity has been passed on but the third. The passport originally belonged to yet another emigrant, an art dealer.

The novel comments on how, in the twentieth century, identities are exchangeable, but how each fate must be remembered and preserved as a warning for future generations.

The Night in Lisbon, first published in 1962, is Remarque’s most ambitious novel in terms of narrative technique, and it shows more clearly than any of his other writings the importance of remembering the fates of individual human beings. The great significance and quality of the novel were immediately recognised. In 1961, before the book came out, a shorter version was serialized in several languages and remains available throughout the world alongside the longer book, which Remarque substantially revised.