Set in 1939, and, despite having no permission to perform surgery, Ravic, a very accomplished German surgeon and a stateless refugee living in Paris, has been ghost-operating on patients for two years on the behalf of two less skillful French physicians. Unwilling to return to Nazi Germany, which has stripped him of his citizenship, and unable to legally exist anywhere else in pre-war western Europe, Ravic manages to hang on. He is one of many displaced persons without passports or any other documents, who live under a constant threat of being captured and deported from one country to the next, and back again. Though Ravic has given up on the possibility of love, life has a curious way of taking a turn for the romantic, even during the worst of times, as he cautiously befriends an actress.
Main characters
Ravic- a refugee surgeon from Germany who has no citizenship ;
Joan Madou - actress, singer. Her father is Romanian, her mother is Italian. She spent her childhood in Italy;
Haake is a German Gestapo man who tortured Ravic and committed his beloved girl Sibylla to suicide. Killed by Ravic at the end of the novel;
Weber is a gynecologist from the Durand Clinic, Comrade Ravic; family man, loves to care for his own garden;
Durant - the famous doctor, the owner of the clinic. A good diagnostician, but a bad surgeon, he hires other doctors who operate on patients instead of him;
Kat Hegstrom is an American, Ravic's first patient. Sick with cancer. Returned to the States on the SS Normandie;
Boris Morozov is a tall and strong 60-year-old bearded man, an émigré from Russia; There is a porter at the Scheherazade establishment. Dreams of revenge against the communists who tortured his father;
Aaron Goldberg, Ravich's neighbor at the Internationale Hotel, hanged himself at the window;
Ruth Goldberg is the wife of Aaron Goldberg. After the death of her husband, she sold his passport to another illegal immigrant;
Ernst Zeylenbaum - Doctor of Philology and Philosophy, an illegal migrant, lived for 6 years at the Internationale;
Rosenfeld is an emigrant who sells unique paintings to survive;
Jeannot - a 13-year-old boy who got into an accident, Ravic amputated his leg;
Lucienne - unsuccessfully performed an abortion with a non-professional midwife, and then went to the clinic, where she was operated on by Ravic. After the removal of the uterus, she continued to earn by prostitution;
Roland is the manager of the Osiris brothel. Received an inheritance from relatives and opened her own coffee shop.
Relationship to other works
Remarque's earlier novel Flotsam is also about the life of stateless individuals. The character Ravic also makes a brief appearance in Remarque's novels, Shadows in Paradise, The Promised Land and Game.
