Erich Maria Remarque

Fire and air take four of his ten planets each, which leaves a single one apiece in earth and water, and five of the ten are mutable. Mercury, Neptune and Pluto fill eight degrees of Gemini. The record says All Quiet on the Western Front sold two and a half million copies in eighteen months and was burned by the Nazis, who stripped Remarque of citizenship and later executed his sister.

The Moon sits in mild friction with Mercury at seven hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, which is what is felt and what is said pulling apart: anxiety, talking oneself out of a valid instinct, and the particular frustration of not being able to explain something that is perfectly clear internally. In a novelist whose one famous book was an attempt to explain exactly that about a war, that contact is the one with the most in it.

The Sun sits square Jupiter at a third of a degree, belief in its own scale meeting a limit, which in a record whose first fact is two and a half million copies in eighteen months is a reading the sales figure answers rather than illustrates. The Moon sits in easy contact with Saturn at three quarters and its sign is certain. What the record's second half describes, the burning and the citizenship and the execution, was done by a government to a writer and to his family, and a birth chart contains no part of it. Saturn and Uranus were the two retrograde planets.

He died at Locarno on 25 September 1970, at seventy two. Mercury stood square his natal Pluto at fourteen hundredths of a degree that day, with Jupiter square his natal Moon at a third and Mars square the same natal Pluto at under half. The Moon was at its last quarter and twenty two per cent lit, a phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.