GENEVA, Sept. 25--Erich Maria Remarque, the German-born author who attained world fame with his World War I novel "All Quiet on the Western Front," died at noon today of a heart collapse at the Sant Agnese clinic at Locarno, Switzerland. He was 72 years old. A naturalized American, Mr. Remarque made his residence at Porto Ronco on the Swiss shore of Lake Maggiore for 40 years. At his bedside when he died was his wife, the actress Paulette Goddard. Mrs. Remarque said by telephone that her husband's heart collapse had been brought on by an aneurysm, a tumor formed by the dilatation of an artery. He had been suffering for four months, she said. A funeral service is to be held Sunday at the Roman Catholic Church at Ronco, a village near Mr. Remarque's residence. Burial will be at the village cemetery "overlooking the Lake Maggiore that he loved so much," his widow said. The power to move people by words, to arouse their sensibilities as well as their minds, was Erich Maria Remarque's to an extraordinary degree. He demonstrated it again and again in novels that sold in the millions, but in none so much as in "All Quiet on the Western Front." A novel of unrelenting realism of battle action in World War I, it was published in Germany in 1929 as "Im Westen Nichts Neues." The English translation appeared the same year in the United States. Its stark description of the physical agonies of battle was written with anger and with grief for the plight of the conscript soldier, who was depicted in his lyric moments and in his most crass. A moralist who was indignant, even passionate, Mr. Remarque shunned the superficial explanation of war as man's inhumanity to man and stroke to discern its power politics and to identify the "they" who sent millions to their deaths. "I see how peoples are set against one another and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another," Paul Baumer, the protagonist in "All Quiet on the Western Front," says. "I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring." And in his most recent book, "The Night in Lisbon," there is no question for Mr. Remarque that World War II was Hitler's war, in which the "master race" was to exterminate the Jews and other "nonpeople." Mr. Remarque (pronounced Raymark) was compared with Ernest Hemmingway for the terseness of his style and with Stephen Crane for his compassion. To H. L. Mencken, "All Quiet on the Western Front" was "unquestionably the best story of the World War." Christopher Morley called it "the greatest book about the war that I have ever seen." A rash critic once ranked Mr. Remarque just below Thomas Mann as the finest writer of his age in Germany. This is hardly so, for Mann, like Proust, dissected a whole society, an entire era. Nonetheless, Mr. Remarque helped to liberate German writing from its stodgy formalism by bending language to his will. Mr. Remarque had an uncommon ability as a storyteller. None of his novels, not even such an undistinguished one as "Arch of Triumph," ever creaked, nor was his "point" or moral obtrusive. He counted on narrative to convey his philosophy. "All Quiet" was not the first of the World War I novels. Henri Barbusse had written "Le Feu" in 1916 and John Dos Passos "Three Soldiers" in 1921. Hemmingway's "A Farewell to Arms" came out in 1929, the same year as "All Quiet." But it was Mr. Remarque who captured readers all over the world, for "All Quiet" is the conscript soldier's war par excellence, whose modern counterpart is Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead." Part of the book's impact traced to the fact that it reflected Mr. Remarque's own service as a German soldier and part to the disillusion with World War I that was widespread in the late nineteen-twenties. Speaking for the common soldier, Mr. Remarque summed up a popular mood by having one of them say: "We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men; we are crude and sorrowful and superficial--I believe we are lost." The book got its ironic title from a recurrent sentence in the Kaiser's high communiques. "All quiet on the western front," the communiques said, glossing over the harsh reality of gaunt, hollow-eyed, frightened soldiers in the trench-lined battle zones. Mr. Remarque's 10 novels dealt with some aspect of the futility and horror of war, of its capacity to dehumanize not only its immediate participants but also those on the periphery of the conflict. The books were read by millions and motion pictures based on many were seen by millions more. "All Quiet on the Western Front," for example, sold 1.2 million copies in Germany in its first year. It was translated into a dozen languages and is still selling well in the United States in paperback editions. In 1930, the Hollywood film version appeared, with Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, Slim Summerville, Russell Gleason and William Bakewell. It became a film classic, rereleased a number of times and shown often on television. The Nazis condemned the book and the film by throwing them both into a huge bonfire of "objectionable" literature in front of Berlin University on May 10, 1933. According to the Nazis, the book and the movie displayed "treachery toward the German soldiers of the World War." The first showing of the movie in Berlin set off street riots generated by Nazi gangs. On Dec. 6, 1930, Joseph Goebbels, later the Propaganda Minister, broke up a showing by throwing stench bombs and loosing white mice into the theater. A few weeks later, the picture was banned as "prejudicial to German national prestige." In the early fifties the movie was reintroduced in West Germany and it played to large and enthusiastic audiences. The profits from "All Quiet on the Western Front" were enormous. Mr. Remarque spent much of them on art, and he accumulated an impressive collection of paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir and Degas. Mr. Remarque, a quiet, soft-spoken man, was once described as resembling a halfback on an American football team. He was tall, blond, athletic appearing and handsome. He hated publicity and did not like to meet strangers. Nonetheless, in the late thirties he built up quite a reputation in New York as a nightclubber. He was frequently seen at the Stork Club and at 21, but it was said that he was not a carouser so much as a night owl with a taste for fine foods and memorable champagne. When he was in Hollywood he was the constant companion for several years of Marlene Dietrich, who was said to have been the model for the actress heroine in "Arch of Triumph." Mr. Remarque was born in Osnabruck in Westphalia on June 22, 1898, the son of Peter Maria Remarque and his wife, Anna Maria. His father was a bookbinder whose family had settled in the Rhineland after the French Revolution. The younger Remarque was educated in Osnabruck and later at the University of Munster. At the age of 18, he was drafted into the German Army and served on the Western front. He was wounded five times--the last time seriously. After the war, he worked as a teacher, a stonecutter in a cemetery, a race-car driver, a test driver for a Berlin tire company and an advertising copywriter. He began writing articles for a Swiss auto magazine and then became assistant editor of Sport in Bild, an illustrated sports magazine. In 1929, he finished the novel that had been on his mind since the war. The manuscript was rejected by one publisher and reluctantly accepted by another. Following the success of the novel, Mr. Remarque retired to Porto Ronco to write and to care for his war-injured lungs. His exile became permanent in 1938 when the Nazis deprived him of German citizenship. His first literary success was followed by a sequel, "The Road Back" in 1931, which dealt with the problems of the returning soldiers in adjusting to peace. The novel was as uncompromisingly critical and bitter as its predecessor. A film version was said by critics to have lost much of its savage antiwar message. Mr. Remarque wrote two more novels before the world again was engulfed by war, "Three Comrades" in 1937 and "Flotsam" in 1941. They were made into films, with "Flotsam" appearing as "So Ends Our Night." In 1939, the author came to the United States. While he was en route on the Queen Mary, war broke out in Europe, and the vessel sailed part way accompanied by a British cruiser. Interviewed at the pier in New York, Mr. Remarque was deeply distressed. "I would like to tell you in a few sentences what I think of the war," he said, "but I can't. I think there is no reason in the whole world for any war, think what you will. This will not be a war on the front. It will be a war on women and children." During the war, he worked on "Arch of Triumph," which was published in 1946. It was a story of a love affair between a German refugee physician and an actress, set in Paris in the days just before World War II. The book, which had a huge sale, was generally accepted as a serious and absorbing book, although many critics were revolted by its brutality and sensationalism. One reviewer wrote that "powerful writing and many fine touches of characterization are clotted for want of selection." The book was made into a film in 1947 with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. Mr. Remarque became a United States citizen in 1947 and divided his time between New York and Lake Maggiore. Two years before becoming a citizen, he said that "I am no more German for I do not think in German nor feel German, nor talk German. Even when I dream it is about America, and when I swear, it is American." His next book, published in 1951, was "Spark of Life," a grim picture of life in a German concentration camp. It was followed by "A Time to Love and a Time to Die" in 1954 and "The Black Obelisk" in 1957. "Heaven Has No Favorites" appeared in 1961. It was a story of the love of a successful auto racing driver for a girl in a tuberculosis sanitarium and their subsequent tour of Europe. Orville Prescott, a reviewer for The New York Times, described it as the "least successful of all of Mr. Remarque's novels," adding: "In fact, it is very poor indeed." "The Night in Lisbon," Mr. Remarque's most recent novel, was issued in 1964 by Harcourt Brace & World. "It is a brilliant novel and a strange one," Charles Poore wrote in The Times, "not completely successful but hauntingly moving." The book described the spiritual and physical agony of refugees fleeing without the papers that would make their existence legal. Mr. Remarque saw his times, he once said, as a conflict between "technological progress and cultural regression." He was chilled by the possibility that an impersonal scientism would triumph and, with it, a frigid nihilism. Against this he posed an almost old-fashioned faith in the vitality of humanity. Paul Baumer may have died on the day the German communique reported all was quiet on the Western Front; but Josef Schwartz, in "The Night in Lisbon," affirms the humanist values of love, faith and affection. What gives Mr. Remarque his stature as a novelist is this belief that man is inextinguishable. Not even a Hitler can quench the human spark. Mr. Remarque was a conscientious craftsman. According to Denver Lindley, one of his translators, the author worked "for years over each of his novels, turning out (in neat, precise longhand) one draft after another until the final one is achieved." Frequently, Mr. Lindley said, Mr. Remarque even rewrote the typescript. A spokesman for Mr. Remarque's publishers, now Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., said yesterday that he had completed another novel and that it was being edited. Mr. Remarque also wrote a play, "The Last Station," which opened to critical acclaim in Berlin in 1956. The drama was about the fall of Berlin, and its central characters included members of Hitler's Schutzstaffel (elite guard), women-chasing Russian soldiers and fugitives from Nazi concentration camps. He also wrote a screenplay, "The Last 10 Days," a graphic speculation on the manner in which Hitler died and the events leading to the end of the Third Reich in a Berlin bunker. It was based on a book, "10 Days to Die," by M. A. Musmanno and was produced by an Austrian film company. Mr. Remarque made his only movie appearance in the brief role of a schoolteacher in the last Hollywood adaptation of "A Time To Love and a Time To Die." In 1923 Mr. Remarque married Ilsa Jeanne Zamboui. They were divorced in 1932 and remarried in 1938. A year later, when Mrs. Remarque arrived in New York, she was detained apparently because of passport irregularities, and was obliged to go to Mexico. They were later divorced again. In 1958 Mr. Remarque married Miss Goddard in a civil ceremony in Branford, Conn.