Ginster
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
When World War I breaks out, a young architecture student in Munich does everything in his power to avoid being enlisted into the German military in this perceptive, wickedly humorous novel by a prominent twentieth-century writer, journalist, and film critic.
Ginster is a war novel about not going to war; about how war, far from the front, comes to warp every aspect of outer and inner life and to infect the workings of language itself. The subject is World War I, but this novel by the brilliant twentieth-century sociologist, journalist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1928, has as much to say about what it means to live under the sulking great powers and blood-imbrued satrapies of today as it does about the inflamed self-righteousness of late imperial Germany. In Ginster, as in Greek tragedy, massacre occurs offstage, arriving only as "news," but the everyday horror of a society engineered for the continual production of violence is not to be denied. Ginster, the Chaplinesque antihero, intent chiefly on saving his own skin, works hard to keep his distance from the war machine, and yet making a living, he discovers, is all about keeping it running. How different, in the end, is his dreamy self-absorption from the empty military language that has come to pervade every aspect of civilian life in the homeland?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Translated into English for the first time by Skoggard, this brilliant WWI satire from German cultural critic Kraucauer (1889–1966; From Caligari to Hitler) was originally published in 1928. The novel begins in 1914, when, in an unnamed German city, the eponymous hero, 25, is told by his landlady, "You'll have to get in the war, too, it can't be helped." But it turns out that Ginster, a self-avowed "coward," can help it very much. As the war progresses, he mostly avoids the battlefield, first by being declared unfit by recruiters, and then, after he's drafted and trained in the use of a cannon, by getting dismissed for being too weak. Kraucauer's mordant satire has the caustic power of Celine but is less coarse and choleric. Sharp criticisms of patriotism, cronyism, and the war itself are tempered by the fanciful observations of a character who has the eye of a visual artist. Ginster's obsession with lines, spirals, and shapes fills the novel with arresting imagery, such as the description of a love interest "whose face acquired the mobility of a lovely grotto formation when she spoke." The result is a tour de force of language enriched by gallows humor.
