Ginster - by Siegfried Kracauer (Paperback)

About the Book

"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. Siegfried Kracauer's Ginster is the great World War I novel you've never heard of. Here, the sheer horrors are kept offstage, as in Greek tragedy, and merely reported from time to time. The setting is the German home front. Its Chaplinesque antihero-Ginster-spends the war gumming up the German war machine as he maneuvers to stay out of its clutches and save his own skin. Which he does; however, there is a deeper struggle going on between Ginster's dreamy self-absorption and the pitiless organization of society, war or no war. Ginster has no wish to do anything. Alas, his reveries are forever being interrupted by the demands of an other-minded world. All the scenes of Ginster are well to the rear of the military action, yet with Kracauer narrating, military language saturates all aspects of civilian life in the homeland. Ginster's nearest and dearest are so gung-ho, he feels that he's at the front when he visits them. War, the author seems to say, is merely ordinary life seen from the back instead of the front. As a new European war darkens our horizon, one no more expected than was World War I, Kracauer's novel feels timelier than ever"--

Book Synopsis

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?

Review Quotes

"War has long been described as a machine, but Siegfried Kracauer's harrowing and hilarious German home front novel, Ginster, shows what machines really are: a massive conglomeration of many tiny, boring individual parts . . . [Ginster's] interior train-track of thinking is particularly bizarre and beautiful, at once mopey and optimistic, as he fails at every aspect of soldiering. It is a slapstick act perfected to high art." --Mary Marge Locker, The New York Times
"Kracauer'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... The result is a tour de force of language enriched by gallows humor." --Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Ginster's name belongs with modern literature's antiwar activists from the Good Soldier Svejk to Yossarian." --Kirkus Reviews

"The reissue of this novel now is valuable, beyond its considerable historical and aesthetic virtues, because it makes pertinent points about today's world, bedeviled by war, misery, poverty, and the enticing lure of despotism as an answer to democracy's shortcomings." --Thomas Filbin, The Arts Fuse

"Ginster is a scathing portrait, light on the plot, of German civilian life between the July-August 1914 declarations of World War I . . . [A] drop-dead hilarious anti-war satire." --Artun Ak, Reading in Translation

"Like Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Ginster appeared in time to mark the tenth anniversary of the armistice. If Remarque's novel seemed to the playwright Carl Zuckmayer to capture with unparalleled immediacy the experience of a generation, Kracauer's novel challenges the very premise of Zuckmayer's enthusiasm. Which generation? Whose experience? [. . .] Ginster does not offer the moral security of All Quiet on the Western Front. The protagonist lives through a 'historic time' with an ironic awareness of the inadequacy of the vocabularies with which people understand their own time."
--Benjamin Morgan, TLS

About the Author

Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was born and raised in Frankfurt am Main. Perhaps best known for his pioneering studies in sociology and film theory, he initially trained as an engineer and architect, emerging in the Weimar years as a gifted journalist. When the Nazis came to power in early 1933, he was chief of the Berlin bureau of the left-leaning Frankfurter Zeitung. He fled, first to France and then, in 1941, to the United States, where he resolved to write only in English. His From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) and his magnum opus, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), were completed in New York, where he spent time working in the film library of the Museum of Modern Art and at Columbia University. Kracauer's novels--Ginster (1928) and Georg (1934, first published in 1963)--testify to his dramatic about-face from literary expressionism to the New Objectivity of the 1920s. Theodore Adorno, who spoke of Ginster as Kracauer's most notable achievement, paid tribute to his lifelong friend on his seventy-fifth birthday by claiming that as a young man he had already learned more about the study of philosophy from Siegfried Kracauer than he ever did from any of his academic teachers.

Carl Skoggard is a writer and translator living in Valatie, New York. He has produced annotated English versions of works by Walter Benjamin, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, and others. His most recently completed translation is Klaus Mann's The Volcano: A Novel Among Emigrants.

Johannes von Moltke is the Rudolf Arnheim Collegiate Professor of German Studies and Film, Media & Television at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America and a coeditor of Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence, 1944-45 by Freya and Helmuth James von Moltke (published by New York Review Books).