EAN: 9781681378145

KRACAUER SIEGFRIED GINSTER

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.

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