Siegfried Kracauer’s prescient anti-war satire, ‘Ginster’

“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 Siegfried Kracauer Translated from the German by Carl Skoggard Afterword by Johannes von Moltke 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? Ginster will be the November 2025 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club. BUY THE BOOK   For three days only, Ginster is available at 25% off along with four other novels by twentieth-century German writers: OUR PHILOSOPHER Gert Hofmann BUY THE BOOK AN ORDINARY YOUTH Walter Kempowski BUY THE BOOK ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS Ernst Jünger BUY THE BOOK THE SEVENTH CROSS Anna Seghers BUY THE BOOK You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. You can choose the types of mailings you wish to receive: Update preferences   New York Review Books 207 East 32nd Street New York, NY 10016-6305 Not a subscriber? Sign up for our newsletter here. Unsubscribe